With about 350,000 "users" and old-school game-style graphics, Second Life is second only to 100 million-member MySpace for popularity in the trades these days. I have posted on the emergence of social advocacy in this virtual space. Every other day somebody is releasing a press release about establishing a beachhead in SecondLife - American Apparel, that boxy car, some PR firm, you name it. Why do they do it? It's the press releases. For now anyway.
And now?
Mark Warner, future candidate for President, is creating a virtual persona in anticipation of holding a virtual town hall meeting. (I learn about this from FutureLab which is a great site). Is this the equivalent of Bill Clinton going on MTV? Of course not. But sort of. If a candidate wanted to truly embrace the new, why not create an avatar in a very popular online world. Now, can someone create a clone avatar of Mark Warner and have him do all sorts of silly things in SL? Is that within the virtual law?
Of course, now I realize that this story is on BoingBoing and that Cory Doctorow interviewed the avatar two hours ago in SL. Sorry I missed it.
Some chick just posted about Second Life (and Mark Warner) over at the Ogilvy PR blog. You should read it. She sounds like she's really smart. ;)
Posted by: Alison Byrne Fields | September 01, 2006 at 05:42 PM