The US Presidential race, still far far away, is already heating up on the net with presidential hopefuls from all parties announcing their candidacy. How to keep track of all the action? One cool new tool is the hilariously named Wannabepresidents.com, a blog aggregator that pulls in content from all of the official blogs of…
Category: Politics
Machinima for Good: check out these cool fair trade machinima!
The machinima production group Strange Company has just released a couple sweet machinima videos intended to raise public awareness about fair trade issues using The Sims 2 and World of Warcraft. The Sims 2 machinima is probably easier to understand, but the WoW video is a more direct analogy comparing a virtual economy to a…
Discussion today on politics in First and Second Life
Kei Moana of Clear Ink moderated a roundtable discussion today about presidential campaign politics in SL. The event happened, appropriately enough, in the chambers of SL Capitol Hill (teleport SLURL) from 11am-noon PDT. There was a spirited and respectful conversation among a small but diverse group of resident politicos about politicking in SL and their…
Obama web event to be streamed in SL next week!
This is a picture of where the Obama in-world event will NOT take place. SLNN reports that presidential contender Barack Obama will be appearing in-world in avatar form as part of a webcast on March 31 at 1PM PDT. Interestingly, the in-world event will take place, not in the grassroots "Obama ’08" build (teleport SLURL)…
Viacom takes down SL fan video of Stephen Colbert
<rant> This just steams my beans. Stephen Colbert nearly pleads for this kind of fan adoration, and when some enterprising SL machinimators create a video in homage to him, his parent company Viacom issues a DMCA takedown on their ass. Next up: NBC goes after children creating shadow puppets that resemble characters from "Lost." </rant>…
New additions at virtual Capitol Hill; a quick peek at Presidential hopefuls HQs in Second Life
Tonight I dropped in on virtual Capitol Hill (teleport SLURL) to check out the new interactive tools the owners have put in place. As much as I admire what the Clear Ink guys have done creating the faux government sim, I have been discouraged by the lack of interest in the sim, mostly due to…
Profile of Tim Wu: intrepid Net Neutrality academic-activist
The Blue and White newspaper at Columbia University has done a nice profile of Tim Wu, the pioneering communications scholar who championed the cause of Net Neutrality back when no one was talking about it. Now of course Tim is a minor celebrity in the net activist community. But four years ago, he was virtually…
Virtual activism for real world change
I was contacted recently by a Joshua Levy (that’s his avatar on the right), a new resident who is interested in creating a documentary about progressive activism in SL. Joshua has created a blog to track his project and his journeys in-world. He asked me to respond to some of his concerns that he raised…
Registration open for YearlyKos in Second Life
It looks like plans are moving fast in preparation for the first multi-verse YearlyKos Convention taking place both in Chicago and in Second Life in August. YearlyKos is an annual convention gathering a thousand or so people from "the Netroots community," a non-partisan grassroots political action community that uses the Internet and blogs for political…
C-SPAN to make videos available online under Creative Commons-type license
This is quite exciting: C-SPAN has announced that they plan to making available on the web their video of congressional, White House and Federal events under a Creative Commons-type licensing structure. They are implementing a "liberalized copyright policy" which will allow non-commercial copying, sharing, and posting of C-SPAN video on the Internet, with attribution. I.e….