Capitol Hill in Second Life continues to draw visitors from around the world interested in the political season. In addition to the twitter display I added a couple weeks ago, I’ve added an electoral map that shows most recent polling on a state-by-state basis.

The technology behind it is interesting. I had originally created a display that would be used on election night, with states called and updated manually. I was looking for a site with live feed of current polling data to feed the display prior to the election, and Leon suggested looking at a scraping web service, Dapper.net, that might be useful. Dapper’s library of scraping scripts included one for RealClearPolitics.com that was easy to hook up to the board (via a PHP intermediary I wrote to turn Dapper’s JSON output into a LSL-consumable feed).  However, the page on realclearpolitics.com that Dapper was scraping only had 37 of the states, which made for a fairly impoverished display.

Although I like the realclearpolitics.com methodology for a weighted average poll-of-polls, I looked for a site with all states, and found USAElectionPolls.com Though this site seems to feed out only the one latest poll it finds for each state, and not a weighted average of polls, it does give a complete set. Dapper was very easy to use to create a scrape of the site to output the data as JSON.

I may channel my inner Brokaw and use the map in manual mode on election night, or I might challenge myself to quickly find a site that can be Dapper-scraped and feed the board automatically.

Why does this matter?
Why do you need a display like this in Second Life when you can go to dozens of web sites with electoral maps?  I believe that the strength of an immersive session in a virtual world is enhanced by the continuity of the immersion. Even though Second Life now supports both an in-application web browser window and web content displayed on the surface of objects in Second Life, having an interactive display that can be manipulated by an avatar means you don’t have to shift back and forth from the perspective of the avatar to the perspective of a web-surfer.