To commemorate the 2010 federal budget announced today, I have installed a new feature at the Capitol Hill in Second Life 

Using the APIs available from USASpending.gov, the Show Me the Money! piggy bank will shower $100 bills down on the Capitol Hill legislative chamber. Each bill has the name of one of the top 50 recipients of government funding during 1Q 2009. The size of the bill is proportionate to the amount of money received, at a scale of $1billion = 1 Second Life meter.

To start the shower, chat "/2009 funding" and the rain of bills will last for 5 minutes, or until you type "/2009 stop"  The money soon disappears, just as in real life.

 

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.

One thing leads to another: I came back from the TED Conference inspired to write some software to find connections between the different TED speakers (something I do manually while listening to each speaker). While looking for concordance software, I stumbled upon DMDigest that led me to the We Feel Fine project.

You'll have to check it out, but basically they have scraped millions of blogs, etc. identifying sentences proclaiming feelings: "I feel..." "I am feeling...". They then go to town on the mining and interface of this, and turn it all into playable art. Mashable art, as it turns out, because they have open APIs. Which got me thinking....

And I threw together the "Theater of Feeling" in Second Life and I've installed it on Clear Ink Island. It's a work in progress as I'm also experimenting with the image and color data served up by the wefeelfine.org people. It's easy to use, but addictive. Just go up and chat "/feel" and a feeling. "/feel good" "/feel lousy" "/feel generous" and see 10 excerpts elaborating on those feelings floating above platforms. Click the platform to go to the source. That's it! But it offers both an insight into what people think they need to share with the world for all time, as well as the mashability of Second Life. Come take a look for yourself.

Oh, and I do feel good about this experiment!