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.

I've installed a new display at Capitol Hill in Second Life that streams Twitter tweets about candidates.  The tweets float above columns, and are refreshed every minute with a search for Obama, Biden, McCain or Palin. You can also talk to the display to get the latest tweets about an individual candidate. Touch a column, and you get the original post on Twitter that you can use to follow links, etc.

The Capitol Hill region has been one of a number of gathering places in Second Life during the debates. Though a lot of avatars tend to gather at party headquarters, Capitol Hill draws those wanting more of a cross-party discussion.

 As for me, joining the discussion in Second Life, with an eye on the Twitter election channel, and another eye on my TV, makes my head explode.

Couric:

What newspapers do you read?

Palin:

Oh, Katie, that’s such a quaint old-timey question – news “papers” - that’s like asking me what “records” I listen to or what “evening news show” I watch.

Well, I do still get the newspaper from my hometown of Wasilla every week – it’s good to stay connected to my roots, to see what is happening at the community level, and to support the small town business.

And I read the Anchorage Daily News – I am still the Governor of Alaska, after all. Most days I read it online, but I get the Sunday edition delivered to my house because my kids (and Todd!) like to read the Sunday funnies the old-fashioned way.

But that’s about as much “paper” as I’m willing to consume just to get the news.

Of course I have news sources beyond the Alaskan border, Katie. If you were to hack into my Google Reader account (please don’t!) you’d see I have it set up with many feeds, not just from traditional “newspaper” sites, but from a variety of sources with a variety of outlooks, including cable news sites and the best of the blogs. That way I can scan the headlines, read the articles, easily see how the same story is reported from different points of view, and form my own opinions.

And, like many Americans, I have my Google Alerts set up to bring me news on specific topics, and I’m constantly updating it with topics that deserve my attention and consideration as a candidate for Vice President. I don’t know how I managed without that one!

So, how about you, Katie. What "newspapers" do you read?