Daily Kos, the online political community, recently posted a blog from SL’s Mala Fegte, also known as Michele in real life, about the Daily KOS presence in SL.
Mala helped organize last year’s Netroots Nation in Second Life Convention, where she met other like-minded folk and made some valuable connections by interacting with them “in real time, in a virtual world.” While Daily Kos has very active boards and comment threads, Mala found real-time chat a unique feature of SL: “I like the immediacy of chat as opposed to the comment thread format, although it does have its place.”
Her Daily Kos post has already generated over 130 comments, which is a credit to Daily Kos’ vibrant community, but also to the current interest in Second Life. The comments delve into other worlds – Blizzard, WoW, etc. – and the advantages and disadvantages of these and others compared with SL. Pretty interesting reading.
The Netroots Nation will hold its conference in Pittsburgh this year August 13-16, with a corresponding SL conference that will include SL-only events and other interactive happenings.
(P.S. Guys, please, I’ll rent you out the Metanomics stage – nothing really WRONG with those prims but why not hold your meetings somewhere, um, gorgeous? 
)
The Daily Kos was really a bust last year. It’s not just that people who are part of their web community had a hard time figuring out SL, or paying something like $25 US as a cover charge to come in and have this very rocky experience, the whole self-referential self-obsessed looping loopy lefty blogosphere thing just didn’t culturally “transpose” to SL.
I mean, even those of us interested enough to sit it out found that staring at a video of, oh, Hillary or something, along with other dancing avatars, was just not…compelling.
I have to say I rarely bother with Kos because it’s so insular and bloggy and insolent. One of the advotorial’s in today’s blog about the evils of “Republic foreign policy” scores the conservative notion of pragmatic American interests, and smugly snorts that this philosophy is what made the Republicans “get their ass handed to them,” but fails to make the sharp critique needed of the fact that…the Obama administration’s foreign policy isn’t all that…different. I mean, we still get a surge in Afghanistan, we can’t quite figure out what to do with Guantanamo, we still cheer NATO war exercises to piss off Russia. Where’s the big difference that the Kossacks were supposed to bring us? I don’t even *have* the leftist politics of these people, but geez, I can ask the questions they *should* be asking! Instead, they just keep jeering at the right as if it were still a presence, they keep mocking and ridiculing more conservative wings of the Democratic Party, and they keep ranting about non-essentials like the evils of Fox News blah blah making a virtual reality. You would never know that these people had *won the elections*. They can’t seem to drain the vitriol out of their systems from the last 8 years and do the job that blogs are supposed to do, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.
Maybe if they had a name that didn’t sound like a traditionally nationalistic and even antisemitic militarized movement in Russia, they might have more followers?
What I *really hate* about these lefty groups coming into SL and everybody crowing about how wonderful it is that the “progressives” now have a “grassroots organizing tool” in SL is just how blind, ignorant, and indifferent these progressives are *to the problems of the community of Second Life itself*.
If they are free to blab on their blogs, they don’t care if someone is permabanned from the forums for talking about LL favouritism or banned from the JIRA for challenging some orthodox opensource coder nerd. Expulsions for “any reason or no reason” and the problems of the mainland and trying to run a society via a private company that refuses to even allow “no” votes are problems that are entirely opaque to them. They perch on top of these problems fabulously, golf-clapped by the Lindens, without understanding just what kind of a world we’re getting here, essentially endorsed *and enabled* by them when we get a dozen major-league newspapers (they still exist) with the predictable headlines about how they had their conference in Second Life.
139 percent of the population of Second Life could care less about them and their parochial issues inside the Beltway, but you will feel as if 142 dancing Kossacks on your sims is some sort of “big event”.
You would NEVER tolerate this in Canada, Dusan.
Oh good. Same time as SLCC.
-ls/cm