For this installment of my series of visits to each candidate's Second Life efforts, I was joined by PDF Associate Editor Josh Levy, also known as Spencer Mukherji. We had the good fortune of running into Astrophysicist McCallister who is the official (but unpaid) Second Life Coordinator for Mike Gravel's presidential campaign.

This is the first campaign we have seen with an officially recognized and at least nominally supported presence in Second Life. Other efforts are entirely volunteer-generated with little or no contact with their respective campaigns. Overall, I was impressed with Gravel's site. It has a professional feeling (not overly showy nor amateurish) and is quite functional as well.

Warning: visiting the front page of Amigos de Obama will cause an enthusiastic reggaeton paean in Spanglish to Barack Obama to start playing and offer you no way to stop it. Which is why I recommend you skip right to the about page, which contains the lyrics (excerpted below) and explains how the words came to the (anonymous?) author in February after having been inspired by the candidate's "authentic" message. Gosh, where do you think he picked up that talking point?

Anyway, the interesting tech angle is that you can also download an MP3 or put the ringtone on your phone.

Today's victim: John Edwards. I visited his new location on March 22nd, the day Elizabeth Edwards announced the recurrence of her cancer. There was a photo of her posted near the site entrance with a timely message. Last month, the Edwards group in Second Life moved their headquarters to a quiet beach setting. The previous location on the more active SL mainland was famously vandalized ("griefed") by some losers with excess time and skillz on their hands.

The new Edwards Campaign Central is located at the relatively bucolic and PG-rated Laguna Beach. More description, analysis, and screenshots after the jump...

A friend of mine has been keeping me up to date on the latest candidate presences in Second Life. We've started visiting them to check them out, and this is the first in a series of reviews I will do of each candidate's virtual headquarters.

It's important to keep in mind that all of these should be considered voter-generated (as opposed to official). In every case (as far as I know) as they have been created by volunteers who are simply enthusiastic about the candidate. The model has been "build first, ask for endorsement later." Most of these sites, including the one I review today, have not been embraced by their respective candidates.

That said, let's go see Hillary! My overarching impression of this space is that it falls easily into the most obvious stereotype of the campaign: Hillary Clinton as a strong (but cold) authority figure. I'm no aesthetic genius, but it's probably the least attractive of all the candidate spaces I've seen so far.

More opinions and screenshots after the jump...

Salon has a very interesting article today by Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise on why she turned down the job that Amanda Marcotte briefly held with the Edwards campaign. She also addresses what she thinks is a major flaw in their online strategy: by making bloggers "official" you remove most of the value of their independent, outsider voices.

I tend to be more interested in "how the web is using them" than "how the candidates are using the web" in this site's mission. So of course I'm fascinated by the John Edwards Is Good website. I like the ambiguity of this slogan. Does it mean Edwards is good... looking, for America, at billiards? It could be any of the above.

When I saw first these 80's-inspired t-shirts popping up during the 2004 campaign, I took them for nothing more than a smarmy remark on Edwards' looks from some overly-clever college students. However, it seems that this meme has blossomed into a full-on campaign. While the goal was previously to market the shirt and take pictures of people wearing it in funny places, now the site seems to be semi-seriously promoting the election of John Edwards.