I decided to stop by, only to discover that Edwards' Second Life headquarters had chalked up another first, the first virtual campaign HQ to be vandalized.

Presidential candidates are used to dealing with people seeking to disrupt events and vandalize their web sites, but as candidates venture more and more into the virtual world they will have to come up with new strategies to deal with things like this.

How do you stop someone from vandalizing your virtual land and how can you react to it quickly? Well as it turns out there are some tricks to the game and I caught up with Jordan Bigel (aka Dire Lobo in Second Life) over at InWorld Studios in Second Life to get some answers.

Raven Canning: So Dire Lobo, you were with me last night to see the aftermath of the vandalism. I noticed that I didn't have the ability to build things on the property, so how did this group pull this off?
Dire Lobo: One way is by rezzing objects on adjacent land and then moving them onto the parcel - why don't we meet somewhere and we can test the theory?
Dire Lobo: I can find a place which has no build rights - one sec, I will send you a tp or a landmark...
Dire Lobo: Ok, so, you notice the BUILD button is disabled here. You cannot create things and you cannot "rez" something from your inventory.
Raven Canning: In laymen's terms, what does "rez" mean?
Dire Lobo: REZ means to take something from storage (inventory) and create an instance of it in the virtual world. The word comes (I am told) from the film "Tron".
Dire Lobo: Objects can also contain other un-rezzed objects and then rez them and put them in a certain place for example.
Raven Canning: So what does that mean exactly?
Dire Lobo: This is one of the major forms of griefing (spamming), creating a self-replicating object which constantly rezes.

Editor's note, one example of this during a high profile event can be found here. The video footage isn't exactly safe for work so view cautiously.

Raven Canning: As a professional how would you defend against vandalism like this on a property you were asked to build?
Dire Lobo: The solution is a multi-part answer.
Dire Lobo: For one, you can just turn on auto-return.
Dire Lobo: This would simply return objects that were not created by the owner, but would be a problem for group ventures.
Dire Lobo: If you have people contributing content, make them DEED it to you or to the group (if the group owns the land). Then you can use auto-return.
Dire Lobo: But you introduce some overhead by doing that and it is fun to allow people to create things as they wish.
Dire Lobo: Now for a sensitive project like a campaign, I wouldn't take that attitude.
Dire Lobo: As I mentioned yesterday you can also use the SL programming tools to create a system which monitors not only everyone who comes and goes but can take a catalog of what objects exist - or at least who owns them - and compare that to a list of authorized owners.
Dire Lobo: This whole process can thus be automated and allow multiple builders, etc.
Dire Lobo: With the tools LL [Linden Labs] provides you can do an awful lot if you know how. This is one potential danger of amateur or hobby 3D sites for candidates.
Dire Lobo: In the early days of the WWW the same thing occurred and even now unauthorized web sites for candidates appeared all the time.
Dire Lobo: The key is that candidates have to provide an "Official" presence like they provide an "official" web site and this has the be a manned effort and properly managed to present the right message.

Raven Canning: So what if anything can regular SL users do to help police the areas they frequent, what is the ettiquette and tools available for community moderation?
Dire Lobo: Not much except IM the owner of the land.
Dire Lobo: The owner can file a report with LL which they will probably ignore. The only things which get their attention (and rightfully so) are child porn (actual child porn, not child-like avatars with porn-like clothing) and Nazi insignia.

Raven Canning: How can property owners stay on top of exploits that are possible in second life? In the real world there are updates and bulletins constantly flowing to administrators, does the second life community have anything similar?
Dire Lobo: There is an official source of info, the Linden Lab Blog - accessible from the secondlife.com home page.
Dire Lobo: It is usually a horse-out-of-the-barn already thing.
Dire Lobo: I mean, in terms of new techniques, no one knows about them until they are unleashed on people.
Dire Lobo: Once that happens they spread like fire through all the blogs and magazines and in-world newspapers.
Dire Lobo: But no, there is no listing or self-help group teaching land-owners the tricks of how to maintain peace.
Raven Canning: sounds like a possible business opportunity :)

Raven Canning: What about virtual security? In the real world and event would have security personnel working to ensure order and there would probably be a skeleton crew working round the clock. Is that feasible in second life, or will the measures you discussed previous suffice?
Raven Canning: in other words can you 'kick' a disruptive avatar from your land?
Dire Lobo: Real people in avatar form work the crowd and eject troublemakers.
Dire Lobo: Absolute neccessity at any live event.
Dire Lobo: For other times when a property is idle and there is static content only this is less important. Though like yesterday, even when no event is on, the griefing can cause more traffic then the content!
Dire Lobo: But its different for a polticial candidate then for someone who owns a virtual clothing shop which runs unattended most of the time.
Dire Lobo: Though in both cases, the spam can interfere with operations.
Dire Lobo: Well, maybe its not so different only that the Candidate has more to lose from bad press resulting from such an event.
Dire Lobo: The danger is casual observers who don't know the story will look.

Raven Canning: One last thing and then I should let you get back to work! Does your firm, InWorld Studios, offer any kind of security consulting as a professional service?
Dire Lobo: No, we do not, except that we provide those services to all of our clients.
Dire Lobo: But we do not do security consultations for only security - we are busy enough.
Dire Lobo: If anyone wants more information on security - go to Search and under the Places tab search for "Security" you will find hundreds of links.

In my mind the really interesting thing about this interview was the many parallels to our own world and existing problems for candidates as well as some new ones to tackle if they venture into this virtual world.

As for this incident, we may never know who was actually behind it. There really isn't any way to tell whether it was a rival campaign, a conservative group that didn't agree with Edwards or simply troublemakers and practical jokesters. I was chatting up some avatars that were there after the fun had ended and got a variety of answers, none of which I chose to believe.

I brought this topic up with Jordan during my interview and he had done some detective work of his own, the owners of the objects didn't have any profile information and the accounts were only about 2 weeks old. Second Life allows you to sign up free with little personal information so much like a denial of service attack on a web site there is little way to find out who is ultimately behind it. Prevention seems to be the key takeaway.

For as far as we've come with technology it seems like we have a long way to go, and particularly with this new medium as candidates begin to embrace it.

So how does RSS help take a candidate's information distribution machine to the next level?. Let's talk about some of our primary information consumers and how RSS can benefit them.

The potential supporter
Potential supporters are a large category and it would be impossible to lump them in one bucket. For the purposes of this discussion the reader should assume we are discussing tech-savvy and/or young potential supporters since this demographic has already begun to embrace RSS in their daily lives. These potential supporters already get lots of information on various topics from all over the web, everything from sports to news to politics. One characteristic of this audience is that they process an incredible amount of information on a daily basis and they won't often take the time to visit all of the web sites they get information from. If a candidate wants to reach this audience you have to allow them to get information on their terms, and that means providing as much information as possible to them via RSS. They may be weighing several candidates, does a campaign really want to lose out because the other candidate is getting information to them and your campaign isn't! ?

The activist
The activist is already in a candidate's camp, and furthermore they are likely volunteering for the campaign and showing their support at the grassroots level. The power of RSS comes into play here because all of a sudden a campaign has the ability to get information produced by the campaign out to thousands of activists on their web sites which is then read and consumed by thousands more people the campaign might not have otherwise reached. The portability of this information makes this possible and it costs a candidate nothing to do it.

The blogger
The blogger is similar to the activist in that they may have decided to support a particular candidate or political party, but they may also be covering the field broadly. Good bloggers are those which can take in incredible amounts of information, and then present the best nuggets either alone or with their own commentary and analysis. This job absolutely requires RSS, no one that is serious goes out and visits hundreds of sites by typing in the URL. They have their sources they use which include mainstream news sources, other bloggers and yes even candidates' web sites. As a candidate you want to make it as easy as possible for this group to get information from your campaign because much like journalists they are writing about politics on a daily basis and influencing thousands with their words.

The political reporter
Very little explanation is required of this group; campaigns have dealt with political reports probably since politics began. There are ways a campaign can make a political reporter's life easier (assuming they are willing to try some new things) which generally benefits the campaign. Some of the things that political reporters are interested in are press releases put out by the campaign, interesting stories that might be included on the blog, and upcoming events so they can schedule trips to cover them. Those reporters probably have a relationship with someone on the campaign staff and that's how they get that information. What if they could get it themselves though? No guarantees all of them would do it, but I think it would become a more compelling argument once they realized how much time they could save if all of that information flowed directly to them as it was published, effortlessly.

What is the state of RSS usage for presidential candidates in 2008? I have put together this handy table to illustrate that usage. Some of the important factors to consider here are:

• Consolidated Feeds: Is there a place on the campaign site where I can see all of my options?
• Blog RSS: Does the blog (if it exists) provide an RSS feed?
• News RSS: Can a reader get RSS feeds for news, press releases, events and other items?
• Discoverability (1-5): Discoverability seeks to rank how easy it is to find these feeds and use them. 5 is the highest ranking and 1 is the lowest.

Democrats

Republicans

And the winner is...
John Edwards is the clear winner here as of the writing of this article. Check out his consolidated RSS page. As you can see Edwards provides RSS feeds for pretty much anything that any of the aforementioned information consumers would be interested in. He also goes a step further and devotes this page to explaining to his readers what RSS is and where they can find a feed reader if they are unfamiliar with the technology. Some additional things to note about his approach is the fact that you can find these individual feeds all over the site, you can get to this page from the footer of each page, and you can get to the main feed offered right from the address bar in browsers which support that functionality like Firefox.

There are a few places Edwards could improve such as using Feed Burner to deliver the feeds. A lot of the benefits of feed burner are for the campaign, most notably they can see how many people are subscribing to each feed. That isn't possible by offering a raw RSS feed. It does offer something for the reader as well, if someone clicks into a feed URL it offers a friendly page letting the user know exactly what s/he is looking at. Read more about Feed Burner.

Advice for the rest of the field
The remaining Democratic candidates generally offer some form of RSS and use some of the basic techniques to make it available. The Republican field on the other hand for the most part does not offer any sort of RSS feed at all. With that in mind the following pieces of advice are offered to those candidates.

Step 1, if you don't current offer an RSS feed then you need to put your technical team to work. It costs you little and the return on investment is huge. If your web site already offers one or more feeds make sure people can get any kind of information they might want delivered via RSS.

Step 2, now that you've got a feed you need to promote it on your site. The wikipedia article linked earlier has the standard icons that are used for RSS. At a minimum one of these icons should be included in the various places on your site where information is available. Extra credit for offering an item in the footer that presents a single page that shows all of the available feeds or adding text to further describe what the icon is.

Step 3, make the feed discoverable through modern browsers from the address bar. This is incredibly simple and just takes one line of HTML in the "head" section of your web pages to make it work. Here's an example (minus opening and closing brackets).
link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My 2008 Campaign, stay informed!" href="http://www.mysitecampaign.com/rss.xml"

Step 4, use Feed Burner. I have absolutely no connection to the company but I also can't see a reason not to use it. Instead of putting this data out and having absolutely no idea how it is used or how many people use it you can have that information available for your web team.

Step 5, take the time to explain RSS. Edwards did a good job of this on his page, if I clicked into that link and didn't know what RSS was I'd be well on my way to understanding it after reading that. Educating your readers ensures that you'll get this information out to more than those that are technically savvy.