Eh, hosting an avatar 24/day on a high end comp for a year, costs as much energy as driving 1800 miles, according to one estimate.

BUT, I attend about a dozen weekly meetings in Second LIfe with programmers living in countries all over the world, so 1800 gas-miles/year of energy is a huge net savings. IBM is so sold on the idea of using virtual worlds to save energy and time that they've set up their own sub-world connected directly to the Second Life world with stringent firewall protections: Avatars can bring stuff into corporate meetings, but they can't take anything away because the connection is essentially one-way--once they leave, everythng is left behind.

This allows IBM employees to share private corporate info within a virtual world and from what people have said, eventually all IBM employees will have an avatar presence, which will allow virtual corporate meetings world wide with any group or subgroup of employees. All for the same cost as driving 1800 miles per person a year.

The significance for politics should start to emerge: virtual townhalls, any time, any place. Conference calls on the cheap from your laptop, Etc.

And https is reasonably secure for most communications, so reasonably private discussions can be held, even between 100 people 10,000 miles apart.

The thing about avatars logging in as mentioned in my blog entry is NOT the IBM corporate VW. That's been in place for a month or two and uses Linden Lab software. The NEW thing is that anyone can use free, open source software to host their own virtual world and let people wander into it from any other compatible virtual world, the same way anyone can host their own website and allow anyone to view their webpage, jumping from one website to the next by clicking a link. In fact, that is one way of triggering a teleport: click on a "SLURL" link in the "world browser's" chat box, which activates the teleport to the new virtual place (and, now, new virtual world).

E.G. clicking on

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Beaumont/145/51/25

takes you to Which Linden's open air office in his bamboo grove in the Island of Beaumont, at coordinates 145, 51, 25, in the Second Life virtual world.

You can even embedd that link in a regular webpage and launch a VW viewer that automatically takes your avatar there. Once things take off, you'd have your own virtual world hosting service with your own virtual world island or group of islands and direct people there via a regular http link similar to the above.