Fox News on Second Life; YouTube presidential campaign; Explode adds new features; and more

The social web weekly: a quick-fire roundup of some of the news, announcements and conversations that have occurred throughout the week…

• Fox News does a hit job on Second Life (and John Edwards' unofficial virtual campaign). Kirsten Powers in her first 'video blog' for the news channel reports on Second Life, with reference to US presidential hopeful John Edwards' virtual campaign office. In a classic hit job, Powers manages to associate Edwards with porn, rape, terrorism and pedophilia -- via his unofficial presence in Second Life. Watching the video I found it slightly surreal to hear Powers use a quote from my interview with campaign volunteer, Jerimee Richir.
• YouTube officially on the campaign trail. The video sharing site now has an official portal for the 08 US presidential campaign. 'You Choose' aggregates all of the candidates' official YouTube channels. (See my earlier post on YouTube and the election.)
• VoIP coming to Second Life. In more Second Life related news, Linden Lab will next week launch a limited Beta which adds voice capabilities to the virtual world. The new feature will be able to distinguish between avatars which are in a user's immediate proximity, and those that are further away. Whilst adding VoIP to the virtual world will be very useful (particularly for in-world events), I'm sure many users would prefer Linden Lab to first address the stability issues that continue to plague the platform.
• Explode adds OpenID, customization, search, and more. The meta-social network that I reviewed last month has added a bunch of new features. The first of which is to turn every Explode account into an OpenID URL. Because an Explode profile points to the site of your choice, your OpenID can link to the profile that you feel best represents you. Very cool. The Explode widget is now customizable, with a number of different options available for MySpace or Javascript-compatible pages. Additionally, users can now broadcast messages to everybody in their network; a feature they're calling 'nudges'. Cross-site searching is also in the testing phase (a preview can be seen here.) The developers tell me that Explode has a number of other exciting developments just around the corner (including an API) -- just don't call it a MyBlogLog competitor!