CAPITOL HILL: Newt Gingrich, the longtime Republican congressman from Georgia and former Speaker of the House, held a press conference yesterday in Second Life. His overall message: technology and virtual worlds will be expanding in the future and Gingrich encourages support of their use by citizens, businesses and by government.

Gingrich announced that IBM will be creating a subdivision of SL called Legislative Life which will be offered to all 7200 state legislators around the country. “Imagine if each legislative committee that wanted to work on the environment could get together on SL with their peers, so from Sacramento to Albany to Austin, Texas to Tallahassee, Florida to Atlanta, they could all get together by just going into their computer without having to fly. This would dramatically expand the rate of innovation and the rate of new ideas. American Solutions are going to be exploring metaverses and how we can develop these kinds of approaches to maximize the interaction of human beings with minimal travel.”

Summer Seale asked if Gingrich would come to speak to the Republican Party in SL and Gingrich replied he would be glad to do it. Gingrich would also like to see debates between both parties, rather than solely internal party debates. He openly welcomed dialogs with individual democrats, saying “I would much rather have a dialog in SL with Senator Clinton on her health plan or a dialog in SL with Barack Obama about national security or a dialog in SL with John Edwards about how to deal with poverty.”

Gingrich will announce in October if he decides to run for President. At present he says he doesn’t know. Randy Evans, Chairman of the Board of Gingrich Communications, will be searching for pledges of $30 million in campaign contributions. “If he can find that by October 21st then I will be glad to tackle the challenge of being a citizen leader.”

Jesse Linden asked about the potential for fund-raising and campaign finance reform in virtual worlds. Gingrich thought it would be a way for the middle class to support candidates without excessive campaign overhead. “Nobody yet understands the extraordinary collapse in cost of being able to communicate, interact and know each other in an Internet-based system. So my guess is in the next few years you’ll see a very dramatic expansion of popular involvement where people who can afford to give $10 or $20 will suddenly find it an easy, practical and desirable way to fund campaigns.”

Ron Revnik asked if Gingrich owned land in SL and Gingrich replied he did not. Gingrich sightings have been reported in the last few weeks as the Speaker has explored the SL community. Gingrich operated his own avatar during the press conference and used voice capabilities to communicate with an aide for in-world assistance.

A small group of protesters gathered in the neighboring