Thursday, May 31, 2007

Real governments in avatars

Finally it had to happen: real governments having their offices in a virtual world. Although it has been widely reported that Sweden is the first country in having an embassy in Second Life, the Swedish have been beaten by the tinny archipelago of Maldives, which opened its own embassy in the virtual reality place several days ago. Furthermore, the Swedish embassy plans to mainly give tourist information while the embassy of Maldives will "offer [the country's] viewpoint on issues of international concern, and to interact with [its] partners in the international community", which is what real embassies actually do...I don't want to know what the International Court of Justice's take will be on this or whether the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations would apply there, but we will have to wait and see how any international disagreement is solved there...

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