Second Life’s Most Read Blogs

March 22, 2009 - in Homepage, SL Society, Snippets by: Gwyneth Llewelyn
8 Comments

Particle-master ArminasX Saiman has done an extensive research job of tracking down the 200 most read blogs of Second Life®, an astonishing feat by all accounts, patiently looking up their rankings on Technorati and figuring out if they were still active or not.

While doing any list of “most read blogs” and selecting a criterium for ranking them will always be a subject to discussion, ArminasX has at least had the trouble of visiting 1800+ blogs and see if they’re still being actively updated or not.

Why is this list interesting or even useful? Second Life, unlike the real world, lacks any mass media facility — which means that it’s way harder to reach a wide audience with a targeted product or marketing campaign. Information is scattered and, in spite of the number of Second Life residents being about the same as the Netherlands’, it’s almost impossible to reach them all — or even have a clue about who is still active or not.

One of the best choices to reach your audience is thus to seek places which are visited by a substantial percentage of the resident population — even if it’s merely a blog. Granted, I still claim that less than 200,000 residents actually read any blogs at all, much less any of the list of 200 published by ArminasX — but it’s a start!

However, if you’re a marketeer looking to buy some ad space, note that while some of those blogs are purely commercial (namely the top two), many bloggers are ostensibly anti-advertising or anti-monetising of their endeavours. Others at least offer some ad space, either through Google Adsense, or even through their own system.

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http://massively.com/category/second-life Tateru Nino

Well, it’s the technorati ranking algorithm, so it isn’t actually ‘most read’ so much as it is ‘most linked within the last X days’. Not quite the same thing.
Jago Constantine

‘most linked within the last X days’

In the next update, Arminas’ blog will be number one
http://secondeffects.com ArminasX

I agree with Tateru – the ranks are based on weighted links, I think and don’t necessarily reflect traffic, let alone the demographics and interests of the readers. That’s the trouble with ranks – there are many ways to do it.

However, the Technorati data was reasonably accessible and provided one type of ranking – and it’s the only publicly accessible ranking data I am aware of.
http://gwynethllewelyn.net Gwyneth Llewelyn

Yes, you’re all right about that. Granted, “most read blog”, when an insanely high percentage of Web traffic is generated by robots, crawlers, and spiders, is not really a good measure. More links sounds actually quite a better metric!
http://ccslfashionista.blogspot.com/ CronoCloud Creeggan

One of the best choices to reach your audience is thus to seek places which are visited by a substantial percentage of the resident population even if it’s merely a blog. Granted, I still claim that less than 200,000 residents actually read any blogs at all, much less any of the list of 200 published by ArminasX — but it’s a start!

True, Ms. Llewelyn, but I think the people who DO read (and write) the blogs are among the “persons of various influence” in SL. And that can be an interesting thing, considering how well connected most of the “persons of various influence” are. Odds are that most of us responding to this post have bloggers from that list in our friends list, or are on the list ourselves (I’m #155 which seems a bit too well ranked to me.)

That leads to word of mouth. For example, there are those who don’t read blogs, but they may talk/communicate/plurk/twitter with those who do. “Word of mouth” or what some might call the “SL zeitgeist scuttlebut” is a powerful thing.
https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/eureka BlueLinden

Regardless of the means of calculating rank, I’d like to offer congrats on making the top 5% Gwyn! I’m not at all surprised
http://gwynethllewelyn.net Gwyneth Llewelyn

@CronoCloud, you definitely have a point there, of course

@Blue, what actually surprises me is that I’m still on the top 5% In late 2004, I had 4 times the audience, and ranked third after New World Notes and Prokofy Neva. There was nothing to read about SL Now that there are at least some 2,000 blogs on SL — and I guess these are the ones in English — I’m always fascinated how people still have time to read the things I write… I wouldn’t have any patience, lol

*goes back to read her favourite fashionista blog*
http://ccslfashionista.blogspot.com/ CronoCloud Creeggan

what actually surprises me is that I’m still on the top 5%

I know why! Reputation and Insightfulness. Which means that you get linked to….. a lot. I think I first read of you in New World Notes, which is probably the most influential generalized SL blog among what you’d call the “100000″. And since Hamlet has linked to you many times, that means the “100000″ know about you, and read you, if they didn’t already know of you by other means.