Wind of Change

When Second Life Shrink was placed at 108 in ArminasX’s list of SL blogs a few months ago, I posted an entry that claimed that we were the blogging equivalent of tennis player Virginia Ruano Pascual. The implication was that we were, like Ms Pascual, relatively low-profile, but heavy hitters. The analogy was misleading in two regards however. We only made 108 on the list thanks to ArminasX’s idiosyncratic numbering scheme, which disregarded ties (so instead of 1st, 2nd equal, 2nd equal, 4th, it went 1st, 2nd equal, 2nd equal, 3rd and so on, even when there were hundreds of blogs on the same rank); a more conventional system was have put us at about 1200. Ms Pascual’s ranking of 108 referred to singles, but her grand-slam titles have all been in doubles, where she is the world number 4.

Despite this, it did look for a while as if our careers were on similar trajectories; while Virginia was winning her tenth grand-slam doubles title at Roland Garros in May, we were in the middle of a run of posts that saw our traffic hit new heights and our Technorati rating finally break into the top 1 million. (We’re currently at 751,289, which puts us in the most popular 0.6% of bloggers, if you believe the figures).

Since then though, not so good. Virginia did pretty well at Wimbledon last month, getting through to the semi-final, but we managed a mere three posts, and our hit-count, while not falling off a cliff, has been disappointing compared with previous months.

The main problem is that my star correspondent has gone off on indefinite summer vacation, so we’re a bit low on virtual-world reportage right now, since I do just about all my internet browsing from my iPhone these days, and they’ve not released a Second Life app yet.

I was beginning to think that we’d mined the Second Life seam to exhaustion anyhow. Sigmund Leominster posted a piece on moribund SL blogs last month, which made me think that everything that has been written about Second Life was some variation on one of two themes: “Look at this cool thing I found” or “Look how the anonymity of the metaverse allows people to delude themselves/behave badly/expose their unconscious”. We were definitely starting to repeat ourselves; it may well be worth taking a break from SL discourse until we think of something new to say.

I will try to fit in a visit to Zindra some time in the not-too-distant future, since we would have to turn in our SL blogging licence if we failed to form an opinion on that development, but I think that SLS will be taking a turn towards more general cultural commentary over the next few months.

And if that’s not a development on par with the fall of the Berlin Wall, then I don’t know what is…