2012: The Year in Review – Part 2: Blogging

2012 saw a landmark in the history of Second Life Shrink, as we celebrated our fifth anniversary back in May. Despite that it has been far from a vintage year, and our post rate and traffic have been well down, partly due to the myriad distractions of life, but mainly because, I must admit, I have rather lost interest in the whole concept of virtual worlds.

I don’t seem to be alone in my ennui; many of the Second Life blogs that were active when we started up are now defunct, and even the mighty Alphaville Herald is but a shadow of its former self. Hamlet Au, to his credit, keeps plugging away at New World Notes (even if he showed terrible judgement by leaving us off his list of influential SL blogs), and there is still a constant froth of SL fashion blogs, but the days when Second Life promised a new intellectual frontier seem to long gone.

Anyway, here are our top ten posts by traffic over the last 12 months:

1. Second Life demographics – a brief review
2. Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space
3. On Second Life and addiction
4. The Social Network
5. Guess I’ll go eat worms
6. All Stars
7. Zombie epidemiology
8. What’s up
9. Virtual alchemy
10. Plunging Necklines

All but two of these are pre-2012, reflecting our low output this year. Of the posts we did manage, these are my personal picks:

• To the right, ever to the right?
• Planned obsolescence
• I’d work very hard, but I’m lazy
• Lunar Requiem
• Power and ideology on the internet: thoughts on the Violentacrez case
• The Lay of the Last Avatar

WordPress introduced a new statistical feature this year allowing us to trace where our readers live; here are the top ten countries:

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. Germany
5. Australia
6. India
7. Brazil
8. Netherlands
9. New Zealand
10. Italy

Unsurprisingly we’re most popular in the English-speaking world, but we have had visitors from 103 countries, on every continent except Antarctica. The most notable exception is China, where I can only assume we are censored as a threat to state security.

So what of 2013? Will we have a creative renaissance, and delight the world with our incisive commentary on culture and the metaverse? Or will we coast along, content to bask in the fading glow of our past glories? Watch this space…