700-ish

In an indication that I am perhaps not paying as much attention to this blog as I used to, I completely overlooked the fact that the post before last was our 700th, and thus missed the chance to do one of our traditional century-celebrating pieces. In lieu of that I’ve gone back and marked all the previous ton-up posts with a special “Century” tag, which hopefully will remind me to write something more notable when number 800 rolls around, which, at my current pace, should be sometime in 2025.

Five Hundred

Today is Groundhog Day, which seems like a good excuse to revisit a topic we’ve covered four times previously; the centenary marker.

Post #100 appeared in December 2008, about 20 months after SLS started. I was still quite enchanted by Second Life back then, and must have spent a lot of time on the grid, judging by the long pieces I wrote about the things I came across during my wanderings.

Post #200 came at the end of 2009, and was our first “Year in Review” piece, which has gone on to become an annual tradition. I was still writing a lot about SL, though my focus had moved on from simple travelogues to consideration of the politics of the metaverse, and in-depth psychology. The year also saw some fine commentary on SL culture from our erstwhile art correspondent Olivia, which were among the most popular pieces we ever published.

Post #300 came after another 12 months, and prompted me, rather hubristically, to offer my opinions on the art of blogging; I will leave it up to you, dear reader, to judge their lasting value. Second Life was still my most frequent topic, and during this period I penned our most-read post of all time, on SL demographics , but, over the course of 2010, our drift towards more general cultural subjects became increasingly evident.

Our ever-dwindling audience had to wait nearly three years to see post #400, during which time our virtual-world coverage waned almost to zero, replaced by my political and historical musings, along with a possibly excessive amount of personal nostalgia, no doubt reflecting my growing preoccupation with the relentless passage of time.

And now here we are at post #500, our slowest century yet, at over four years. I was never the most productive of bloggers, even during our heyday of 2009/10, but I have to admit that our slowdown over the past half-decade has periodically made me wonder whether it is worth continuing with this project, especially since we have undeniably strayed far from our original mission statement.

Yet I keep going. Partly this is due to my somewhat obsessive attachment to keeping the ten year run of at-least-one-a-month posts unbroken, but mostly it’s because, in my humble opinion, there is still an occasional gem to be found in amongst all the dross.

Onward to post #600 then, which, if current trends hold true, you can expect around 2023…

200 not out

With pleasing synchronicity we have reached post #200 just as the year is drawing to a close, which seems like a good excuse to review the last 12 months in the intellectual hothouse that is Second Life Shrink.

We managed to knock off our second century in about half the time it took us to get to our first 100, which either means we are getting the hang of this blogging lark, or, more likely, we have too much time on our hands. (Or I have at least; Olivia is more of a low-frequency/high-quality correspondent.)

Our top ten posts by views over the past year were:

1. Zombie Epidemiology
2. No man is an island
3. Greenies may have invaded some time ago, we hear
4. Why we hate and fear the BBC
5. The killer awoke before dawn
6. Less than zero
7. Nothing to do with your Vorsprung durch Technik
8. Nietzsche work if you can get it
9. Just to clarify…
10. Liberté, Egalité, Virtualité

Our traffic generally has maintained a mostly upward trend, and while we did have a relatively quiet spell over the summer we’ve been busy again since the autumn, and this December has been our best month ever. The zombie post is top because we got a link from the popular Undead Report, the one-stop shop for post-apocalyptic survival advice. (The Australian guy who runs it seems to take the prospect of civilisation being overrun by the living dead a little too seriously, and sometimes I worry that the “zombie” thing is a euphemism, and what’s he’s really getting ready for is some kind of Charles Manson-style race war or something, though I’m sure it’s all perfectly innocent, and he’s just really into zombie-killing.) We don’t get many direct links from other blogs; this is something I’m going to try to work on. Most of our hits come via searches, with a small but growing proportion from Twitter, FriendFeed and similar social networking sites, something else I’ll try to expand in the new year.

My personal favourites among this year’s posts, in no particular order, are:

• Cargo cult consciousness
• Do boys make passes at avatars with glasses?
• Plunging Necklines
• Why we hate and fear the BBC
• No man is an island
• The killer awoke before dawn
• Less than zero
• Ferrisburg, Vermont
• Twixt and between
• Taking Ownership of the Problem
• The best laid schemes
• Unrewarded talent
• Scenes from the Class Struggle in Second Life
• Liberté, Egalité, Virtualité
• Live from East 3rd Street

These posts reflect what for me is the main attraction of blogging about SL; the ability to casually apply heavyweight intellectual scrutiny to an essentially trivial subject. I would be reluctant to offer a Marxist or psychoanlytical analysis of some real-world situation without a lot of research and thought, but I feel free to write about virtual topics more spontaneously, since if anyone pulls me up for sounding ridiculous, I can excuse myself by pointing out that the whole idea of taking the metaverse so seriously is in itself rather absurd.

So what can readers look forward to in the new year? More of the same essentially. We will try to make good on our promise of an increased level of general cultural commentary, but the next couple of months are likely to be dominated by my quest to foment social revolution in Second Life. Whether that will be of interest to anyone other than myself remains to be seen.

Anyhow, I’m just heading off to usher out 2009 in the company of some old friends, so I’ll finish by saying Happy New Year to one and all, and may it find you healthy and prosperous.