Web 2.0 Rules: Almost 1000 "Second Life" Flickr Groups

I'm endlessly fascinated by the way Second Life Residents extend their in-world communities out and into Web 2.0 sites.  There are so many fans and promulgators of SL-based music, for example, they recently took over a popular music social network.  There are also roughly 200-650 blogs devoted to SL, depending on how you count them.  Inspired by a post from Jean Ricard, I recently looked up the number of sites devoted to Second Life screenshots on Flickr. Jean found 1,749, but using a more stringent search, I found less, but still quite a lot: 965.  For comparison's sake, searching for "World of Warcraft" groups in Flickr, I came up with just 140.  How can an MMO with 10 million subscribers possibly be creating and sharing less screenshots than 550,000 active SL users?

But are all the Flickr Second Life groups actually devoted to the virtual world?  (As opposed to, say, "second life antiques" or whatever.)  I browsed through the list, and came up with SL-based sub-groups of every possible variety:

There's a Second Life Girls with Guns Flickr group, for example, and a Second Life-- Dirty Pirate Whores' Living Room Flickr group with 25 members.  (Living room!)  There's a Black Second Life Flickr group "Dedicated to black people from Second Life", too, and a Second Life Art & Artist Network Flickr group.  And so on.

This is the kind of activity that doesn't show up on the Lindens' demographic data, hinting at another strata of the metaverse experience we haven't even began to fully appreciate. We know half a million Residents are now going in-world an average of 40 hours a month.  But how many people are taking their Second Life into the larger Web 2.0, and on how many sites, and for how long?

Comments

[GoSpeed Racer]

Almost every single interest and activity is represented in Flickr. I myself administer such groups as:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/tonightlive/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/secondlifevideo/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/sl-ebony/

[Crap Mariner]

I set up DPW Living Room for JueL Resistance and her Living Room #13 venue as part of a musician fanclub project I was doing.

I created groups for Cylindrian and Grace McD as well.

All three seem to attract the top-notch shutterbugs and I figured it would be easiest for all just to create groups for them.