Second Life Blogs-- 6x The Number Of WoW Blogs?

While hacking through the thicket of SL blogs new to my RSS reader, I tried counting the total number... and got so overwhelmed, I instead counted the number of blogs in my feed that weren't related to Second Life, and subtracted.  On a hunch, I did a comparison, and came up with this:

Estimated number of SL blogs, based on my RSS feed: 190
Estimated number of WoW blogs, based on WoW Wiki: 32

Maybe this isn't a fair comparison.  Does someone have a larger list of World of Warcraft blogs handy?  But even if there were three times that number of blogs devoted to World of Warcraft, the contrast would still be striking.  190 bloggers out of 550,000 active users, versus 32 bloggers of 10,000,000 subscribers.  There's a fair amount of user-created content associated with WoW, far as machinima, guilds, and so on-- why so few bloggers?

Comments

[vint falken]

As far as I know, Zoe Connolly already gathered more than 500 SL related blogs. So... ;)

[Yulunga]

Because we have to level, my dear friend :)

Or possibly because WoW is a VW that actually has a lot of things to do in it, so people don't have time to blog about it!

More seriously, blogging is one obvious way to acquire status in SL, while this process is automated through a series of variables in WoW (level, honor, items, etc.).

Less time + alternatives to attain same goals = less blogs. Elementary, my dear Hamlet!

Yulunga

[Alex]

This is just NOT TRUE.
There are around 350 active SL blogs and around 1500 active WoW blogs (I'm not counting individual blogs within the guild sites). Lineage blogs are very scarce - 25 active, 20+ EVE online blogs... That's pretty much it.

Regards.

[Alex]

... BTW, there are several reasons why gamers blog or not:
1. Some VW/games have a well-developed community sites (EVE-online, Kaneva, Entropia to some extent) - some not.
2. Most gamers represent 'forum culture' as opposed to the 'blog culture'.
3. People blog much less in Europe. So, all European VW/games have much less blogs related to them.

Enough for the next article. :) Enjoy.

[bllius]

Forums.

BTW:

3. People blog much less in Europe. So, all European VW/games have much less blogs related to them.

Is there evidence for this?

[Ann Otoole]

sl blogs are rife with fictitious blog alts all praising the main "fashionista" involved. Not all that hard to spot. they always review the same "fashionista's stuff while not accepting materials to review from other designers.

knock off a 20:1 ratio for SL blogs and you'll have a more accurate representation. as Yulunga mentioned.. SL blogs are about "status" so naturally the system is gamed.

personally i have found only a very select few SL blogs to be worth the time to read. this is one of the top blogs on my tiny list.

[Veeyawn]

I would also add that it is easy to blog from within Second Life and that could certainly be a contributing factor.

[Cyde Weys]

It's much harder to find things to write about in games rather than virtual worlds. Second Life is essentially limitless - anything can happen in it, so anything can potentially be a topic of a blog post.

World of Warcraft, on the other hand, is a carefully constructed game in which the active players know the rules inside and out. What is there to blog about? You just slayed the dragon? You and a million other people. All of the game's encounters are very mechanical in nature and widely experienced by most people who reach the top levels of the game. There just isn't much interesting to read about.

[Alex]

I strongly disagree, Cyde.
The main 'content' in VW and MMO equally are human relationships. MMO (not all of them, but many) require COLLECTIVE effort, so the thing 'to write about' are relationships within the group/guild. That's exactly what WoW bloggers are writing about. On the other hand VW are more about romantic relationships. People keep them more private.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

There are only 350 SL blogs? And 1500 WoW blogs? Hmm... where do people get those statistics? World of SL tracks down "only" 181, but Tao is picky — I'd easily claim that these are 1% of all blogs about SL.

I have no idea on how to estimate the total number of SL blogs-versus-active-users ratio. In my country, with only 4000 or so active residents (out of 200,000 registered accounts), there are 20 very active blogs. That's about 0.5%. Now, blogging is not taken seriously in my country, so I'd expect this to be a "worst case scenario". 0.5% of 550,000 active users would be 2750 SL blogs, which I find a much more reasonable number. Don't forget that English only accounts for roughly 40% of all the languages spoken in SL, and blogs will obviously reflect that — so there would be at least a thousand active blogs in SL. Still, I believe that the number is far higher than that.

But, yes, I'd not be very surprised that there are far more blogs about SL than anything else. In fact, I would be very surprised if there are more Facebook blogs than SL blogs (although Facebook has not even twice the registered users than SL, and SL is catching up furiously). In fact... if we think a bit about it... there are very likely more blogs about SL than about any other social tool ;) (how many Twitter blogs or Flickr blogs are there? :) )

This is worth reflecting on. Of course I can imagine that WoW players have way more interesting things to do than to blog :) The SLogosphere, however, is a different kind of beast. It's like blogging about a country really. I know this is an old cliché, but I can't describe it in any other way. The comparisons fail because SL is not only "technology" and not only "social environment" — it's both that, but quite a lot more beyond it.

Yes, there are dozens (hundreds?) of fashionista blogs, but fashion is just one of many things. There are economy blogs. There are virtual law blogs. There are (many!) technology blogs. There are blogs about sex (all variants). There are blogs about communities in SL. There is journalism and news. There are essays, thoughts, papers. There are blogs about blogging about SL! It's endless. It's like "blogging about the Internet" — there are millions of blogs about the Internet — it can't be "constrained" to a special "style" or concept. There is no such thing as a "standard blog about SL".

Yulunga's comment ("More seriously, blogging is one obvious way to acquire status in SL") is a very interesting phenomenon, even if I'm not so sure about it. When I joined SL, the "status" came from posting on the SL forums. There was a "guaranteed" audience of close to 6,000 users. As LL started to "abandon" the forums, blogs multiplied and grew — but the amount of regular readers diluted heavily. According to SocialRank, my own blog is usually on the top ten — with just 200-300 "readers" (most of which are, of course, just bots, aggregators, and spammers). Although SocialRank does not say how many SL blogs they track (they claim to track them "all"), it certainly means that the overall audience of all the SLogosphere is not very big. My own estimate is that perhaps 150,000 or so people read those 3000 or so blogs. It's hard to use that as a claim to "social status", but I still find Yulunga's concept very, very intriguing (and worth writing an essay about it!).

Alex, your own claim that "VW are more about romantic relationships" is soooo off the mark that it hurts :) Specially if you're putting Second Life under that definition. Don't get clouded with the image that "sex rules Second Life" — around 20% of all content in SL is certainly about sex, of course, and it's very easy to claim that one in five people are in SL for the "romantic relationships", but SL (and probably VWs...) are not "more about romantic relationships"... when these are a small minority of what is really going on in SL. However, if your point is just to claim that bloggers write on "human relationships", well, I'd say that this is certainly true on many of the blogs I read (since I'm particularly fond of observing human beings interacting online :) ) but I'm pretty sure there are a gazillion blogs that are just marginally related to that, like blogs on SL technology, news, fashion, economy, or law. Of course, ultimately, we're all humans here, and all these things are collectively part of what makes us human, so I guess we can't really avoid the human factor even on a blog discussing, say, how to implement Mono in Second Life...

[Hamlet Au]

Alex, do you have a source for the "1500 active WoW blogs" claim?

[USA 4 eva]

..."BTW:

3. People blog much less in Europe. So, all European VW/games have much less blogs related to them.

Is there evidence for this?"...

Surely this is self-evident? Everyone knows that Americans are the world's most educated, erudite, literate and vocal people. Whereas Europe (and the rest of the world) is filled with illiterate and ignorant peasants who can barely put two English words together.

QED There are less blogs in Europe!

/me runs away and hides.

[Alex]

Yes I do have. Our bots found them all in about a month and icluded into our feed reader ( http://yolto.com ).
Let me mention that it's not for 'aggregation' purpose, but for this -http://yolto.com/FeedTopics.aspx , they (robots) identify cross-blog discussions and assemble Topic Digests (in chronological order).
So... we have statistics :). BTW, the number is still growing, because people blog about VW and MMO more and more.

Regards.

[Hamlet Au]

That's cool, Alex, but do you have a list of these WoW/SL blog somewhere on the site I can link to?

[Zoe Connolly]

Hamlet,

I've gathered over 650 SL related links (mostly blogs) on my blogrolling.com account.

I've also created a Ning.com group as an adjunct for my inworld Second Life Bloggers group: Second Life Bloggers

[Tina]

IF you understand Scandinavian language (or use Google automatic translator software) there are mine: http://tinasuniversum.blogspot.com/

The blog covers a lot different things about Second Life and around it.. Right now Its alot about our upcoming Swedish National day celebration - first one in cyber and in Second Life (of course!)...

I have written more than 1.100 articles since 31th of December 2oo7...

Why not have a look?! Your welcome - all of you!

/Tina (PetGirl) Bergman

[Blog King]

I never really played the second life game, but friends said that it was great. I can tell you that the number of blogs are increasing more and more everyday mainly, because SL is becoming so popular.

[Account Deleted]

Yes that is a nice idea but have you ever thought of going up to the biggest guy on the subway and telling him your thoughts on this. I wonder what he might do, or would you even do it.
Jacob Smith
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wow gold

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