Digg-able Planet: EU Airline Lists Truly Popular Places in SL

The black and white New Orleans of Silent, with B.Places voting booth

The most ironic misnomer in Second Life, of course, is "Popular Places", the tab on the official viewer that's supposed to show the twenty most visited sites in SL based on foot traffic, but due to free money camping chairs and bots, is largely a list of land owners who've figured out how to exploit the Lindens' outdated system best.  During random metaverse travels late last night, I stumbled into Silent, a moody black and white version of New Orleans.  (Direct SLURL teleport to Silent at this link.) And then I discovered a greater irony: a Belgian airlines, of all things, is sponsoring a far better list of popular places than what's offered by the Lindens' listings.

Sort of like Digg for the metaverse, b-places.com is a repository of locations that have collected the most votes via XML-powered towers places throughout Second Life.  (It also supplies a heads-up display which shows this tally.)

Of course, there's been many other attempts to create a Digg-like recommendation system for SL, like Babbage Linden's interface early last year, but I haven't seen any that have attracted a large enough number of voters for the wisdom of crowds to obtain.  (Systems with a smaller number of users can be gamed by a minority of logrolling boosters.)  By contrast, b-places' very top Second Life locales have several thousand votes, which is quite comparable with Digg.  (Though Kevin Rose's site has a million-plus users, recommended links almost always top out at 3000-5000 Diggs.)

I'm not sure why Brussels Airlines decided to create a folskonomic aggregator for the metaverse to promote itself, but I'm glad they did.

Comments

[Oxytone]

This is awesome, thank you for posting this. I've always been annoyed with "popular" places list since it's incredibly useless.

[Kell]

Problem with this, is not everyone gets a voting kiosk. It is b.places decision who gets one. So you end up with places that only meet b.places approval. So even if you get a kiosk, you still have to get people to come vote. So you still have places, like a certain asian escort service I know who has artificially boosted their traffic with bots for months now, who get all the votes. While good places that don't cheat are ignored. This place maintains over 8000 traffic, mostly fake and has over 300 votes.

[Kell]

Someone should make a place to keep a list of all places that cheat, so we can boycott them. Death to the bots!

[anomouse]

GAWD I have been spammed so many times by b.places I'll never goto any of the sites they sponser!

[Noirran]

I've found some great spots with b-places. I love it. Some truely beautiful builds and sims out there.

[Paley]

Another good option is the new Showcase section of Secondlife.com. Linden Lab quietly launched that a couple of months ago. It features a directory of cool places and other guide content.

[arnto]

I think that the service offered by b-places is great. A truly resident voted directory.
Found some really cool places with the HUD.