How large is Second Life's blogging community? Thanks to Second Effects, we definitely know there are hundreds of active SL blogs, but that list mostly tracks those which show up on the US/EU side of the Internet. It's certainly much larger than that, and here's some good data points to point that out:
Metaverse.Jp is a new portal of Second Life blogs from Japan, but with an emphasis on those written in English. (Now in Beta, to officially debut in November.) It's an extension of SL Mame, Japan's largest SL blogging network, hosted by metaverse developer Metabirds. According to the CEO, known in-world as Nao Noe, SLMame gets 16.5 million monthly pageviews across the network, less than 10% of which are from the top page. (In other words, most of the activity is on individual blogs.) This is an astounding number. To put that in perspective, one the Internet's top videogame blogs, Kotaku, gets only just a bit more pageviews.
Those SLMame page views come from 250,000 unique users, according to Noe, which is much larger than Japan's monthly active SL user base (probably less than 75,000), suggesting it draws a large crossover audience of non-users and/or Japanese Residents who go in-world less frequently, but are still interested in Second Life content.
The most popular Japanese SL blogs? Here's a list of top 200, and they're worth a browse, if only for the great screenshots. By Noe's estimate, the most popular blogs focus on freebie items and free L$ offers, and fashion. "And blogs about 'love' seem to become popular these days," he adds.
About a year ago I had tried to get an account on SL-Mame. They always offered English blogs too, and had a good deal of them already, however the navigation was all in Japanese. Even with the help of one of my Japanese translators, it was not managable for an extended time to work the site without understanding Japanese. So I welcome the changes which makes it easier to access.
There is a huge gap between the Japanese SL users and the others, and I was often able to help bridge this gap. People like Beannie Canning add a huge value to bringing the Japanese SL closer to the rest of us. Every step into that direction is dearly needed.
Posted by: Peter Stindberg | Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 09:01 AM
I think at least half the SL blogs that I track are Japanese language blogs.
Posted by: Tateru Nino | Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 10:12 AM