I wrote about B-Places, a Second Life discovery site with a Digg-style interface, last year, when it was still sponsored by a Belgian airlines, of all things. I'm glad to see it's still operating, though it's now managed by a metaverse agency called The Blue Pill group. It's an extremely useful supplemental resource to the SL viewer's Showcase tab and Koinup's Most Popular Locations list I feature here every month. As you can see in the screen capture above, the locations are folksonomically nominated and voted on, and for the most part, the listings seem genuine, with little evident ballot stuffing. (Above, for example, are B-Place users'top SL locations, Inspire Space Park, Botanical Straylight, and Dublin in SL, legitimately deserving selections.)
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sloog.org is another thing like this.
Counting votes is a crude way to gauge popularity because it will favor places that have been around longer: they've had more time to accumulate votes.
Devising a more meaningful rating takes a bit more thought. A great article on "How to Build a Popularity Algorithm You can be Proud of" can be found at http://bit.ly/3Up5Gs
Posted by: Troy McConaghy | Wednesday, October 07, 2009 at 07:38 PM