In PostRank's Top 20 Virtual World Blogs, 13 of 20 are Second Life-Oriented, With Combined Engagement Larger Than World of Warcraft's Top Blogs

I often write about the remarkable reach of the Second Life community across numerous Web 2.0 sites (as here, and here), one that's far more pervasive than any other virtual world. Here's another example: Take a look at the top ten blogs devoted to virtual worlds, as compiled and measured by PostRank Analytics:

1. World of Warcraft Insider
2. Massively
3. Second Life Flickr Group
4. Fashion World of SL
5. Koinup, Latest Works (Virtual World Social Network)
6. World of SL
7. What's New (Club Penguin)
8. New World Notes (Rawk!)
9. Official Linden Blog
10. Second Life Herald

See the full list here. (Evidently user-generated community sites like Flickr and Koinup are counted as blogs.) I'm proud New World Notes is the largest general interest Second Life blog, but to help keep me humble, I have to note that Second Life's fashion blog aggregator has nearly three times as many Engagement Points, which is PostRank's way of tracking activity related to the blog on Digg, Twitter, and other top social networks. On that score, WoW Insider is the largest blog by far, but Second Life-related blogs dominate the top twenty, claiming 13 of the top 20 slots. Even more interesting, when you count up aggregate Engagement Points, the top Second Life blogs arguably have a larger combined total than the top World of Warcraft blogs. I say "arguably", because in that tally, I'm counting Engagement Points from Koinup (an occasional sponsor to this blog), even though it's a social network for multiple virtual worlds -- however, Koinup's CEO Pier Casolari just told me 70% of the content on his site is Second Life-oriented.

Hat tip: Gwynneth Llewelyn (PostRank's virtual sweet sixteen)!

Comments

[Melanie Baker]

I always find it fascinating how the cultures of different communities evolve, and where and how they're active. Also, how they define or don't define themselves (given that more often than not I'm on the outside). E.g. your comments above about Flickr and Koinup.

As a side note, our World of Warcraft topic was a lot more built-out than our Second Life one. (http://www.postrank.com/topic/World%20Of%20Warcraft and http://www.postrank.com/topic/Second%20Life)

I've copied a bunch of SL sites over to the topic from the Virtual Worlds topic to balance things somewhat. However, as always, I'd love for folks who know and are part of the community to build out their own topics, since they know the players better than I ever can.

Of course, anyone with an account can edit topics: http://blog.postrank.com/getting-started/adding-a-website-to-a-postrank-topic/

Anyway, thanks for the article and the analysis. :)

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Well, this sort of makes me think why so many exceptional bloggers write only about SL... I never compared it to blogs elsewhere (and of course WoW has always ranked above SL). Does anyone have any idea? Given a specific topic/theme, how many blogs are usually there, and how many people actually read them?

I always had this strange feeling that SL has a *lot* of people gravitating to blogs (and other social tools too). For instance, does Plurk still have non-SL users? :-)

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Part of the equation is longevity. SL has been around much longer than WoW. Another is that SL is a social VW, attracting social people; WoW is an achivement-oriented game attracting achievers. You would expect socializers to make more use of social media.

Doesn't make it any less awesome :)

[Lordfly Digeridoo]

SL was launched in 2003. WoW launched in 2004. WoW has a much larger userbase, but somehow I don't think they're the blogging type; games tend to focus more on forum activity. VWs are easier to expound on and allows for more "beard-stroking" type posts where we can all theorize about the future of virtual worlds or whatever.

VWs are, basically, easier to blog about as a concept, and seeing as Second Life is still the king of non-gamey virtual worlds, it stands to reason that most of the blogs would talk about it.

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