SocialRanked!

I received a surprise message yesterday from the folks at Sweet Second Life. It's a site that uses the SocialRank service to identify “hot” Second Life blog postings. It seems like a fab place quickly get the SLBlogosphere buzz of the day. I registered the Second Effects blog on their site just for fun a while ago.

But today, the message from them was:

Did you ever wonder how your blog stacks up compared to all other blogs on Second Life?

Well, um, yeah! Duh.

and

Congratulations, you are one of the community leaders!

As you might know, every day SocialRank algorithm is tracking thousands of blogs and identifies the hottest posts on Second Life.

Not only does your blog rank in the Top 50 of all Second Life blogs, we have also created a badge so that you can proudly display your blogs overall rank on your blog.

Ok, I get a lot of SPAM messages, and at first that's what I thought this was. Or at least some kind of scam to promote their site. However, I went to Sweet Second Life and examined their list of “hot” sites, and found that it did have the popular blogs listed, such as my pal Nobody Fugazi's Your2ndPlace (16th), New World Notes (9), Torley (3) and my new acquaintance Zoe Connolly (15). So it seems quite legit – and useful.

Surprisingly, I somehow made it into the top 50! And I have to thank you – my readers for placing me there. Way to go, guys! We were #48 as of this writing.

I've also pasted the Sweet Second Life badge on the right hand side of this blog so we can see where we are ranked. Maybe it will go higher, if I'm lucky.

So how does this ranking take place? Well, Sweet Second Life says:

We use SocialRank software to monitor each of the best Second Life sites and determine today's hottest articles and bloggers in the field. This is done by analyzing how sites and users link, connect, and discuss each other's content. Add a touch of math and what we have is a powerful filter into the hottest stories of the day.

Translated, this means “it's a secret”. And that's a good thing too, since if their algorithm was public, people would be gaming it for certain, and all value would be lost. I think that's already happened to Digg (think “Top Ten Barf Pictures”, etc.) Regardless, I think the SLBlogosphere is growing, but a lot of people don't know their way around it yet. Sweet Second Life can help you out – you can find pointers to many of the best Second Life blogs right there.