Top Posts of 2008

Tuesday, December 30, 2008 Tuesday, December 30, 2008

 
Each year I publish quite a few posts. Some are very popular, and others, well, not so much. Today I list the posts that you read most often in 2008. Why are these so popular? It’s hard to say, but the readers have spoken with their clicks. So to you frequent readers, or those who have just joined us, here are the top posts of 2008.

The Name Series
By far the most popular posts were the articles on how best to name your avatar. We’ve all seen horrifying avatar names, and some of us are even stuck with them ourselves (/me is guilty). How could this happen? How can we prevent it? And, find out exactly how good or bad your avatar name is with the scoring system. 

The Economics Series
In my business I often bump into club owners who seek fogs or other particle effects, and I get a sense of their issues. I wrote my thoughts in a three-part series that explained some of the problems and potential solutions. Not a terribly kewl topic, but they’re very popular reads.

The Plurk Hoax
In June of 2008 several SL types including myself began to use Plurk, the microblogging service. It quickly became addictive and after many, many invitations we now find hundreds, perhaps thousands of avatars using it daily. It was so wildly popular for avatars that I could not resist using an extremely provocative and misleading title.

The Mix’n Match
The story is well-known now; Vint Falken and I conjured up a rather insane project for the SL blogosphere. We made blogging volunteers write random posts on random blogs. It was a ton of work, but we managed to get it done and the results were astonishing. I am still proud of all the participants.  

The Rouge Thing
One of my Canadian SL friends is the amazing builder/designer/bonvivant Codebastard Redgrave, who executed a textbook-case sim opening. I covered the opening itself, but then analyzed how she pulled it off so well.

In the course of analyzing the most popular posts above, I went through all 2008 posts and found myself re-reading some of the not-top posts. While they didn’t seem to get the massive hit counts of those above, I like them a lot, probably because they made me emo for one reason or another. For what it’s worth, here’s my personal favorite posts of 2008:

SLCC 08
I managed to attend the Second Life Community Convention during September, and it was one of the most amazing experiences ever. I can’t tell you how much fun I had, and was able to write down only a tiny bit of it in my post convention report.

The 2015 Series
I’m constantly thinking about what might be in the future, and I realized I’d better start writing it down. I began a series of fictional “days in the life of a future avatar” that describe some of my crazy ideas. These were not especially popular, but I really enjoyed writing them. I am certain I will do more in 2009.

Gods of Second Life
A friend pointed me to a rather unusual exhibition that poked fun at the Lindens, and I wrote it up in this post. Why do I like this one so much? The bit about Lagnor at the end had me howling for quite a while.

It’s Not Bad!
Many SL blogs tend to be highly critical of, well, everything. I try not to be critical because I believe that things are really never as bad as is often claimed, and that if progress is to occur we must have a positive attitude. In this post I tried to demonstrate that the blogosphere negabuzz was a bit offbase.

My All Time Favorite Post
I wrote this one in early 2008, and I often think of it. You’ll see why.

I am still smiling. Best Wishes to Everyone in 2009!

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your favourite post "They walk" reminded me of an article I found some time ago called "The view from a wheelchair": http://www.metaversejournal.com/2008/12/18/the-view-from-a-wheelchair/

Have a great 2009

/Speedmaster Bing

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