web traffic – if i did blogging for a living, i’d live and die by it but i’m just OCD about it. i love how social media can share an idea and create change
there have been positive changes in the world thanks to the internet. it’s easy to point to “big” events, like Egypt, however there are a lot of personal stories of positive change on the individual level
with all my blabbing about OpenSim, i’ll never change the world but maybe someone else will find the creative joy i experience or maybe it will get some students excited about learning
however, i would not be in OpenSim if it was not for Maria at Hypergrid Business
lol, 2009!
when i realised that Second Life would no longer work for me, i was done with virtual worlds and figured i’d get back into Blender and SketchUp (i use SketchUp regularly in my day job). fortunately, subQuark saw an opportunity with OpenSim to do what he’d been wanting to do in Second Life since 2008 and he saw that because of Maria’s blogafter learning that, i was glued to Hypergrid Business and read every post as soon as it came out – Maria formed the foundation of my knowledge of OpenSim. OpenSim was still on the new side at that time, but other blogs started showing up that were instrumental in my education. i was still in SL but subQuark started up in OpenSim and that allowed me to dip my toes in while i closed out the SL estate
blogs do make a contribution and today i saw Daniel Voyager’s post of having 100,000 visits to his. if i understand WordPress analytics, that is a total of daily unique hits. it won’t count you twice if you hit a post twice in one day, but you are counted twice if you visit the site on two different days. Daniel posts a lot of rich information about many aspects of Second Life and virtual worlds. his writing is easy to follow and he includes great photos with many of his posts (he has over 20k flickr pics!) o_O
how many of his 100,000 visits have resulted in a new virtual world user or someone finding a new way to use virtual worlds?
congrats Daniel and i hope you know that your articles add positively to the body of knowledge out there about virtual worlds. i have no doubt that many people who did not know anything about Second Life and OpenSim, or were sitting on the fence about them, gave them a try as a result of your writings and images
if you are passionate about virtual worlds and don’t blog or tweet or upload videos and pics, maybe it’s time to make your mark on the world – both virtual and real! =)
est. jan 29th, 2008
Ener –
Thank you for your kind words!
Now this makes me wonder how many visits Hypergrid Business has had… (pulling up Google Analytics)…
Since our launch in April 2009, we’ve had:
* 793,899 pages viewed
* during 448,598 separate visits
* by 241,084 different people
Of course, we have a lot of different folks contributing to HB — our great columnists, plus our (paid!) freelance writers.
I think more interesting is the upward trend of visitors — we used to average around 7,000 visitors a month in 2010, and are now up to around 15,000-20,000 unique visitors a month. Since our content is almost exclusively about OpenSim, that’s an indication about the growing user base of core OpenSim users — the kind of folks who run grids, build stuff, keep an eye out for new viewer features, new exchanges and currencies, etc… We don’t do any virtual lifestyle coverage, so casual grid residents aren’t our target audience. And the students or employees who use grids in enterprise or school settings without maybe even known their using OpenSim aren’t our target readers as well.
I’d bet that a good blog focused on the OpenSim/hypergrid lifestyle and end user experience could easily draw five to ten times our audience.
And with HG 2.0 coming out this summer, and more grids expected to get hypergrid-enabled and, thus, easily accessible to everyone, this is a good time to launch one!
Maria Korolov
15 Jun 12 at 10:30 am
what a great way to trend OpenSim users – blog hits! i’ll use yours and mine for a post tomorrow! thanks for the insight! =)
yep. our initial decisins were 100% based on your posts. David told me to read you and i did and from your stuff, i actually decided that SimHost would be best for our work, but dilbert decided on Reaction Grid. it’s been “i told you so” ever since but you were instrumental in us doing OpenSim – in no small part!
Ener Hax
15 Jun 12 at 3:02 pm
“however, i would not be in OpenSim if it was not for Maria at Hypergrid Business”
I would not be in Opensim if it wasn’t for iliveisl.
Well, maybe. You see, when I was fresh from Second Life, dejected with that platform, I had heard of Opensim, but it took a while to see if it was anything more that a VW in development.
I guess I wanted to know if there was a somewhat active community outside the core development side. iliveisl provided that for me. Back then, at the time, any involvement at the lower level, was not for the feint hearted, where, if you didnt have the technical knowledge to write patches you were cast outside the city gates :)
I once suggested on the osgrid forums that the “pic of the day” could be a little better to capture a wider audience. That suggestion resulted in vilification.
So, I thank iliveisl that it provided a normal power user perspective.
Breen Whitman
16 Jun 12 at 3:33 am
I first got to know of Opensim by reading a SL forum post back at the start of 2008 when Linden Labs dropped the Open spaces scam on everyone. Someone was talking alternatives to SL and by way of a rebuke to LL I began researching these alternatives and posting the web addresses’s together with 101 reasons to put a middle finger up to LL. Well, this got me banned from the forum and a few visits inworld from LL’s back room people with some soft warnings. Yes, it’s true!
Anyway, I now recall reading Hypergrid Business and at some point after that so I could stay informed of developments – my experience in OSgrid was awful back then!
But, even then OpenLife and Legend City were trying to run their own wannabe Second Life grids on pre-alpha software (unbelievable!) but now we are seeing the full potential of what it all meant – a vast open Metaverse of connected worlds (fantastico!).
I am glad I kept in touch but it’s been a long slow development and still has a way to go but I believe, thanks to Maria and Ener plugging away it would not be as far down the road has it has come, even now.
It’s been a wonderful ride!
Gaga
16 Jun 12 at 8:24 am
intersesting way to view OpenSim growth Maria – via traffic to related blogs – traffic here has steadily climbed and some of that is simply to daily blogging (technorati suggest two posts per day) but some of that has been from a growing community
vilification! Breen the Villain! well groups can be cliquish and i suspect that’s what happened with you. an outsider with a good suggestion who got pounced on and seen as critical – oh well, some people (or groups) need to take a breath and put life in perspective! all i know is that your suggestions are well thought out and very good, like the port 9100 mod in SoaS – outstanding!!!
well Gaga, that’s when SL went south for me too! Jack Linden with his Openspace announcement! i had something like 9 openspaces and was a good customer and converted them to real sims before the deadline (that cost some $$$ and also lost many of my residents). then Jack announced a year extension, ugh . . . i never made a profit after that =(
Ener Hax
21 Jun 12 at 9:59 am