Graph of Second Life’s Land Area Growth
Second Life resident Mark Barrett, who’s been providing community tools and collecting interesting information about the Grid at SLStats.com, SLBuzz.com and SLTags.com, recently cobbled together a nice graph showing the growth of SL’s land area, which I’m happy to present above. While Second Life’s economic statistics page gives some data on how many “private islands” are out there (i.e., regions not part of the mainland), it doesn’t give a total figure for the land masses present in Second Life. Mark’s figures, while not 100 percent accurate, should be close, and give a very good picture of one aspect of Second Life’s growth since he started collecting the data about six weeks ago — in which time the SL land area has grown almost 15 percent, from under 3,600 16-acre sims to over 4,000. (Almost half of these are private islands, according to LL’s economics page.) According to Mark, Linden Lab is adding some 10 to 20 regions every day. It will be interesting to see how this growth curve changes, if at all, given the recent increae in prices for islands not on the mainland.
Side note: While poking around for links for this post, I came across another interesting SL-related widget called SLStats, this one a WordPress plugin that allows bloggers to generate Second Life tags at the end of blog entries. Neat.
Feeds
1. The “community” has not always been so enthusiastic about these “community tools” that weathered a huge scandal and a wave of negative feeling over the capturing of data about relations among avatars within Second Life.
2. Are you in a business relationship with Mark Barrett on the sim Dirty?
3. Rather than funnelling us all to be depending on SLstats or Mark Barrett’s interpretation fo the data, the recipe for making these pronouncements should be discussed. I imagine it involves:
a. monitoring the land auctions daily to see how many auctions are sold, possibly using a script
b. calculating that the sinks belonging to Governor Linden called land sales on the economic pages are purchases of subsidized new land for $512, through which you can figure how many newbies are on first land (I think).
c. Lindens routinely give the total number of servers, i.e. 3000, they give the number of private islands, so you subtract the one from the other. But that doesn’t tell you how much land is in Gov. Linden’s own hands and/or abandonded to her and waiting for the auction queue — some estimates are as much as 1/3 of the mainland.
4. Are the widgets for sale or free?