DISQUS

The Metaverse Journal: True traffic measurement in Second Life - when?

  • Jovin · 1 year ago
    Linden already have sophisticated ways to measure traffic, they came inside the 'GoogleBox' they bought to do the new Search system. One metric Google pioneered was 'dwell' which measured how long each user spent on a website before coming back to the Google results page and clicking another link - the thinking was that the less time you spent on a page the less relevant the info there was to your original query - and so Google down-rated that site slightly against similar queries. Obviously it worked in reverse for 'good' sites.

    Altho it's limited to resident's use of the Search system the advantage of prioritising that kind of measurement in SL is that it would pretty much filter out spam-bot-searches and camping, rendering them useless and leaving a much more accurate set of figures.

    They can do all sorts of smart things to measure inworld activity, the current traffic head-count is certainly an outdated blunt instrument. Depends which Google features they paid for and intend to switch on i guess... :-)
  • TateruNino · 1 year ago
    Ermm.. Actually not today. That was the 28th of April.
  • Lee Lindman · 1 year ago
    Yeah this is a month old, but still a great thing to talk about!

    We have RealXtend and OpenSim alongside Second Life now, which all share a similar architecture in common. We should try to find a traffic solution that incorporates them into the equation too. My suggestion was to build the traffic monitoring into the viewer (which all these worlds share) and then have the viewer send along all of the required data to an external DB for analytics etc. See my blog post at http://www.wammyshouse.com/?p=23 for the nitty gritty of what could be a nice all-inclusive solution.

    It wouldn't really be a good solution though unless it was pre-built into the viewer, otherwise it would suffer the same opt-in problem that Alexa has for web statistics. So maybe a non-profit oversee's the db and provides nice stats for the public to access?

    Any comments / questions / rude remarks? :O)

    Cheers,
    Lee
  • Lowell Cremorne · 1 year ago
    Ahhh you've got to love the WordPress scheduling feature - I wrote this story on 28th April and set it to appear later that day but I must have selected the fifth month on the time stamp - hence its appearance overnight. Sorry for the confusion :)
  • TateruNino · 1 year ago
    Well, it took us the whole month to get some questions about it all answered. Others, we're still waiting on.