I feel I need to drop a quick note about what's been going on with Slogbase in the past couple weeks since it launched.

There were several articles written about it, but the most interesting and well-researched was from avatar and reporter for SLNN, Zeina Zehetbauer: "Slogbase is watching you? Traffic monitoring in SL". Zeina did a good job of asking probing questions and putting the answers into a provocative format. As I suspected, other people are coming to the ideas of Slogbase with fresh perspectives. I like the dialog going on, and I bet there are even better conversations going on behind closed doors.

The stats on sourceforge are showing that Slogbase has been downloaded more than 200 times since launch. I consider those good numbers. Through the feedback I'm getting, I've found a small bug that I've fixed and included in a new release today. The global configuration was set to exclude index.php from the URLs, but this requires Apache's mod_rewrite which we can't assume it on for everyone. I also patched the code to support PHP running as a CGI.

Some of the best feedback I've received was from the folks at Phreak Isle, Max Case and Taco Rubio. Taco might actually be more enthusiastic about Slogbase than I am. And Max has been contributing code. He has a library for parsing the incoming Second Life data that I plan to integrate soon.

Taco told me that Slogbase has shown that traffic to his island is much higher than the standard reports from Linden Lab show. This seems to be based on the Linden Lab numbers counting visitors every five minutes as compared to Slogbase's default scan time of 60 seconds. Phreak Isle hosts Babbler, the free tool for language translation, and it seems many avatars drop in to grab a copy and leave before five minutes are up. If nothing else, knowing this is knowing there's opportunity to entice this steady stream of visitors to stay longer.

I think Taco was a bit surprised to find that his island has become a destination for newbies. Slobase records the virtual birthdate of visitors and Phreak Isle seems to be weighted significantly towards accounts that are about a month old. Taco and team are actively updating their site now to serve the specific needs of their visitors where before they may have imagined more experienced people spending time there. He's also interested in finding reasons for those more experienced users to come back more often.

These are the exact type of uses and learnings I was hoping to generate by releasing Slogbase. As I mentioned in the SLNN article, we do have a neat "radar table" that is an in-world version of the minimap rendered in 3D (of course) that uses a feed from Slogbase. I need to get the pieces together to release it, but I intend to share it with everyone. Aside from seeing dots that represent avatars in the space, you can click on them to get a teleport. Stay tuned for that one.

If anyone else has a slogbase success story, please contact me.