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.

When reviewing Slogbase metrics and use-patterns of our Second Life projects, I'm often reminded of the hilarious Sprint Nextel Commercial "Who's Agitating My Dots?" I find it especially true in this case, because not only do I want to avoid agitating the dots, but I want the dots to stick around, and have a good experience while visiting our projects. It is not unlike the way Randy Pagulayan at Microsoft optimized game play in Halo 3 by using heat maps to understand player movement through each level (Wired).

As an architect working in virtual worlds, I find the idea of real time design measurement and responsiveness very compelling. This is one of those 'Not Possible in Real Life' realities that has so much potential, yet we've barely scratched the surface. At a glance, I can easily discern areas of a design that are popular, as well as areas that are under visited or completely unnoticed. With this data in mind, I can jump back into the design and modify it based on these metrics, then check back a few days later to see if the dots like what I've done. Try doing that with a real life building!

I think of this kind of design responsiveness as asynchronous. The architecture responds to avatar behavior, but it requires my ongoing analysis and modification to continuously improve it. This broad stroke level of measurement and intervention is critical in understanding how your build is being used, and enables you to optimize your design to ensure that it is being fully explored by visitors.

Lately, I've been working on ways to dovetail the asynchronous measurement from Slogbase with more immediate and synchronous methods of architectural responsiveness. I've called it 'Reflexive Architecture (video), and have been working on a series of installations that test out various reflexive concepts.

One example is 'Carvable Architecture.' This installation is made of an array of wall panels that are scripted to move away from an approaching avatar just a tiny bit. Over time, areas that are most frequently visited naturally become larger. Areas that are never visited remain small. In this way, the architecture is carved by avatar movement over time. Another example are floor tiles that dissolve as an avatar walks over them. This concept leaves a visual trace or pattern of where avatars have traveled in the space.

One interesting effect of these installations is the way they address issues of presence in Second Life. There is a lot of controversy and discussion around the issue of Second Life builds being empty. Certainly this may be the case for some builds, but in other instances it is only a matter of visitor timing. A build could easily have 50 visitors during the course of a day without any of them running into each other, yet conclude that the place is 'always empty'. But the truth is, Second Life is a 24/7 global phenomenon and builds are visited at all hours of the day. By installing reflexive and responsive elements that leave a visual trace or indication of asynchronous presence, new visitors could get a better sense that the space isn't always empty and actually see patterns and traces left behind by avatars who have visited before them.

These concepts are currently on display in the Gallery of Reflexive Architecture (SLurl), and most of the scripts are now open source so you can explore them for yourself (find them HERE).

By combining Slogbase metrics with architectural reflexivity, a virtual building can conceivably transcend physical replication, becoming alive, intelligent, and perhaps even as fluid and dynamic as the community it serves.

Either way, these are some fun ideas to explore, and the best part is they're all completely free and open source. So, have fun with it! But whatever you do, don't agitate the dots!

As of today, Clear Ink has officially launched Slogbase, an open source solution for measuring activity in Second Life. Virtual World News released a story about Slogbase which covers the basics and includes the press release we sent out.

I was hoping for some intelligent analysis of the tool from TechCrunch's Duncan Riley, who frequently has interesting news about virtual worlds. Maybe if I'd tied Slogbase's RSS feed into a twitter account Dave Winer would give us some advice.

In the coming weeks, we'll talk more about the tools we've been building that use the live data in Slogbase, like the 3D radar tables we built several months ago. Stay tuned!