The Life Cycle of Social Media Hype

I’ve been reading with fascination a series of articles that have appeared lately that question the value of maintaining a presence in Second Life. To make a long story short, a year or so ago, when the Second Life hype was deafening, companies appeared in mass to construct their own virtual presences as a way to market their products....

Link Roundup (July 30, 2007)

Get productive with the best Facebook Apps

Lifehacker breaks down Facebook Apps that can improve productivity.

A Social-Networking Service With a Velvet Rope

New York Times on Digg/Revision3/Pownce founder Kevin Rose. If anyone wants a Pownce invite, let me know in the comments. I’ve got a few left....

Newspaper Homepages and Load Times

Our recent newspaper study dealt exclusively with the features present on newspaper websites. We didn’t look critically at the design of these sites. The adoption of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) makes it possible for web developers to create rich designs while keeping the file size of pages to a minimum....

Republican Primary Results by Web Traffic

Compete has a novel post up that analyzes how the Republican primary would play out based on web traffic in each state. This chart summarizes the results based on traffic the first half of the year:

Completely anecdotal, but interesting nonetheless....

Companies Abandoning Second Life

The LA Times had a story last week about companies abandoning their presences on Second Life due to poor return on investment. From the sound of things, many companies that have stayed may not be long for the world:

But the sites of many of the companies remaining in Second Life are empty....