On October 1st, SocialRank introduced Sweet Second Life, which could be considered a Techmeme for the Second Life crowd. Once SocialRank decides on a niche to monitor, they invite a set number of bloggers from that niche to go about their business of blogging. From there, they manually identify the top stories, related blogs, and topics. After several weeks, a complex algorithm learns from the patterns and is able to spot the hottest news on it's own!

From what I can tell, it monitors the traffic to the blog entry, number of trackbacks, and comments at the very least. At that point, it recommends the 15 top posts of the moment, and the 15 blogs that showed the greatest increase in traffic for the day. Once it identifies the entry as a success, it sends a trackback to it, if possible.

Not only are they keeping viewers informed of the stats, but they're also gaining new viewers in the bloggers that check out the incoming link! I was even able to spot a few blogs that I'd never checked out before. It's brilliant!

CMP's must read blog, Game Set Watch, has started a weekly Second Life column written by freelance journalist Mathew Kumar, who's written for such prestigious publications as Insert Credit and Eurogamer. Game Set Watch has covered Second Life in the past, but their weekly column is only in its second week so, though new to the game (look who's talking), this column is definitely worth reading (so is the rest of the blog for that matter). This week's entry covered a new blog dedicated to Second Life called Second Life Insider. Thanks for the love, Game Set Watch!

The bulk of this week's post covered shopping in world, including American Apparel's recent entry. Kumar follows this up with a complaint that I completely empathize with: you can't try on any clothes or see them on your avatar without buying them. We don't even see mannequins, we just get flat pictures of clothes and have to guess how they'll look on our avatars. Now, if only I could find a shirt with the Game Set Watch mascot on it or, even better, his entire space suit.