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!

[In an effort to keep the real individuals out of this, I'm going to pose a hypothetical question to both bloggers and residents.]

As a blogger, I recognize that I'm not a journalist. I try to follow a code of ethics and extend the courtesy that I am given. If I need a comment on an entry I'm working on, I will send the person a private message, or instant message them somewhere if I know them personally. If an explanation is long-winded, I will ask if I am allowed to call them, but again, only if I know them.

To provide an example, let's say a potentially controversial piece of information was discovered by a blogger, and they felt the need to get a comment RIGHT away. Now imagine being a resident enjoying dinner with friends in real life, when you receive a call to your cell phone asking you to comment on this information.

How would you feel about that? Is it okay for bloggers of SL news publications to phone you for the knowledge that they could receive with an in-world IM or email? Do you feel this violates your privacy? On the flip side, if you are a blogger, do you think it's okay to call for a comment on a story? If so, in what situations would this be okay? Leave a comment!