Seat at the Table

I did a little media trend research to see if the media and blog discussion backed up yesterday’s Reuters story on Second Life nearing its peak on the Gartner Hype Cycle.   

As Linda Zimmer of Second Life Business Communicators notes, the Gartner Hype cycle follows media patterns, at least initially (actual broad adoption can take off well after the hype).  I did a little trend research with the media and blogosphere discussion.  As you can see, there is a clear downward trend in media (methodology at the bottom).

Methodology: We did a little research starting in June (a little after the Business Week cover story – a good hype launch point) up until December (search was for Second Life in the headline or first paragraph of all media.  For December, we searched the first have then doubled month everyone was gone.  We also did a blog search using Google as it allows us to get specific posts by date.  The number of posts were divided by 100 to create a line closer to media.  The two numbers added up for each month provided a score.  As you can see, the blogosphere is more or less flat while media has a clear trend drop.  Based on this simple finding, Gartner’s Hype Cycle forecast is just in time.

Note: Thanks to Zoho againfor their easy spreadsheet application and charting feature (read the short review here).