Google Blogoscoped

Monday, March 24, 2008

Create Online Mini Cities

My Mini City lets you create a new village (without registering) and then see it grow as new unique referrers are pointed towards it. The city I just created, Blogoscopia, can be seen above in its current near-empty status. But others cities like Barbelith are already much bigger, sometimes showing impressive skyscrapers.

By default, linking to your* city will increase its population when people click the link. But once the city grew a bit, new links on the city sub-domain become available to grow specific sectors – say, linking to blogoscopia.myminicity.com/ind/ will increase the city’s industry, whereas .../tra/ will push its transport facilities.

With this incentive to create backlinks, I wouldn’t be surprised if MyMiniCity.com reaches high PageRank and keeps gaining traffic over time (the homepage currently has a PR5, with around 21,600 pages on the domain – many to most of them their own sub-domains – indexed in Google).

The site was created by Motion-Twin, who exist since 2001 and call themselves the “leading provider of online games for the French-speaking public.”

[Via Waxy.]

*Or rather, the city you originally created – it looks like you can’t “own” a city as you didn’t register to create it.

Update: Justin comments, “Please don’t. This sort of viral site causes people to spam their links all over forums and blog comments in an effort to pump the stats to their little cities. Think about it. It is an ecosystem fueled by deceiving people into clicking useless links that have nothing to do with anything.” [Thanks Justin!]

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