There is something strange about online entities, be it blogs, virtual games, moocs, or vles. There’s something ethereal about all those entities. Because they will fade away quickly as they were praised. They have a lifetime so short that some users are still hanging to those entities while the servers are being shut down. An example is Second Life islands. How many abandoned places are still there in Second Life. Ghost of 2007 gold run. Who is paying for them? Some of these places were never really popular. The virtual worlds were sold by the companies that promoted them to suckers that spent much real money to buy virtual goods, islands and services.
Second Life is only an example, but you can clearly imagine the same thing happening to other worlds like WoW or Minecraft. Obviously right now they are highly sought and present users might say that they don’t feel that the online entity is going to disappear. Are really you sure about that? Second Life was a pain. A evolved IRC for finger and imagination impaired people. I never liked it, but just 8 years ago everybody was writing about it (me included saying how bad it was (in PT)).
The moral of finding all these abandoned places in the virtual worlds is that there always some Bullish movement sponsored by companies that are real Bears. Be careful where you place your online bets. We really need an Internet janitor.