Value?

[pecunium]

There is a strange little game out in the web... Blogshares.

It's a fantasy stock market, where blogs are the companies in trade.

The simple game is based on information flow. The more people there are who want your information, the more valuable you are. The more people to whom you refer others, the less valuable you are. They measure it by tracking links.

Think of it as cash flow... people spend the time/effort to point you away from their blog, and to someone elses. That blog must have merit. I have no idea the algorithms being used, but each reference from a blog has a value, (right now pecunium has an outgoing value of B$296.83, or B$122.22, or perhaps both, there seems to be a slight hiccup in the program, and I'm listed twice. Same product, very different values...), and the ratio of incoming/outgoing links is used as the P/E ratio.

You can own more than one blog... which implies the system is sort of gameable (I've made a few bucks in buying and selling friends blogs, and may have pumped their value a bit because I refer to blogs I like...) On the other hand, I bought shares in my own blog, and the price dropped.


A share in this blog is either (because of that odd double listing) about B$12, or B$15. A share in Josh Marshall's Talking Points or Dave Neiwerts Orcinus will set one back B$15,409.28 or, B$10,648.10 respectively (then again, they are both listed as overpriced, and have no share available... so the best thing is for one of them to refer to you, with a value of B$25,000.00, for Marshall, and B$2,062.16 for Niewert (though with the number of links Marhall puts out, and the value of one being more than the cost of a share, I don't see the overvaluation myself).

When a blog is listed, the owner has 1,000 shares set aside, which it might be worth cashing in, if one wants to play. I ought to have done that when someone who saw me as a cash cow started buying up all my free stock, shoving the price up to about B$40 a share, and then cashing out, putting it back down to about B$17.

For those who want a larger readership, there are also ways to buy ads. A bit of time, and voila, you can be an ad on a page where people who read blogs, spend some time.


It's free, and there are a lot of other games in the game, no way in the world I can imagine spending the time to learn them all, but this one has some amusing aspects, it gives one a sense of the people who are reading one, and not commenting on it, here.

Comments

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

No, fake money. Blogdollars (B$).

TK