A virtual Stock Market for Blogs

01:13 Steampunk 0 Comments

A virtual Stock Market for Blogs

Came across this interesting website Blogshares

The site defines itself as ‘BlogShares is a fantasy stock market for blogs where weblogs are the companies. Players invest fictional dollars on shares in blogs. Blogs are valued by their incoming links and add value to other blogs by linking to them. Prices can go up or down based on trading and the underlying value of the blog’. No actual ownership of blogs is transferred. BlogShares is purely a fictional marketplace.

Blogs are added to the BlogShares Index via a spider parse of the listings at a service called FeedMesh, where multiple ‘ping’ streams are scanned for new URLs, or can be the result of a player manually adding a blog to the system. You can add your blog manually as well.

Shares in a blog can be viewed as similar to shares of publicly traded corporate stock, with each blog being a company. Each share represents a financial interest in the success of the blog. Upon being listed for trading, all blogs start the game with 5000 shares. 1000 are automatically reserved for the blog’s actual owner, with the rest being owned by the public. Every blog in the game goes through a three-step process prior to being fully available to players for trade.

Process goes like this: First, the blog is added as described above. Next, once the URL for the blog is added to the BlogShares system, the blog must await a re-indexing. This will cause a spider to parse the blog, and gather initial information from the site. Basically, this involves verifying the blog’s URL and then recording the outgoing links. Also, the blog’s URL is compared against outgoing links from other blogs, also referred to as “incoming links”. After this, the blog’s listing in the game will reflect any incoming or outgoing links which are made from/to other blogs listed in the system. Links to/from non-blogs or blogs not yet in the system will not count toward your blog’s valuation.

The trading screen of this Stock Market for Blogs looks very similar to the actual trading sites.

My blog is currently valued at $2768.

Blog image source Shutterstock

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