Blogshares is a fantasy market where you bet on shares of bloggers, and the value of your shares is multipled by the number of links to the blog.
I totally don’t get this game.
It takes political-network blogging, and makes the rich get even richer by betting on top players. It’s the power-law squared.
There’s no way to win unless you’re Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan.
If you’re a blogger, and want to win the Blogshares game, and you’re not Andrew, then you bet against your own blog, and drive the value of your own shares down.
By contrast, if you’re “just blogging”, then you can win if you have more readers than you would reach by email. You can win if you meet people through comments that you wouldn’t have otherwise met. You can win by building relationships in the social and creative networks, even if you’re not Susannah Breslin talking about pornography.
In sports, if you’re not an Olympic athlete, you can play on a local team, or you can run for personal records and fitness.
Why play games that you can’t win, any way you look at it?
I haven’t really messed with blogshares, because that damned ticker is very problematic for Mac browsers.
Anyhow.
I can imagine it being fun simply for the opportunity to game the system, cheat, use the equivalent of googlebombing to manipulate values, etc.
But the general concept is pretty shallow. There’s no way to reflect the underlying value of a blog (and of links to/from it). A link to, say, a Klan website is taken as a positive vote. This gets back to the problem of adding rating metadata to links.
Well said, Adina! I couldn’t agree more. I’ve got better things to do than fool around with this nonsense.
AMEN! YAIBR”I” (Yet Another Irritating Blog Related “Innovation”). Yawn… This one is particularly frustrating because it plays up to the egos of the A-listers who relentlessly flog the meme in their own blogs… crowding out any hope of posting something interesting. These little projects can’t all be winners, I guess. Out of a volume of rapid developments will spring forth the Big Ideas.
seems like you all lost your $500 on your first few transactions? Or were you rewarded with a P/E below 1? đŸ˜€