BlogShares Benefits?
Blogshares is a pretty neat idea that creates a phantom market for the trading of "shares" in Weblogs. I recently claimed Salocin.com and decided to try to drive the share price up slightly.
But I have a few criticisms...
First of all, I registered over 2 hours ago and I have yet to receive the confirmation email to activate my account. It doesn't take hours to send an email, only seconds, so I wonder as to why this is taking so long - you have to strike while the iron is hot, and many people may find their interest fading as they wait for some activation code to allow them to start playing.
Second, a whole bunch of the links that exist on this page are missing from my record on Blogshares. I don't really know why this is. Also, a bunch of the links that I have coming into the blog are either not there, or split over 2 URLs, one with the / on the end, and one without. You'd think software would be able to determine this.
Other than that, I quite like the way the system works - it would be nice to have a "next update in xxx hours" feature, to avoid checking back when there have been no changes, and an RSS feed you can include on your own page to report the price, volume, ownership and other interesting features of a blog's stock.. I would probably put that on the page somewhere, and it would help Blogshares get additional exposure.
Someone recently bought two other players out for real cash. They paid $100 to each of the players in return for their approximate $100m holdings in Blogshares. I supposed if you've got the money to burn you might as well burn it, but the person in question argues that a potential real economy may arise from the phantom economy that is Blogshares.
I disagree. In it's present form, blogshares may find a way to make some modest income from some of the various applications it may develop. It already has premium members. But I doubt very much many people will be willing to play for real money, other than in controlled rounds of simulated tournaments, as happens in the fantasy football and the like. The reasons for this are...
- Unless the market becomes extremely finely balanced, with all of the forces of a free market working on it, those that have money already will always be advantages, which means a game where real cash was up for grabs would need to happen in rounds, where everyone started from zero, paid up front, and there was a "finish date", just as in fantasy sports leagues.
- Given the ability of individuals to control the links on their pages, and the lack of oversight, and the role that interlinkages play in the valuation of a stock, the system is remarkably open to manipulation.
- On the flip side, the system remains opaque. One of the key determinants of a free market is good (if not perfect) information, but the equation by which stocks are valued is opaque, and as I pointed out above with respect to my website, unreliable.
So unless all of that gets worked out, I don't really see anyone seriously considering pushing money into the system, especially when they don't have a very good perspective on the rules that will decide if they win or lose.
Despite this, as a fun tool to track your weblog with, it's definitely got value, and it should be able to make enough from its concept to costs and pay the coder a modest amount.
Posted by nlvp at May 22, 2003 01:25 PM