i’ve gone public!

I tend to find blog entries about blogging a bit too self-referential. Well, at least mine are. However, I thought I’d post a quick entry concerning Blogshares, which is “a fantasy stock market for blogs.” A number of people have written about it already, and I don’t have anything particularly scintillating to add. However, I’d like to draw your attention to my blog’s listing, and invite you to buy some stock. It’s a steal!

You can read the Blogshares faq for yourself to see how it works. Here are a few quick observations on my part:

  • The rules state that your blog must reach a valuation of $1,000 before it will go public. My blog is only valued at around $17, but it went public anyway. I half-thought this meant that I was special in some way, that perhaps someone recognized the obvious genius of my postings and decided, “Damn the rules! This simply must be listed publicly!” It turns out that there was just a bug in the system. Humility can be a good thing.
  • My friend Chuck bought 400 shares of my blog, which makes sense because he’s one of the 4 or 5 of you who appear to actually read my site. But then this afternoon I noticed that a user named Empty Pages, who owns a blog by the same name had bought 200 shares. Strangers are buying up my blog! What does this mean?
  • The links you create to other blogs from your homepage have value. My links are currently worth around $29. If I link to you, and blogshares tracks that link, then the value of your blog goes up by $29. I really don’t know what to make of this. If my blog’s only worth $17, then why is the link worth $29? The quantification {and commodification} of my importance in the blogosphere is as puzzling as the price of gas in the “real” world. I suspect, though, that if I were to read the rules a bit more carefully, things would make more sense to me. Update. This just in: reading the directions can prove to be a simple yet effective way to make sense of things. This explains how the link value is calculated: ($100 + Value of Blog) / (Total number of outgoing links). My blog is valued at $17.30. Add $100. Divide by 4, which is how many outgoing links blogshares think I have. The result? $29.35.

Oh, and I’ve added a list of blogshare blogs in the righthand column of the page. Some of these are blogs I read regularly. Some aren’t. {Hint: I don’t read Norwegian.} I bought ones I thought might be good investments in addition to ones that I like to read. Sometimes these two things coincide.

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5 thoughts on “i’ve gone public!

  1. You have a much clearer blog entry on this than I do. I’m still waiting to score enough links to actually go public. But this begs one question. If you link to too many blogs, does that devalue your links?

  2. Turns out the answer is yes. I went and read through the manual to see what it says about this. I wrote it up in an “update” to my original post.
    The forum at blogshares contains some really interesting conversations about all of this, including one thread warning of the potential of a market crash.

  3. I signed up, but it looks like all of your stock has been bought?
    I guess if I understood this type of stuff, I wouldn’t be a poor grad student :p

  4. J, catch me on IM some time and I’ll sell a few shares so that you can buy them up. It looks like Brandon Barr of http://texturl.net bought up the rest of my very cheap shares. Hmm, a little speculation going on…

  5. Hi, Empty Pages here. :)
    I bought some of your BlogShares because the price was right and your blog is interesting. Powered by MT is thumbs up too. :P I think it was a good investment.
    You showed on the hot stock list for a while.
    I bought more than half my own shares first thing because during the wait to get indexed I read the forums and saw where people were buying way too many like that. I don’t think it’s very nice at all to be so greedy, I feel guilty about just a couple hundred so let me know and I will gift them back to you… now, not after I make millions off you! :) :) :)
    PS mine went public under that bug too.

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