It's Nice to Share

During a slight episode of narcissism on Tuesday I did a Google search on this blog’s name to see how many insightful web pages are referencing it when lo and behold, it turned up a reference to this site on www.blogshares.com.

BlogShares is an economic game based on a running valuation of blogs. Players receive a starting amount of 500 B$, a virtual currency, with which to invest by purchasing shares in the blog(s) of their choice. As the blog values go up or down, so does the player’s virtual wealth. There are some nice graphing and analysis tools provided by the site and for any blog you can see a list of web sites referencing that blog and sites referenced by that blog, as well as their share value for that blog. Be sure to check it out!

I have to admit I get a kick out of the whole “mirror in a mirror ad infinitum” aspect of an economic “video game” (loosely applied) referencing this blog which is about video game economics, which now also references that economic video game, which references this blog, and so on.

If you’ve been following along you might wonder if the “play money” at blogshares is being sold for real money? Of course I checked, and of course it has been! While I didn’t find anything on eBay, there was a sale at “The Crazy Swede’s B$ and Chip Store” for various amounts of blogshare $ and “chips.” (FYI - I got an “Access Forbidden” message when I tried to directly access the TCS store, so do a search on Google and click on the “Cached” link to see for yourself). These chips are an interesting story in themselves. They do not count towards the blogshares player’s score (B$), but are a form of intermediate currency which players offer and exchange among themselves as compensation for real world tasks, traded for blogshare financial instruments (e.g. bonds) or be used to execute various strategies, such as advertising, in the blogshares game. Carl’s chip prices ran about $0.27 per 100, making them pretty valuable relative to many MMORPG currencies. The value of B$ are much lower than the chips, at $0.08-$0.10 per BILLION.

But wait, it gets even more interesting… The Crazy Swede has an interesting way of paying. After a player send TCS real money, he buys one share of a stock that the purchasing player is selling on blogshares for the amount of B$ that the player purchased. So, if you are in blogshares selling shares of vconomics.blogspot.com stock and you send TCS $7.95 through PayPal along with your blogshares ID, he will buy one share of vconomics.blogspot.com from you for 100 Billion B$.

Okay, if I think about this too much I’m gonna get freaked out, so lets stop here and you let that sink in. Meanwhile, I’m gonna go register at blogshares.