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BlogShares is a simulated, fantasy stock market for weblogs where players invest fictional money to buy stocks in an artificial economy. Weblogs are the companies, issuing shares and producing commodities called 'Ideas'. Created in 2003 by Seyed Razavi, the game suffered a near-fatal crash later that same year and was resurrected only after Jay Campbell of Santa Cruz Tech purchased the original code. Today, the game has thousands of active members, tracking well over 7.2 million blogs and 6.1 million links between them (as of January, 2007). BlogShares relies heavily on volunteers for most game support and development, and offers many opportunities for interested and active players to help build and maintain the site. A stock market is a market for the trading of company stock, and derivatives of same; both of these are securities listed on a stock exchange as well as those only traded privately. ...
A weblog (now more commonly known as a blog) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally, but not always, in reverse chronological order). ...
Economics offers various definitions for money, though it is now commonly defined as any good or token that functions as a medium of exchange that is socially and legally accepted in payment for goods and services and in settlement of debts. ...
It has been suggested that shareholder be merged into this article or section. ...
A company in the broadest sense is an aggregation of people who stay together for a common purpose. ...
The word commodity has a different meaning in business than in Marxian political economy. ...
2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
A crash in computing is a condition where a program (either an application or part of the operating system) stops performing its expected function and also stops responding to other parts of the system. ...
Gameplay
Weblogs, or blogs for short, are valued by their incoming links from other known blogs. In effect, links become the business deals in the simulation and players speculate on the fortunes of thousands of blogs by buying and selling shares. A whole host of options exist for advanced play including gifting shares, leveraged buy-outs, artefact building and usage, additional share issues, ideas market, player bonds, voting blogs into categories, and reporting spam or dead listings. Extensive documentation is available in the BlogShares Help system. The BlogShares community extends across on-site messaging, forum, IRC channel, and numerous unofficial BlogShares-related blogs and sites maintained by players. Wall Street, Manhattan is the location of the New York Stock Exchange and is often used as a symbol for the world of business. ...
Wooden mechanical horse simulator during WWI. A simulation is an imitation of some real thing, state of affairs, or process. ...
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of real-time Internet chat or synchronous conferencing. ...
Playing Blogs The most basic objective of the game is to trade virtual shares in listed blogs. Each blog is automatically set to issue 5,000 shares, 1,000 of which are reserved for the blogger who actually authors the blog. Players can buy or sell shares from each blog's page in the game, and can manipulate prices through trading and Artifact functions. The basic advice of 'buy low, sell high' applies. Through other Artefact functions, players can forcibly take some shares in the blog from current holders (known as a 'Restructure') or grab all shares (known as a 'Hostile Takeover' or HTO), though paying three times the current price per share to do so.
Industries and Ideas Industries in BlogShares are the same as categories. Ideas are produced when blogs (which have been voted into categories by players) are reindexed. Essentially commodities, Ideas are produced every 15-30 minutes in many of the 6500+ Industries. Ideas production is based on a mathematical algorithm that takes various factors and variables into account to determine the number of Ideas to 'drop' on the market. The algorithm behind Ideas production changed from the original code as rescued, to an algorithm developed by game player Alan Dean on September 13, 2004.. The algorithm worked partially as intended, but created a market where prices continually inflated and rarely fell. On the plus side, Ideas became a long-term investment of choice for veteran players, with little volatility or risk. On the downside, free cash within the game over time became completely consumed by the Ideas market as players became more and more invested. See also the category disambiguation page. ...
In mathematics, computing, linguistics, and related disciplines, an algorithm is a procedure (a finite set of well-defined instructions) for accomplishing some task which, given an initial state, will terminate in a defined end-state. ...
Invest redirects here. ...
Volatility most frequently refers to the standard deviation of the change in value of a financial instrument with a specific time horizon. ...
For other uses, see Risk (disambiguation). ...
This situation was temporarily resolved by "Black Friday" (November 25, 2005) which saw the BlogShares Currency re-valued on a 1:10,000 ratio; The Ideas market lost approximately 99% of its value but due to the uniform revaluation, no player lost their game ranking. While the revaluation and associated market crash alleviated the growth problem in the short term, it did not address the underlying cause. Over time, the market would consume all free cash once again.
Since Black Friday, a new algorithm was worked on and improved upon to solve the flaws of the previous implementation. The new math was eventually ratified by the Board of Directors and the Game Improvement Commission and, after much testing, was switched over August 21, 2006. Although too early to analyze the impact of the change fully, initial indications are good.
Apart from increasing wealth, Ideas are also the product used to create the main gameplay tool, Artefacts. The composite rankings also consider how many unique Industries a player holds Ideas for, leading many players to attempt to own at least 1 Idea in as many Industries as possible. This is also known as 'Collecting', and the players known as 'Collectors'.
New Industries are added often, dictated by the dynamic emerging content of blogs. Some recent additions have captured the booming NeoPets site, a slew of ailments and illnesses, and hundreds of cities and countries. Players can suggest new Industries and build up existing ones by voting blogs into correct categories. Neopets is an online virtual pet game. ...
Illness can be a synonym for disease or it can be a persons perception of having poor health. ...
Composite Rankings In April 2006, a new scoring system was implemented which awards points based on player rankings in six categories: Wealth, Artefacts, Chips, Industry Ideas, Karma, and Sigma. The top 100 players in each category are awarded points based on the formula: Points = 101 - Rank. A player ranked #1 in Wealth would receive 100 points for that category, and #100 would gain 1 point. Only the Top 100 in each category are considered, and a player who does not rank receives zero points for the category. The composite score is the total of all six categories for each player, which then determines the overall composite ranking. A player ranked #1 in all six categories would have the maximum of 600 points. Rankings are recalculated every hour.
Artefacts Artefacts are tools in the BlogShares universe. They have six functions that can affect blogs and one that affects ideas. Artefacts alone have no value, and do not contribute to overall net worth, but can be used to influence the player's wealth by raising share prices of blogs. Artefacts are only usable on blogs that have been voted into the artefact's specific industry. To create an artefact, a player must have 10,000 idea commodities in the artefact's industry. For composite rankings, the total number of Artefacts are counted for each player.
Voting and Moderating Players can categorize blogs based on the content they find. For example, a blog written in Swedish by a woman in Kenya which frequently includes discussions of cats and birds could be correctly voted into the Swedish, Kenya, Female, Cats, Birds, and Animals / Pets Industries. Descriptions are available for Industries so that voters can readily understand what content is expected for a vote to be correctly placed.
Moderators can pull up slates of ten votes and check them for correctness. Upon approval or rejection, the original voter is either rewarded or penalized both karma and chips based on the moderator's decision. Because of this power over the success or failure of others, players can only become a Moderator by first achieving a karma level of 750.
Karma Players receive Karma for correctly voting blogs into categories. Each moderator-approved vote yields the voter 1 karma (as well as 5-40 chips depending on specificity of the vote). Moderators also receive Karma (and chips), gaining 1 karma point for each vote moderated (and 25 chips).
Sigma Introduced in April 2006, Sigma is awarded whenever a player's report of a spam blog (splog), dead listing, or non-blog is used to remove a listing from the game. Sigma is awarded at the rate of 1 per report, which also gives the player 20 chips. Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, are weblog sites which the author uses only for promoting affiliated websites. ...
Currencies BlogShares has two main currencies.
B$ The functional currency used in BlogShares is B$. The long form of this is referred to as 'BlogShares Dollars' or 'BlogDollars'. B$ is the currency used to purchase shares in blogs, ideas in industries, or can be traded among players. The B$ has no real-life value supported by Santa Cruz Tech.
Chips The "social currency" of BlogShares is chips. They can be earned in a number of ways, among them by categorizing blogs (voting), answering quick survey questions, being gifted chips by another player or receiving incoming referral links. Chips can then be used to participate in raffles, which can be real-life prizes, services, or game assets, might be used to buy advertisement space on the front page, or can gifted to other players. A raffle is a competition in which people buy numbered tickets. ...
Rules and Enforcement There are numerous rules players must follow in the game. Three frequently broken rules deal with the number of accounts, poor voting/moderating, and usage of unapproved scripts. Only one account may be created per player. Any automated off-site tools, such as a bot or page scraper, must be approved by game administration prior to any use. Players are expected to read and understand all game rules. It's usually a good idea for new players [noobs] to ingratiate themselves with the Index Managers and members of the BSEC. Look up bot in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
Screen scraping is a technique in which a computer program extracts text data from the display output of another program, ignoring all binary data (usually images or multimedia data). ...
BlogShares has a powerful rule-enforcing department, the BSEC - Blogshares Securities & Exchange Commission. The BSEC is made up of several volunteer players who pursue cases of cheating, investigate, and hold deliberations to determine guilt and if necessary, punishment. The BSEC has the right to suspend players from the game, fine or penalize game assets, or recommend other administrative punishment. The BSEC has at times been accused of using their position to persecute players they dislike, but it should be noted even these cases involved actions deemed to be in violation of game rules. Further, the game's administration reserves the right to ammend or overturn any BSEC decisions. Game Administrators might take any means necessary to protect the game, its servers, and other players.
Anyone caught breaking rules at BlogShares is known as a Cheatypants.
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