I have found yet another addiction, and that is playing a free “fantasy blog share market” game called [1] Blogshares. It is a cleverly designed game that allows me to buy, sell and trade shares in all the available blogs out there on the internet just like a real life corporation. Within this game, you will start with B$500 in cash to trade and all blogs (including your own) are treated like tradable corporations with a total of 5000 initial stock, 4000 of which can be bought by the public and 1000 of which is “privately” owned by the actual blog owner. Blog corporations are categorized in “Industries”. Simply put, an Industry relates to the topic of your blog e.g. if you have a personal blog about life, it will be put into the “Personal Life” Industry. The game spiders every blog on the internet using [2] Weblogs.com (a [3] Verisign owned company that is a blog directory/ repository). So if you have been blogging long enough, chances are that your blog has probably been indexed by them and is “tradable” on the Blogshare Market.

There are many facets to the game and it’s pretty challenging, which is why I like it. The realism of the game to a “real stock market” and a publicly traded company is uncanny i.e. stock price fluctuations with buying and selling, stock price increase of a company due to company news, stockholder pressures, P/E ratios, company valuations etc. Your company worth/ stock price is valued by the number of incoming and outgoing links to your blog and the amount of stock assets you have bought/ sold. The objective is clear, to make as much money as you can. The best thing about it is that if you really lose money or you are really bad at the stock trading thingy, you won’t be losing REAL money - just Blogshare B$ and your reputation ;-).

Along the way for the Quest for Eternal Richness and a Top 1000 [1] Blogshares “Richest People” rank - if you have enough, you can try to exchange your fantasy money for “perks” like blog advertisements in the form of “press releases” on the blogshare website and some “real life” services e.g. I have seen some that have offered $31 billion Blogshare dollars (B$) to do a C to C++ conversion.

I have since setup my own company called The Foo Logs Inc. and have bought a lot of other company stocks including those of my blog friends. There are many “hardcore” players out there that have been playing for years, and was just amazed to find out that some of those guys have accumulated a blogshare net worth of more than a trillion dollars.

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