Ok, I promised to try and explain Blogshares. Here's the simple explanation: It's a stock market simulation based on blogs, with shares of a blog valued by the number of links to that blog from other listed blogs. If you understand the basic concepts of the stock market, you can play blogshares.
As a player, you can buy shares in a blog and sell them. You can place market orders in a blog that you are interested in, and sell orders when you want to sell stock in a blog for something different than the market price.
That's the simple explanation. Because it's a simulation, things get different from the real world fast. First thing to remember is that it's a game, and therefore people are not investing real money. But getting lots of B$'s is an accomplishment, and can be fun if you play it right. It's also a great way to kill time when you have massive sunburned-induced insomnia.
The system works by indexing blogs like a search engine. Blogs are listed when people put them into the system, and then the blogs are frequently spidered by bots to find out who is linking to them. The more links to a blog, the more valuable it is. It also works like many of the popular blog listings, in that you can see who a blog is linking to, and what popular blogs are linking to it. I've now found a couple of links to my blog through blogshares, although the links to my blog are somewhat pathetic by blogshares standards. Heh. Unfortunately, the spider does miss blogs, as I'm still not linked to Elayne's blog for some reason.
If you go to the listing of a blog, like here, you will see several categories.
The first category is "General" and has the basics about the blog. The URL, the Value, when it was Added, the Status, the Owner (if available), and the Industries the blog belongs to (more on that later). If you have registered for the game and are logged in, you'll also get a couple of boxes with the public status, including the likelihood of you buying any stock in this blog.
The next important category is "Statistics" and the only real important number there is the number of Incoming Links. The higher the number, the more valuable the blog. For instance, compare the value of technorati to my blog. Ouch.
Moving on, the "Share Market" category is the most important for you if you want to buy, because you can find out how many shares are owned by the public (thus easy to buy) by looking at the Public Held Shares. Right under that is the Price of each share. So if it says "2000" in Public Held Shares, and "$49.17" in Price, you could buy up to 2000 shares for $49.17 each. Simple, eh?
Underneath that is a bunch of other stuff, but if you are just getting started, you don't want to mess with that. To start, you want to only buy public shares if you can.
Whew. That's enough for tonight. Look for part two sometime tomorrow. "How to get enough seed money to really have fun".
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