AlanBarber.Org
Friday, December 12, 2003
BlogShares is back!
Hey good news, maybe. It appears that BlogShares, the stock market game that uses blogs as companies to trade, is back from the grave. Apparently It's still in limbo right now though. The new owners have the site back up running but it's still running as bad as it did when it got shut down. Plus not everything is working yet. The forums for example are still down.It's nice to see BlogShares get a second change. However I'm not sure If I'll start playing again. At first it was fun to play but the game was too artificial. The stock prices followed preset tracks and regardless of a blog once listed the stock price would go from 20cents a share to almost 40 dollars a share within about a week. So there was little fun in playing the market. Of course that was new blogs that no one bothered with. If you trying buying and selling in popular ones the price would fluctuate so wildly share prices could go from 50 dollars to 10,000 dollars to 10 dollars within a single day. The market really became stagnate and so the site operators created a whole new system known as Ideas and Artifacts. Based on number of incoming links to blog within an industry (category of the blog) the industry would produce these Ideas every so often. You could buy these ideas and when you had 10,000 ideas turn it into an Artifact. The artifact gave you special abilities such as causing a stock price to rise (hype it) or fall (public relations disaster).
The idea market become what the game was all about. Depending on number of Ideas produced and number of blogs in an industry the Idea prices could vary wildly. It became a competition for the top few players to fight over getting cheap Ideas and then waiting a day or two in hopes the price would skyrocket and sell the ideas. It was very possible for a person to turn a hundred thousand into a billion in short order. The problems came when the owner of the site created the ability for people to write applications to play the game. More people used automated tools to buy and sell than visit the website. Within about a months time the site became completely unusable. WebPages would take 2-3 minutes to load if they did load. It just got to the point where it wasn't fun anymore. It became work just to play.
Then one day the site crashed bad. The database just exploded. It was the second or third time it had happened. The site was down for several days before a message finally showed up and said BlogShares was dead. Well it's been a few weeks and it appears that some small web development company called Santa Cruz Tech has taken control of the site. I'll be keeping an eye on it. However, I really don't think I'll start playing again. So once they're up full steam if you're a player look me up and maybe I'll give you some free stock or something. I'm known as AB Investments, Ltd. and worth a little over 21 billion.
AB Investments, Ltd. (the owner of AlanBarber.Org)
on 12/12/2003 at 04:27 PM