I thought blogshares would be more interesting than it is. (BlogShares is a fantasy stock market where web logs are the companies. Players invest fictional dollars on shares in blogs. Blogs are valued by their incoming links and add value to other blogs by linking to them. Prices can go up or down based on trading and the underlying value of the blog.) The site is very slow… almost to the point of not being playable. I’ll give it a few days, and see if it shifts in any direction, one way or the other.

I’m ranked as the 9th top player for august 2003 so far. (Scott von Berg 20726.49% growth -Rank: 4208, $104,132.43 current worth / $500.00 start of month)

As it stands now, I’ve only invested in my own… when you register your blog, you get 1000 shares of your own journal, but maybe I’ll expand outward to folks on my reading list as well. Starting with $500 virtual dollars, and the stock value of my site, my portfolio is worth $104,271.60 I set up a goofy little RSS feed (scotto_shares) that’ll tell me when / how the share value fluctuates. Oddly, since my journal can be accessed in three distinctly different links, via http://scottobear.livejournal.com, http://www.livejournal.com/~scottobear and http://www.livejournal.com/users/scottobear, it’s valued in three different ways, depending on investments. s.l.com is currently worth $49.91 each – 249.52 p/e, ~ is worth $34.42 each -172.10 p/e, and users is $19.62 each – 98.03 p/e

Looking at things, I see that chrishaas has already placed a bid on the most expensive of the available shares, but at no profit to me. He’d stand a greater chance of profit by bidding on public shares in the “users or ~” version. For simplicity of bidding, I’ve made those mentioned in this paragraph as direct links to the respective blogshares. If you want to play, I recommend the one that’s going for $19.62 each, rather than the $49.91. (Less than half price, with growth potential. I think the middle one “users” has the most growth possibility, because that’s the default listing.)

Other folks listed on blogshares that I might look into investing in (- (typed in to the search, many on my list haven’t been listed I’m tempted to post my reading list here, so that they get spidered) edbook (here), flying_blind (here), meredith (here), sweetalyssm (here) and tarpo (here). If anyone else sets up an account, or ends up on blogshares, let me know, so I can invest. 🙂 The above listings were spidered (many from my journal, I’d imagine), and aren’t officially “on the market” yet.

Of course, totally private or friends only-blogs aren’t tradable, nor are “non-indexed sites” as there’s nothing for the public to link to or track. Communities also seem to be out of the action, which is a shame, because I imagine the would do well. Also, Weblogs.com has to be active in your userinfo, I think.

Regarding the Vampire game… they’ve added a new element. Peacekeepers. There are flyers pasted up on many walls in the city, advertising “Peacekeepers Missions”. There are very small quite useless maps scrawled on the poorly photocopies scraps of paper, but the addresses are quite clear – the newbie mission is at Emerald and 67th, while the others are at Unicorn and 33rd and Emerald and 33rd respectively. It looks like ‘mission’ is used in the sense of a building, rather than the sense of a quest, but it’s not very clear at all.

The Expedition Company… seems normal enough for vacations and getaways until you get to the part about the hollow earth expedition.

Nifty sounding drink that I’ve never consumed – Dead Lizard