I had hoped when I read the original post about the death of BlogShares that the site would return one day, I just had no idea it would be this damned quick. The front of BlogShares currently reads that a person by the name of Jay Campbell has acquired the rights to the site and code from Seyed, and over the last few days us folks in #blogshares have watched as Jay and his group have worked to bring the site back from nearly all parts of the DB corrupted to what I am told is the expected full relaunch within a day, likely within 12 hours. The code, i am told, is mostly there, except the forums and the Strategy Blog are lost to the memories of those who read and participated. I am happy to see a group so knowledgeable take the helm from the founder, and can't wait to play.
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I went to BlogShares a moment ago, and found an unkind, but not unexpected message. The beginning, I guess, says it all. Read the more for the complete text(for posterity sake) and remember that for a time this game was the funnest thing for a lot of people. I met some great friends through it, and will fondly remember what Seyed did, this experiment he tried on the whole of the Internet, and hope that one day I shall find another free game that will introduce me to so many excellent people, those who I would trust the advice of beyond most others, and who I would trust me deepest worries and thoughts to. If I am forced to list the things I have lost or gained from this game, memories and friends are those which I have gained, and time is all I lost, and it was time well spent.
Ok, so it took 2 gifts of a billion each to get here, but I am finally enjoying the game. I am not struggling to afford the playing style I enjoy, and I am actually not seeing myself falling behind the big players due to my limitations on transaction. You see, I discovered after those gifts that idea purchases, where the really big money is made these days, are not limited in transactions, nor do they count toward the normal transaction limit, so I can buy as much as I want. Now, if I weren't competing with dozens of others, I would be a fair bit happier, but I still manage to snag a few ideas here and there, and with 1.9 Billion in cash holdings, and 3 or so Billion in worth, I can afford to buy as I wish, in fact I am nearing the ability to make 3 or 4 artefacts, though I am not sure I will.
Ok, I have ranted before about the introduction of Artefacts and Ideas into BlogShares. They were meant as a way for rich players getting bored to use their money. Ever since day 1 most of the smaller non premium players have been getting screwed by the transaction limits and use of artefacts at times when players cannot take advantage, and the use of other ones that end up screwing the smaller players. Many of the rich excuse the use by saying smaller players do benefit, but as a smaller player, they have only hurt me. Even when a rich player does something, I got screwed due to server issues. I know that at 2 or 3 K a day gain, I will continue to lose without becoming premium, which I simply cannot afford. The rich snobs whined so much the owner has pretty much given up on improving the game. I think I see why good idea's die in blogland.
Ok, over the last few weeks, I have had 5 blogs go LBO on me. All of them had major stock splits and reverse stock splits happen just before. The current instance is of A Journey of Faith and Life whose owner in the span of 11 minutes did 6 splits and 4 reverses starting at 13:36 server time. In More I show the most recent price alterations. The LBO happened at 13:37. I am not sure if this is a code bug, or simply people screwing over the system, but at the beginning of this I had 18000 shares @ 1.58, at the end I had 100 shares @ .01. I would suggest a select group of users have found a way to mess with price by doing a certain order or number of transactions, meant to lower the price to a reasonable one at which to do an LBO. 5 blogs, all of them multi hundred dollar before the play, all worthless after. Hardly fair.
Ok, so it's been awhile since I did one of these. First up, I am currently at 18 million blog bucks, spread between 236 blogs. Second, I wanted to point out a few press releases that players might have missed. BlogShares Strategy is offering 100 blog bucks for any incoming links, up to 47 people. GeekNews Central is also offering a chunk of shares for those who provide links, but this time it needs to be through Blogrolling.com. As well, many news tools have been brought forth, and many are being looked at on the testing group's side of things. If you are not part of the game, why not go and check it out?
Well, the reset of the game is around 36 hours or so away, s the server is in Britain or somewhere like that, so if u have high value holdings, sell them quick, because they will simply be removed, to be replaced with a lost, empty feeling in the end, and all that will be left will be your cash. I have squirreled away cash in the amount of about $21,000, which will, I hope, allow me to buy out a majority of my blog. Right now the price sits at 79 cents, and I hope by everyone selling to Seyed, I am able to keep it there until the game resets, which means all the post reset buying will only increase my share value. I don;t truly expect to hit the multi dollar values that Chris seems to have achieved doing nothing new at all, but I do want to see the price over $1 again.
Well, unfortunately Seyed's attempt to save share prices, by having his player buy stocks at a set rate, has failed in the case of Geek Blog shares. Sadly, it appears one major holder, or several of them, sold shares to the tune of 3000 or so, driving the price down almost 30 cents to 51 cents per share. Thankfully, there are now almost 4000 shares available, which I am considering purchasing in order to drive the stock up a significant deal. I have, though, been selling off many of my holdings, all that are over 20 cents, in order to attempt to set aside good amounts of funds for the site going live in around a week. The good thing is that it looks possible that I may have somewhere near $11,000 at the opening of the non beta round. Time to hurry up and wait for my next transaction.
"When the site goes live all shares in your portfolio will be deleted as will your transaction history for the beta period. You will only take your cash balance forward. Blogs will have their shares reset to the original 5000 and you will receive 1000 shares in every blog you've claimed ownership of. So be sure to sell your stock early. There will be a limit on the number of buys players can make in the first 12 hours of the game to ensure there are plenty of investment opportunities for everybody." That is from Seyed, owner of BlogShares, who is likely starting off a market crash, with everyone selling all their shares off and as you see the price drop, it is not hard at all to imagine that the market can quickly go into a nose dive.
Therefore, you will note on the side you see my portfolio shows at around $5K. This does not include the $5K I have in cash that I am trying to put aside for the reset, in case things happen that prevent me from cashing in the rest of my big holdings. I am not sure if the bots are still out there crawling, but I hope they are because I have a lot of holdings that are worthless, but have the potential once the valuations are fixed. I suspect, though, that a lot of sites will drop to almost nothing, thus making them even more worthwhile when the site picks up. Sadly, the first 12 hours after reset will see limited buying, so one, like me, needs to be very careful what I buy with future increases in mind. Either way, 7 days of a stock market roller-coaster on BlogShares is ahead. Let's Ride!
Ok, well, I have looked into this a little, and the code on the right is good, but for some reason it shows my blog value at 0 and my portfolio at same. I have looked into the code, but I am not sure what was writing what, and why it is not showing up anymore. So, I will assure you I am not like Mr. Sims, who made a million bucks and had it all taken away, it seems, in a BSEC complaint that claims he was a really bad man. My current portfolio is at almost $9,000, while my blog is currently valued at $0.82. The current available shares is at XXX, while the largest shareholder is me. I own tens of thousands of shares, all of which I hope go up at least a little by the time account resets are done on the 1st, a little over a week away. Sadly the site's accessibility is still too sporadic.
Ok, while I plan to keep managing my portfolio on B$, there have been some rather heated arguments on the BSJ staff forum as of late, and I feel it wise to simply calm down, take a step back, do some work on the Pirillo interview to get it ready for posting to the site for real editorial review instead of simply asking, as I have now, what questions I should keep in, and what I should take out. It is 10 pages long right now, and it needs a serious trim down, as I doubt anyone could seriously be expected to read a 10 page Q&A, even if it was with their childhood hero. 10 pages is too long. I have begun to arrange the randomly asked questions into sections, and now I need to make them make sense from one question to another. This was my first interview, and it shows right now.
43 Blogs. 25661 shares. Average of 596 shares held per blog. Most shares for a blog: Loquacious - 2900. Least shares held for a blog: Blogrolling News - 6. Total Portfolio - $4560.1. Days in game: not nearly enough.
Yeah, I have been having a lot of fun with BlogShares, so much so that I have signed up for the new blog Street Journal(play on The Wall Street Journal), which has about 20 staff at this point. I am interviewing Chris for the first issue, which is planned to be 'out'(not sure what that means, exactly) on the 1st of May, the same day the site goes fully live. I will really regret when I have to sell off all of my stocks on the 30th, and I just hope that the market does not tank too bad, and that the site's current issues of becoming unreachable(at least for some) every hour or so does not hurt the users too much when everyone starts selling high. Perhaps a freeze on prices for the last day before it goes live would be wise to prevent a complete crash of the market. Yeah, I am addicted.
With this forum post, the idea of BlogShares own rag, the Blog Street Journal, was born, and your truly has signed up to be a writer. I plan to do reviews of popular and lesser known blogs, and hopefully interviews with others like Matt, Jim, Mike, Andrew, Doc, Dave Winer, Ev, and the many others who are major framers of my Blogosphere. Doc and Dave began my blogging trip that is getting ever nearer to the 2 year mark, and Ev's tool was my first tool, so interviewing them would be amazing, and I would love to bring a bit of traffic to those who I consider my closest friends, as well as other big name and small time bloggers. This is something to look forward to, without a doubt.
You know a topic is big when it has it's own category, eh? Well, let's see. I am sitting here, staring temptingly at the scrolling ticker on the Blog Shares site, waiting for the counter on my transactions to not be maxed out at 21. You see, Sayed, the glorious owner of the site, has limited us players to no more than 20 or so transactions per 24 hour period, and I tell you, I see why. I have found it easy to make decent cash by buying low value blogs, like a penny or two, and just siting on them until they are in the 20-40 cent range, thus making really good money for almost no cost. If I buy 1000 of a blog priced at a quarter of a cent, and sell when it hit's 20 cents, I have made $200 off an investment of $2.5. Yeah, I have made about $750 by doing this, and would be doing it more if it weren't for a lack of available transactions.
In other news, Sayed has announced he is going to be launching the site live on the 1st, so all stocks much be cleared at the time for all you keep is cash, and your blog if claimed. That should really shake up some of the stock valuations. As well, I have finally added the MT Blogshares Plugin from David Raynes, which not only shows a blog price, but also the portfolio value, all of which you can see just below the BlogShares button. I have not yet instituted the ticker that I downloaded, as I have yet to find a suitable instruction set on how to get it running.
The code looks nice, don't get me wrong, but I have no experience with PHP, and that which I do have amounts to installing stuff using PHP myAdmin, which this does not seem to need. Anyone who know what I have to do, please let me know. I want to get it running, for myself and all of you, but the creator, wise as he may have been, has failed to include the usual readme, and without it I, and many others I know, are completely lost. Once someone explains it to me, I would happily write a readme in english for it so all of the downloaders know how to install it. Sayed let me know he uses a different version of the ticker, seemingly showing the blogs with recent price changes, which I would like here. I would also like a list of all blogs, or a index by letter, of the trading blogs.
Ok, so I am in love with this game. I have found many stocks that totally rock, and a few that cost almost nothing, and have the potential to be great money makers. I even found a couple that are priced at $0. While I have not yet found a piece of code to show my current portfolio, Seyed has brought out a few changes to the portfolio, such as RSS feeds for the portfolio(mine), as well as showing the total value including stocks and cash, on the portfolio front page. I currently own shares in 23 blogs, a total of 7560 between them all, a total portfolio of $1146.94, and total worth $1147.10. The best thing? It could change in a minute.
As soon as I noticed that the owner of BlogShares had formally announced the gift option in the daily update, my nefarious mind came up with at least one way to exploit it, and I proceeded to test this by creating a new account and buying some fairly valuable stocks, then transferring them all to my main account, bringing it down to 2 cents remaining. I then, after confirming the attempt was successful, I emailed the owner who got back to me in the morning and told me he was monitoring it closely, and advising me to gift those benefits to other deserving bloggers, giving to those like the owner of Drawing the Button, who's blog is highly undervalued, and others who's blogs are not publicly traded yet. It is good to know we are being monitored, though, so cheating is prevented.
Ok, so yesterday I joined BlogShares, a site where one can buy and trade shares of blogs(no, you cannot own any blog but your own), and I have found it quite helpful. I have also noticed the number of scripts that integrate the data from that site to your own blog has increased, but in the 2 weeks or so that the game has been going I still do not see a way to have your current holdings listed on your blog. I see not one but two script for listing your own blog price on the blog itself, one with MT blogs and one that does not have a destined blog tool.
While my blog is not really high priced, only $0.16 right now(up one cent from earlier), I do plan to post almost a dozen entries that I have been lax on, and plan to try my best to avoid a class action suit through the site(yes, I said a class action, I think mock, suit from shareholders to blog owner). I do not know if anyone else has bought my shares(Matty G did, and Chris Baldrey from Drawing the Button, a new found reader of this blog), but it is certainly a fun game. I am looking toward a redesign right now, and when I launch that, I hope my price will go up a fair bit. I will also have the Blog Shares stuff listed on here then. In the meantime, click here to buy my shares, and support my site! Enjoy!
I like to blog, and I love share trading games, and Blog Shares is a new that combines both. They tell me I need to post the button at right 
in order to get 1000 shares in my own blog(I'll move it when I do a redesign), and hopefully being a good blogger, and being added by some of you, I can gain in popularity. If you want to buy shares in my site, it is currently valued at $75 or so, though the share price when you can buy is yet unknown, but it will surely be quite a deal when you see blogs like the Pirillo's who are valued in the thousands, and others valued in the tens of thousands. So, come play with me and a few hundred, or thousand, other bloggers, and let's see if we can get up there.
