Blogshares
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What is BlogShares?
BlogShares is a simulated, fantasy stock market for weblogs where players invest fictional money to buy stocks and bonds in an artificial economy. Weblogs are the companies, producing commodities called 'Ideas'. Created in 2003 by Seyed Razavi, the game suffered a near-fatal crash in late 2003, only to be salvaged by Jay Campbell of Santa Cruz Tech, with much assistance from player/codemonkey Suburban Wolf. Today, the game has thousands of active members, tracking well over 2 million blogs.
How does it work?
Weblogs, or blogs for short, are valued by their incoming links from other known blogs. In effect, links become the business deals in the simulation and players speculate on the fortunes of thousands of blogs by buying and selling shares. A whole host of options exist for advanced play including gifting shares, leveraged buy-outs, artefact building and usage, additional share issues, ideas market and player bonds. Extensive documentation is available in the BlogShares Help system (http://blogshares.com/help.php). The BlogShares community extends across on-site messaging, forum (http://blogshares.com/yabbse/index.php), IRC channel, and is furthered by a friendly player base and administrators.
Gameplay Objects
This section contains a description of several objects used in gameplay.
Industries
Industries in BlogShares are the same as categories. Ideas are produced when blogs (which have been voted into categories by players) are reindexed. Essentially commodities, Ideas are produced regularly throughout every day in most of the over 2300 categories. Current gameplay finds Ideas the investment of choice for veteran players. They are also the product used to create the main gameplay tool, Artefacts.
Industries are added often, dictated by the dynamic emerging content of blogs. Some new industries have captured the booming NeoPets site, a slew of ailments and illnesses, and hundreds of cities and countries. Players can suggest new Industries and build up existing ones by voting blogs into correct categories.
Artefacts
Artefacts are tools in the BlogShares universe. They have six functions that can affect blogs and one that affects ideas. Artifacts alone have no value, and do not contribute to overall net worth, but can be used to influence the player's wealth. Artefacts are only usable on blogs that have been voted into the artefact's specific industry.
How to create an artefact
To create an artefact... To do
Currency
BlogShares has two main currencies.
B$
The functional currency used in BlogShares is B$. There's no standard as to its meaning: "BlogShares dollars", "blog dollars" or "bloggars" can be used. B$ is the currency used to purchase shares in blogs, ideas in industries or can be traded among players. The B$ has no real-life value supported by Santa Cruz Tech.
Chips
The "social currency" of BlogShares is chips. Chips is supposedly an allusion to poker chips. Chips can be earned in a number of ways, among them by answering a survey with a limited supply of questions, being gifted chips by another player or receiving incoming referral links. Chips can then be used to participate in raffles, which usually are worth real-life prizes, or used to buy advertisement space on the front page, or gifted to other players.
Rules, Rule Enforcement & Cheaters
BlogShares has a strong rule-enforcing department, the BSEC (http://www.blogshares.com/roles.php#bsec) - Blogshares Securities & Exchange Commission. The BSEC is made up of several moderators that detect cases of cheating and deliberate what and how the punishment should be administrated. Cheaters at BlogShares are known as CHEATYPANTS.
External links
- BlogShares Homepage (http://www.blogshares.com/)
- BSEC @ BlogShares.com (http://www.blogshares.com/roles.php#bsec)