It's a good thing I'm not studying to be a stock analyst or financial
planner. I know it's not the same thing as the real stock market,
but I took a virtual bath today on BlogShares.com., selling and then
buying, of all things, pretend shares of John Scalzi's non-AOL blog, Whatever.
It started right after Christmas, when a stranger, one M. Emin Gonal, "gifted" me with shares of a blog called Bilgiler,
a Turkish blog that apparently has something to do with
libraries. And autobiographical memoirs. I'm just taking
BlogShares' word for what it is, really. I can't read the
thing. But when the blog's owner did a Leveraged Buy Out (LBO) a
few days later, I had lots of lovely BlogDollars (B$) or whatever
they're called. I invested in Whatever,
because I like and respect it, and because it has lots of inbound links
(including mine), which translates on BlogShares as value. It was
also very highly priced, and one person (NOT Scalzi) owned most of the
BlogShares. Right after I bought my silly 20 shares or whatever
it was, the other guy bought the rest of what was available, and the
value of my shares doubled or something. Woo-hoo!So I watched it and did nothing. This morning, the guy who owned the rest of the shares sold them all, presumably making money. I was down to around B$400 at the time, so I foolishly sold my shares, taking the smaller profit than if I'd sold before the other guy pulled out. Then, regretting this, I bought a few shares tonight--and the price dropped again. It was supposed to go up! I think. I don't really get how this is supposed to work. Can you tell?
Now, this probably all sounds pretty obscure and meaningless and boring, but I've finally reached the part of this entry in which I actually have a point to make. If Whatever, with its 309 links from 283 sources (according to Technorati), is worth over B$59,000, how much do you suppose Scalzi's flagship AOL Journal, By the Way, with its 665 links from 532 sources, is worth on BlogShares?
Nothin'. It's not listed. Neither are any of the other AOL Journals I link to--at least, none of the ones I've checked. Shelly's non-AOL blogs are there. Jeff's BlogSpot one is there. But there's no By the Way, no Ellipsis, no Interactive Haiku or Where Life Takes You or Jersey Girl or other fine and popular AOL Journals I could list here, except that this sentence is too long already and that that's what the Other Journals box is for.
BlogShares
has zillions of BlogSpot blogs listed, along with blogs on many other
blogging services, including a few here and there on LiveJournal.
Weblogs.com fuels the BlogShares engine. But when I first found
BlogShares, the only one of the five blogs I maintain that wasn't
listed (in some cases in duplicate!) was this one, Musings. My main blog. Apparently, BlogShares doesn't know anything from AOL-J Land exists unless the person who writes it registers with BlogShares and tells them about it. Even then, it takes a couple of weeks for it to get fully indexed into the system. Without all those AOL Journals, BlogShares doesn't know how popular Who Cares What I Think! or Alphawoman's Blog or Aurora Walking Vacation is. A major quadrant of the Blogosphere is neglected, invisible.
I say we should change that.
If
you have a journal on AOL or LiveJournal that isn't listed on
BlogShares, you can register your site with them. It
won't cost you any real world money, it's another avenue for finding
new readers, and you may have fun messing around on the site.
Maybe if enough AOL-Jers do this, the BlogShares programmers will
finally notice us, and take steps to make their spider include AOL
Journals as a matter of course. Everybody wins. Well,
unless we crash their servers or something, which seems unlikely.
Oh, you also get B$500 to play with, and 1000 free shares in each of
your own blogs. The catch is that you have to "claim" them, which
involves running the BlogShares logo in your journal. If you
don't want to do that, then never mind. Meanwhile, I'm promoting my other blogs on BlogShares. The following ad, running now on their site, cost me 100 "chips," which I earned mostly by showing up (and taking a couple of anonymous surveys):
Quantum Uncertainty
Playing in Schrödinger’s
catbox, JW is neither
here nor there. Online
serial novelette.
Clock is ticking on that Law of Internet Invocation.
Yeah, yeah, ethics. High school. I'll get to them.
Karen
Putting this here until I figure out where else to put it and have time to do so:
You are looking at an archive edition of 
5 comments:
Karen, I have no idea why or how my Blogger blogs got listed on Blogshares. Someone told me they were. I thought about registering, but couldn't figure the thing out, so never bothered. I'm not into finances or the stock market, so the whole thing was just too confusing for me. :)
Oh, and as for the blogwise link, either do a plain text link in your links list here or see if you can empty enough characters out of About Me to fit it there. Otherwise, you're out of luck til AOL increases the maximum character limit for the About Me section.
There really is a reason I don't blog much on AOL anymore. I wanted room to add blog rings and things and all that code takes up room AOL blogs don't have.
Hmmm.... very intriguuing. Not into the whole stock martet thing but this could be an alternative way to get my blog out there. Hopefully it won't consume too much time. Might have to pop on over and try a hand at figuring it out. Thanks for the tip and best of luck with you Blogshares venture.
http://journals.aol.com/madmanadhd/ConfessionsofaMadmanInsightsinto/entries/839
In addition to having trouble finding other AOL journals on Blogshares, for some reason they haven't mailed me my confirmation email so I can go in and play around. I have tried several times and finally emailed the support-hopefully I'll be able to get in soon. http://pointclickjeff.blogspot.com/ Jeff
You have relocated your JW entries, eh? Now I have to go looking for them. LOL My alerts are such a crutch. BlogShares, eh? Hmm.
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