The Blog Boom: BlogShares Offer Market-minded Popularity Meter

Serving as a bridge between the dorky world of fantasy stock trading and the even dorkier world of blogging, BlogShares (www.blogshares.com)
offers participants the opportunity to "invest" $500 of virtual cash in
the blog of their choice and watch their fortunes rise and fall.

BlogShares are similar to stocks and are categorized into
industries as narrow as "Curling" (which contains only 2 blogs) and as
broad as "Religion" (over 3,000). Valuations fluctuate with the number
of incoming links, with hefty rewards for those who can get in on the
ground floor of an up-and-coming blog. The site already boasts over 100
trillionaires.

All in all, BlogShares is an amusing idea, but a poorly named
one. The site isn’t so much a stock market analog as a measurement
tool. In real life, stock prices are influenced to some extent by
supply and demand, while this economic law plays no part in the
BlogShares market.

However, BlogShares could be a serious boon for web designers,
content providers, agents looking to land a blogger a book deal, and
marketing companies who need an inexpensive, objective measurement of
the popularity of their corprate blogs, viral campaigns, and other
online promotional material. If I were BlogShares, I’d start promoting
myself as such and see if I could make some cash.

Only time will tell if the BlogShares proprietors are as motivated
by finance as I am. Incidentally, PSFK was worth $118 at the time of
this writing. I recommend getting in now.

Contributed to PSFK by Andrea Sharfin