Blogonomics
The other day BoingBoing linked to Blogpoly (which I still maintain would sound better as Blogopoly), an internet-application-themed version of Monopoly.
Today I discovered BlogShares, a fantasy stock market for weblogs. The logistics are that players each get a fictional $500 to invest, with blogs being valued by the number of incoming links. You can add your own blog, and just by claiming it will receive 1k share in your blog’s stock. And there are some “real” incentives, like raffles for… fancy pens. Or professional webhosting.
According to the introduction, one of the purposes of BlogShares, invented in 2003, was to prove the Power Law theory, which explains the phenomena of 20% of the population holding 80% of the wealth [trackback]. And indeed, BlogShares found that about 20% of the blogs contain 80% of all incoming links. [It was interesting to see that the third-highest valued blog was for a Persian blog– No, silly, not this one]
I think this calls for a Paul.za “Exercise for the reader”: Go start lots of blogs, and at a predetermined time after my blog gets listed, link them all to me. And mwa ha ha, voila: We’ll win that pen yet. Think of what a stable investment that is: at some point in the future you will probably find yourself needing a pen, and when you do you will be able to call me up and use our pen, for an amount of time/ink proportional to your contribution to winning it. And you won’t have had to spend a dime to earn this right. Isn’t the internet exciting?!?
