The BlogShares Blog

Q. How long have you been playing B$?

Almost five years now, I first signed on in March 2005.

Q. What got you interested in playing B$?

I had started blogging in December 2004, and the spiders found me a month later. As I started to figure things out, I noticed a few hits from the game and decided to check it out. At first, the volume of information was intimidating, and I actually left the game alone for about 4 months.

Q. Ideas or Shares?

It depends, I play both. Shares can be a lot of fun when there are many players fighting over a few blogs, and so can competing for drops on rare or artefact industries.

Q. Why did you volunteer to be on GIC?

I really like to understand how things work, and I spent a lot of time mapping out the new ideas math. After that, I made some suggestions to the GIC and was doing some testing to help AdamF with the Dead Blog Finder. My membership on the GIC is all his fault.

Q. What's the hardest part of being on GIC?

Sometimes, players have really cool ideas and I have absolutely no idea how to make them work. A close second is explaining to my wife why I need to spend every evening online playing B$.

Q. You are the head of GIC? How is that different from other GIC members?

Not much different, really. My role as GIC Chairman is to be the primary interface with the game administrators and BOD. And to referee the Jello wrestling matches.

Q. Potent Wind send share prices all over the place. What happened? Can we expect to see that again any time soon?

The spike from Potent Wind was an expected consequence of removing the artificial limit on outgoing link value, coupled with the time needed to settle things out in the database. At the time, we had over 7 million blogs that needed to be indexed about 10 times to fully propagate the new valuations, and that caused the perturbations.
I don't expect to see anything like it again, but if someone has an idea that makes long-term sense with weird short-term effects, I'm game.

Q. Occasionally GIC will have a contest. How do you decide when to do this? Can we expect any new contests soon?

We don't have anything currently planned, but if someone has an idea for a contest we'd be happy to help set it up.

Q. Can players help GIC improve the game?

Ask questions, and make suggestions. Volunteer!

Posted by The IM Team at 10:37 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (5)

Q. How long have you been playing B$?

April 2006. I was a very casual player; stopped playing than started again.

Q. What got you interested in playing B$?

I was looking at my stats on a blog and saw blogshares showing up and was curious. I followed the link and was intrigued.

Q. Ideas or Shares?

Ideas, duh. No offense to shares mavens, I just think ideas are vastly more interesting than shares.

Q. Why did you volunteer to be an IM?

I'm a librarian in real life. I'm interested in how things are cataloged/organized so the index was intriguing to me. I had been asked to be an IM awhile before but real life kept me from accepting. I was spending more and more time voting, modding, and killing deads, so I volunteered.

Q. What's the hardest part of being an IM?

Sometimes it's knowing where to start. The index is large and there is just so much to do. Fortunately, we have a team of really smart, dedicated Index Managers and we're carving out a plan of attack.

Q. You've recently been promoted to Lead IM? How have your duties changed?

I've got more of a leadership role obviously. I've been called on to be the final word on something a couple of times. I expect that will continue. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have this great team of people who are doing so much to make the Index as good as we can.

Q. Are the IMs working on any projects you'd like (or can share) with your fellow players?

We have a couple of things in the works. Some of us are busy cleaning various industries that desperately need cleaning. Some of these were solo efforts (I am proud that I cleaned every single South American nation!) others are more team efforts.

What I'm really excited about is that we're taking a holistic look at the main areas of the Index. The blogosphere has changed so much since it was first organized and we have crossover in more than one area. The hope is that we can figure out how to minimize the crossover and get a cleaner index. And then of course, to do that.

Q. Occasionally the IMs will have a contest (like "A is for Artefact"). How do you decide when to do this? Can we expect any new contests soon?

I am hoping we do have some new contests. They may be repeats of old ideas, for instance, we still have a ton of really cheap industries with no artefact.

Q. What are the traits of a good artefact suggestion? How do the IMs decide what artefact to release and when? Does Immunis just enjoy releasing artefacts in blogless industries or is he just evil?

A good artefact suggestion is well written, original, and should be really representative of that industry. Merely copying text from Wikipedia or some other site is not what we're looking for.

How do we decide? Well, the good entries usually stick out right away. The IM looks at the suggestion thread and does some research. Sometimes the IM has a particular interest in creating an artefact by themselves. If the IM thinks it's worth releasing, he or she checks to see how many people can build it. Why? Well, in some cases the IM who's looking at that industry may be the only person or one of the only people who can. Unless it's an arte that we know is going to be easily built, that IM does not release it.

My personal belief is that Immunis enjoys releasing artefacts in blogless industries and that, yes, he is evil. I say that with love.

Q. What about sub-industry suggestions? How do you decide which to add? How can a player improve the chance their suggestion will be released?

If it's a location industry, it has to meet the population criteria - less than 15000 people and it does not get into the Index.

If it's a content industry, it has to be something with enough blogs to merit inclusion. We're trying to not add micro specific things. For instance, while you could say that the Beatles were an iconic group and worthy of being in the Index, we don't need every band that every cut a record there. No Geronimo Jacksons.

A player who really wants a subindustry approved should make sure they do the research on a population industry. Find a good representative blog and write a clear, well- written description.

Q. What can players do to improve the Index?

Report deads. Suggest title changes. Vote against no longer valid industries. Let us know when you spot problems. We welcome your input!

Posted by The IM Team at 10:13 AM | IM News | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of the youngest blogs in the Index! In 2002, Markos Moulitsas founded the political site Daily Kos, with a liberal bent and frequent posts. Added to the index in March 2003 (the first months!), the valuation has seen a few spikes up and down over the past few years, currently sitting at a lower point, but by no means losing traffic or contributors. The site is supported through advertising and ad-free subscriptions if desired.

If you have a political eye, this is one to trade. Bear in mind the share count is a little high right now, lets see if we can fix that eh. In other news, in the last week 90,000 new blogs were added to the index, but 280,000 pings to parse new content were received - thats one ping every 2 seconds! We like these numbers, and theres more to come.

Posted by Suburban Wolf at 2:28 PM | FrontPage | Permalink

Added to the index in April 2005, Binary Moon is the work of Ben Gillbanks, a blogger and software developer, writing games since early 2000, which he promotes on his sister site Binary Sun. Interestingly enough, Ben is one year younger than yours truly, but then hes still going strong in the online world. The valuation of this blog continues to rise, as seems to be a growing trend in quite a few Top 100 blogs these days.

In other news, earlier this morning maintenance was performed to remove a few years worth of old entries, which went perfectly - we're now about 30,000,000 rows and 3.5Gb of space lighter. Over the next week or so we'll look at more gently removing additional tracking data to save more space, and look for ways to boost site speed and efficiency. Stay tuned.

Posted by Suburban Wolf at 3:00 AM | FrontPage | Permalink

Time for your weekend Blog Of The Week - Twitter! We certainly wish we hadnt started adding these to the index in 2007, now theres over 820,000 of them and rising! The site is principled on the question: "What are you doing?", with a post limit of 140 characters. People post about a variety of topics, see a search for 'blogshares', for example. Users post their activities frequently, and have thousands of both followers and other users they themselves follow. Of course, their own blog holds the top spot on the Top 100 List, along with twitter blogs for Barack Obama and Wil Wheaton, not to mention tech pundits Kevin Rose, Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble, Justine Ezarik and more. How can you not want to get involved???

Now, sitting at No. 8 on the Top 100, the index entry for our recently elected President shows nothing but growth - added in June 2007 (the month before my stroke, would you believe), at this rate it'll steal the top spot from the Twitter Blog, with (at this time) over 530,000 users following his activities on the site. Keep an eye on this one, folks.

Posted by Suburban Wolf at 4:38 AM | FrontPage | Permalink

A popular liberal web-based political blog, Talking Points Memo was founded by Josh Marshall in the midst of the 2000 Florida Recount, and has grown ever since. The blog covers several topics, in earlier years covering the Iraq war, later moving onto newer topics like the proposed privatization of Social Security. The site joined the Blogshares Index in January 2005, with a valuation that has been... varied, to say the least, at one point nearing B$200m but lately back down at B$2.5m. The blog is still in good shape and actively traded. You can find out more about the site on Wikipedia.

Posted by Suburban Wolf at 9:50 AM | FrontPage | Permalink

_{(Graphs are correct at time of article publication)}

Post your secrets anonymously, and have them appear online. First listed in April 2006, PostSecret quickly gained value, peaking at over B$100,000,000 before being hit by the Potent Wind decline that pushed the valuation down to its current level of B$8.3m, however the blog continues to grow in strength each month, soon to pass 10,000 incoming links. The blog has a strong position in the Top 100 and the owner Frank Warren still continues to post fresh secrets every Sunday. Begun as a community mail art project, the site quickly gained a huge following, now with over 60,000 people registered on the chat forum. Frank himself regularly comments and appears to speak at venues across the US.

In other news, yesterday the Blogshares server went down (again), suffering it's first hard disk failure since 2003. We're temporarily on lowered strength until the disk(s) can be replaced and the RAID array rebuilt, hopefully (!) in the next few days. Also, it seems that for a while users have been experiencing problems using PayPal to purchase Premium Membership. We'll be looking into this, but if you have any information that could be of use, drop us an email.

Posted by Suburban Wolf at 3:05 AM | FrontPage | Permalink

Currently, the world economy is experiencing a serious downturn. Lots of people have lost their jobs, their homes, and their life savings because this condition.
The Blogshares economy is no different. Every player has noted the extreme loss of value in the shares market, from the highs of last year to today's worthless scrap paper. In just six months, 73% of the market's value has been wiped out.

In order to help the struggling masses yearning to breathe free, the Board of Directors has directed the GIC to implement the following actions.
1) 25% of the total wealth held by the top 10 players will be confiscated. This tax will be used to fund the recently increased B$5,000,000 starting stake for new players, until the crisis has passed.
2) All corporate assets will now be controlled by the Board of Directors to dispense as they see fit. Administrative tools that allow corporate owners to distribute funds and chips will be temporarily suspended until this crisis has passed.
3) Idea transaction fees will be increased from the current levels to 10% of the total value, until the crisis has passed.
4) A new chip transaction fee will be initiated. All private sales of chips will be taxed at a temporary rate of 2%, until the crisis has passed.

To allow for a period of adjustment, these changes will be effective starting at 1500 BST, 09 Feb 2009.

Related forum discussion here.

Update: Don't worry, it's not real.

Posted by The GIC at 11:41 AM | GIC News | Permalink | Comments (4)

Surprisingly to the members of the Game Improvement Commission, today was Hug-a-GIC-Member Day.

To those of you who chose to participate, we are deeply honored and privileged to have received your kindness.

To those who were not aware (like us), you should know that there is a group of players who will instigate such an effort. Find out who they are, and help them. They are wonderful people.

Thank you, all.

Posted by The GIC at 8:50 PM | GIC News | Permalink

The relatively low amount of starting cash new players receive (B$500), coupled with the very inflationary BlogShares economy, has caused many debates and requests aimed at increasing that starting cash. In a game of Quadrillionaires, starting out with only five-hundred dollars can seem like an insurmountable mountain to climb. Therefore, effective immediately, the amount of starting cash for all new players has been increased to B$5,000,000.00. This has been applied retroactively to all players who have registered in the past month. Now, go forth and make that cash multiply!

Posted by MrPilot at 6:18 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (3)

Here at Blogshares, we all know that a blog is dead if there have been no new posts in six months. We can't have that for our own blog, it just wouldn't be right.
So, given that we needed to post something here anyway, I think it's time to tell you about a new feature we are working on in the GIC Labs. For a long time, we've wanted to make the "public" market a bit more dynamic and less predictable. We've come up with a way to start that process by causing some semi-automated trading of blogs that look like they might be interesting. The only blogs affected are those solely owned by the public, and the trades will look a lot like normal player activity.
The financial effect of this functionality is somewhat limited, generating a couple of billion B$ in value through testing on a few dozen blogs. Once the kinks are all worked out, we hope that it will open up trading opportunities for shares players by exposing blogs that they might not run across in normal searches or other play.

Posted by The GIC at 4:41 PM | GIC News | Permalink | Comments (5)

AP - Santa Cruz - 27 Jan 08 18:00 - Recent huge growth in the BlogShares stock market has fueled rumors of a systemic problem with the market. Gains on the order of 25% have been realized since last Friday's news of a crash broke. Some individual stocks are up tens of thousands of percentage points.

Click the image for a larger version

Game Director Suburban Wolf could not be reached for comment. Through his spokesman, Director Island Dave expressed optimism that the future of the market was "bright and sunny."

Despite the comforting words from Island Dave, we can report that all is not well with the market. An anonymous source intimately familiar with the inner workings of the market, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak with media, said, "We're [expletive deleted]! We're totally [expletive deleted] man! We are so [expletive deleted] that the word [expletive deleted] doesn't even begin to describe how [expletive deleted] we truly are."

Only time will tell, but the recent volatility in the blogs market would indicate that troubled times may be ahead.

Posted by The GIC at 6:03 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (2)

AP - 2 hours, 44 minutes ago - BlogShares ended a tumultuous week with a sharp decline Friday, backtracking following two weeks of stunning gains as investors turned cautious and cashed in some of their winnings.

Pundits on the afternoon business channel programs unanimously declared a profound shift in market dynamics. "It's as if blog valuations have been turned on their ears," said analyst Ken Adams on the Fox Business Channel's Neil Cavuto show. "We don't completely understand the phenomenon, but it's clear that the business cycle has shifted."

Once mighty Wonkette and it's affiliates were among the first to feel the pain, with values dropping precipitously through early after-hours trading. Rumors place the losses somewhere near 90% before all is said and done, and cash flow for these companies appears to be severely restricted.

Rob in China, spokesman for the Blogshares Securities and Exchange Commission, could not be reached for comment. Exchange director Suburban Wolf, meanwhile, deferred comment until after his pedicure.

Posted by MrPilot at 5:47 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (1)

This has been one helluva week here at BlogShares. To kick things off, we got the new database box installed and serving live data. This is the new db box that started as a community fund drive and became the desperately needed major upgrade to the entire site. The web box got a kernal upgrade and many needed optimizations. This broke a few things codewise, but we've tracked down and fixed all major bugs to this point. And that was just the first 3 days...

We've seen the launch of Turbo Chances (and saw the Chip Market prices surge for days as a result). In-game message handling got smarter. Composite scores are now figured hourly (previously every 3 hours). The Industry Trading tool is available once more. A rewrite of the Players Market (p2p ideas market) is in the queue. And the big one: Share searching is back online, bringing back a very long awaited and very powerful tool for share play.

We'd love to officially congratulate the newest BlogShares Elite: Sage Enterprises. She has stepped down as an Admin, but she'll still be around and in force. She's held practically every role the game has to offer, but has never lost her keenest of game smarts. A very much deserved honor.

We'd also like to welcome J.T. Sage and beachtiglet to the GIC team. Ken and Ts (along with many other beta testers and bug finders) have been invaluable to the Admin and BOD this week, and are eager to see the new recruits jump into the mix. Lots of cool things are suddenly possible in BlogShares, and I cannot wait to see what the team will come up with.

For what is a first to my knowledge, someone with certified legal education has joined the BSEC. We're not sure whether to be happy about that or scared, but either way, welcome to immunis. I'm sure someone will find a cheatypants for you to bust very soon.

Don't forget to get your vote in for BlogShares Wacko and buy raffle tickets for the upcoming Futurama DVD giveaway.

Let me leave you with a pic from October when ID and IT visited Jay and SubWolf in central California. SubWolf was on his way back to the UK the next day, after having spent an extra week in the US after his mom broke her foot the night before the original flight out. Twas a great trip, and I love this shot of the 3 guys that are Santa Cruz Tech finally in the same place at the same time.

Posted by at 8:05 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (8)

We've been meaning to hold another IRC player summit for many, many months (ok, I'll admit it, the earliest discussion in the staff forum about this dates back to September last year!). So far, things have always conspired against us and the days and weeks have continued rolling past. Before we knew it, it's winter again and over a year of BlogShares play has gone by. Amazing how time flies, isn't it?

No more excuses! This is an early warning to players to have a think about issues they want to raise. It's also a public announcement to get us to get our butts into gear. The programme of topics is quite loose at the moment, but certainly I'd like to discuss the following points at a minimum:

• Revolution in Share Play and Blog Valulation Math
• Changes to the Composite Rank
• Industry Captains
• Enhancements to Corporations
• The BlogShares Economy

Everyone is welcome to the Town Hall meeting. It will be held in one of the BlogShares IRC channels, and detailed joining instructions will be given nearer the time. For those of you who cannot make it, regular (every 10 minutes or so) logs will be pasted to the forums.

Just remember, if you're not there, you can't participate and help forge the direction BlogShares will take in 2008!

Posted by AdamF at 1:38 PM | FrontPage | Permalink

Hopefully we can get regular blogging going again. This is my first post here, so please be gentle! --Adam.

The thing about BlogShares, as many have noticed, is that volunteers keep it alive. Our Index Managers with their indepth expertise in all-things blog related; the GIC and their analytical minds helping to formulate the future of the game and coming up with innovative contests and competitions; the BSEC, rule enforcers and providers of justice for all; Tengrrl, our tireless Editor, ensuring that the documentation keeps up with the game and its myriad of changes. Everyone on this team each provide a unique and very necessary part of the puzzle and challenge of keeping BlogShares going. They all come in for continual demands from above, and hassle from below.

Thank you for doing what you do. If you've not thought of getting involved before, you can apply to join the team. Click here for more information.

Many of you, old and new, will probably by now be aware that the lead developer of the game suffered a stroke earlier this year. He has now returned to the UK from the USA to continue his recovery. I hope everyone will join me in wishing him a full and speedy recovery. We miss you, Subwolf.

This has sadly impacted on where we are with the continued development of the game. Dave, primarily committed with other Santa Cruz Tech projects (the owners of BlogShares), offers what time he can. I try and do the most pressing, small improvements or bug-fixes. We do have a great deal planned; changes to share play, share math, the voting process, and much, much more. We are accutely aware that there are issues with the game. The GIC have formulated a way forward on many of those fronts. Sage has grand plans for fixing what is wrong with a lot of the issues surrounding voting and more.

Please bear with us on these fronts. We're not burying our heads in the sand as some accuse, or simply ignoring the issues; It goes back to the volunteer nature of the game development. It has become over the years, a very, very complex beast. Even the smallest of changes have to be checked against a whole host of factors to make sure fixing one thing, isn't going to break 3 others! We will get there with time. I promise you that. Our walking-talking reference manual (Subwolf) isn't available, so everything takes 3 times as long.

With all that said, now, some good news!

The recent database crash reminded us just how pressing the need is for getting the new database server plumbed in. I am hopeful that this will finally be happening over the next 2 weeks. We were lucky that there were sufficient options available to finally get the repair to work, although it was touch-and-go at one point with just 118mb of free disk space remaining! The things we can do with the raw processing power available on the new box is almost limitless, and I'll be trawling through the forum suggestions for the last 2 years or so looking for the immortal phrase "maybe when we have a new db server"!

There's a new GIC Competition running right now and a side bet to go with it. Free chips and an artefact are the main prize, as well as potentially, many more thousands on the side bet. You'd be mad to miss it!

That's it from me for now. Until next time.

Posted by AdamF at 11:44 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (2)

My friends and fellow BlogSharesians, it gives me great pleasure to announce that the much-anticipated brand new database server has been ordered! It began with the dream of more resources for the game, was made a reality though the incredible generosity of the BlogShares community, and will soon be realized when the new database server arrives in California to be installed and put into operation. Here are some specs and highlights:

• Processors: 2 x Dual-core AMD Opteron 2.2GHz 2MB Cache
• Memory: 4 x 2GB PC5300 667MHz DDR2 ECC Registered
• Hard Drives: 5 x 73.4GB SAS 15000 RPM - Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 (RAID 5)
• Total Cost: $5,750 (the rest of the money raised will go towards shipping, hosting, and support expenses)

We don't yet have an ETA for installation, but that will hopefully be very soon after shipment. When the new server is installed, it will likely entail a day or possibly two days of downtime for the game. In addition to installing the new database server, we will use that time to do the wipe, OS upgrade, and re-installation of the web server as well. This way everything will be running optimally. More details about this process will be released when available.

Role Announcements:
I am also happy to announce several new role promotions. First, we would like to extend a belated welcome for Honey4evr and Enigma Chaos to the Index Management team. They have been in their roles for several weeks and dove right in to assist with the very complex task of maintaining our index.

Next, we would like to welcome T$ and Ken Adams to the GIC. These players are very knowledgeable about the game and we look forward to their assistance as we expand upon and improve the game in the future.

And finally, it is our distinct pleasure to bestow the title of Elite Player to R U Serious. RUS has been a valued member of the community for some time now and since the addition of the new composite scoring he has been prolific in holding onto the #1 spot. Well done!

Congratulations to all of our new roled players!

Posted by MrPilot at 1:24 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've spent the last two weeks in California, visiting with Jay and checking out the area - it's fantastic, I hope to move here very soon. During the visit, I had the opportunity to visit the hosting facility for Blogshares, and snap a photo of the old database box, shown here. In case you didn't know, it's a Quad PIII 550Mhz with 4Gb RAM and 10K SCSI disks with RAID-5. It's served us well, handling up to 900 queries per second when the spiders were running flat out alongside the website, but it's slowly failing. Not to worry, due to your contributions, soon this old box will go on easy street.

No, we haven't purchased the new one yet - this is taking some careful planning and execution, going for a balance of future security while not compromising on components. We're gonna shell out for a 3 year 4-hour response warranty out of our own pocket, on top of the community donations, to make sure that in the unlikely event of a hardware problem, we can get it sorted quickly. The hope is we'll have a box on order within the next two weeks, we'll keep you informed of any news.

Cheers!

Addendum: While doing some Java today, I'm reminded of a site that has helped me immensely in the maintenance and growth of the spiders, as well as our other projects, yet I've never given it props. It's Roedy Green's Java & Internet Glossary, a useful resource. Thanks to him for the help it's brought me.

Posted by Suburban Wolf at 11:15 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (6)

We are continually overwhelmed by the generousity and kindness we see every day by the BlogShares community, and as you may have noticed, that generousity has paid off big time for the BlogShares site. Yesterday, after numerous donations from a wide range of players and anonymous donors, our fund drive for a new database box was completed.

You did it.

You, the players, have come through stronger than we could ever have imagined. This wasn't paid sponsors or advertisers or corporate investment, this was a diverse, wide-spread group of players who have given and given strongly. Thanks to your donations, BlogShares will soon have a more powerful box for the database, which means more features, faster pages, and greater flexibility in the game.

This is no small feat. You have given over $6000 in less than one year's time. To say we are blown away would be an understatement. We are incredibly thankful for your donations, and we look forward to selecting a box and getting it online for you as soon as possible. How can we possibly say enough 'Thank You Thank You Thank You'. We'll keep you up to date as we go through the process of selecting and installing the new box, and it will be our pleasure to do so. Best wishes and our eternal gratitude to everyone who contributed in any way to this fund drive, and we at BlogShares look forward to spending time each day in this community that you all have built as a unique, welcoming, generous, and positive Home on the web. Cheers and thank you, all. We can't wait to see what you will do next!

Posted by at 9:51 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (6)

Lots of things going on in the world of BlogShares right now, and we're asking for your help to move things forward on several fronts. Our New DB Fund (right side-bar) has been filling up nicely, but we still have a ways to go. A very, very generous anonymous donor is making a very special offer to help meet the goal. For every $1 donated to the DB Fund, the donor will match it with $2. That's right, if you donate $10, the donor throws in $20 more! You can give to the fund right now:

You may also have noticed that 3 of the Development Funds have had cash goals met. Thank you to everyone who donated to these and others! Now, we need to see those B$ goals met! Please, donate some of your B$ assets to these goals. There are dozens of players who could finish off these goals all by themselves, so let's get these goals met ASAP! Admin Sage Enterprises has offered to match B$ donations to the Text Ad Editing Fund to fill that goal, so take her up on the offer!

Finally, BlogShares' chat room #blogshares is one of the largest rooms housed in the WyldRyde IRC Network. Right now, WyldRyde has a fund drive going on to help pay for various expenses that add up quickly on a large chat network. Several generous B$ players have donated to WyldRyde, and we'd like to send them much more for the professional, spam-free chatting #blogshares regulars rely on. If you enjoy chatting in #blogshares, or any of the WyldRyde chat rooms, or even if you just want to help out the cause, please give what you can to help the folks behind wyldryde.org pay the network's bills! You'll get a special hostmask identifying you as a donor, plus loads of kudos and appreciation from the proprietors at WyldRyde.

Posted by at 11:24 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (1)

For those who have been hibernating, we've added a lot to BlogShares lately. The most recent addition is the new drop down navigation bar at the top of every game page. Thanks to some DHTML goodness, we're using JavaScript to give us a dynamic and much more flexible menu for navigation. You'll likely also notice a color tweak to our standard blues and greens across the site, as well as a lime makeover for the top banner. Hope you like it!

Just launched are the new Development Funds. You can help determine what cool new features we work on, and help the coders spend more time on the game. Please donate your B$ and/or real cash to your favorite funds, and support BlogShares and the people behind it.

We now have a Lottery where you can spend your B$ for a chance to hit a nice jackpot. Some of the early wins have gone over half a trillion B$!

There is also a Birthday signup available on your User Preferences page (click the 'Prefs' tab from your user Profile or click [Your Preferences] in the right-side Members Area menu). If you would like to add your birthday, you can do so, and on your special day, your player name will appear in a special 'Today's Birthdays' box in the right sidebar.

Don't forget to add BlogShares to your Myspace friends list, and join the BlogShares Music Lovers group at Last.fm!

Posted by at 4:57 PM | FrontPage | Permalink

Here's hoping you and yours are having a healthy and happy December, and are able to enjoy whatever holidays you hold dear. Real Life™ has caught up with many of us the last few weeks, so you may not have seen a lot of development or new posts here. However, we're still chugging away behind the scenes on things like index cleaning (removing dead blogs in bulk, nearly a million delisted in the last five weeks) and optimizations (code improvement, data archiving).

Thanks to tremendous work from Friendly Wholesale Bonds, Beverly Shaw, and ChrisB, our fund for a new database box has seen a healthy movement towards our $6,000 goal. Thank you, Rich, Bev, and Chris, and thank you as well to all the generous folks who have participated and helped B$ get closer to the new box!

My personal apologies for not being able to get the next community IRC Summit together. I've had some family issues that have kept me busy lately, and I've been unable to tackle all the work that goes into putting such a large gathering together. Don't fret, though, we will have a Summit in the near future, probably some time after New Years if all goes well, where we'll deal with many subjects, including fine-tuning and improving Ideas Math.

You may have noticed that we've put new blog addition (from our spiders) on hold. We were relying on the FeedMesh ping list to receive blog pings, but with the demise of PubSub, FeedMesh has gone offline. We have a couple of other ping lists / clouds that we can use, but we have unfortunately discovered that the urls pinging are very, very high in non-blogs and spam. We'd slaughter the index quickly if we blindly accepted these listings without a serious rewrite to our current code.

We are working on refining our automated ping reading, but until we can build, test, and implement such a system, the automatied pinging will remain offline. You can still add blogs yourself with Add Site. You can also use the Add Site bookmarklet (drag it to your toolbar) to quickly add a blog you are viewing. It fills in blog title and url for you, just double check and submit. We've just added Sigma and Chip rewards for your additions, awarding you 1 Sigma point and 20 chips for each URL you add. We are logging every addition, so be certain you are adding a blog and not non-blogs or spam. The BSEC will be notified if abuse is found.

Posted by at 5:09 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (3)

We've worked out as many bugs and issues as possible with the new Idea math code, and can do nothing more until it is run on the game live. The target date for implementation is August 21, so you have a reasonable time to get your Idea holdings in order. Between coding, analysis, testing, and all the various discussions that have gone into this, the Admin, GIC, and BoD members have easily spent over 100 hours getting this ready, and the end result is a dynamic Ideas market that should be much more interesting than what you see currently. Premium Members will have access to at least one additional tool or data set to help with Ideas market play, and we'll have this ready prior to this implementation.

Now some caveats:
* We cannot predict what this new math will do beyond the spare tests we have run. Because we don't have a mirrored backup server, we can't test it live on real data beyond a one-off run. This means we are forced to make predictions of how the market will work based solely on a very small, and possibly non-representative set of data. We've done the best we can, but be forewarned that even TPTB don't know how the market will handle things over numerous iterations.

* There may be several times during early implementation that Ideas play will need to be taken offline to make adjustments to the code. This is expected to happen, so please understand that we will do so to prevent undesirable or unstable side-effects from taking place. This should only happen during the first few weeks or possibly as far as a couple months after implementation.

* We do not expect to see instant crashes of market prices, nor do we expect to see instantaneous skyrocketing of prices. However, we have observed those effects in one or two industries (and even then, only once or twice). We believe we have code in place to prevent such drastic price movements from happening in one drop or even over a short set of drops. That said, again, be forewarned that either extreme reaction is still possible. We will not correct the market should this take place except in cases where bugs cause extreme reactions.

* The new math code brings a couple new twists to the Ideas market, one of which has long been requested by a wide variety of players: consumption. Simply put, if Ideas are sitting on the market when a drop happens, the most typical response is for consumption of sitting ideas rather than dropping additional ones onto the pile. While downward price pressure during the drop remains high, consumption eats away at existing Industry Ideas, which in aggregate, pushes upward price pressure higher with each drop. Consumption does not affect Player Held Ideas!

* A second twist deals with when Idea pricing changes take place. Previously, prices changed for all Industries (which already had prices) regardless of whether that Industry was specifically involved in the current production run. This will change in the new math. Price changes will only occur on an Industry if Ideas were produced or consumed during the current production run. This will be significantly different than what takes place now. Reindexing strategies will change significantly for the best Ideas players as a result.

* There have been rumors of people losing their Idea holdings due to (insert rumor reason here). Let's set the record straight before this goes too far. The original math had proposed what was called 'Revolutionary New Ideas'. In short, this was the destruction of all Ideas in an Industry when the Industry reached a low price point which was never recoverable. This proposal item has changed dramatically. Active players will not have to worry about having any Ideas 'destroyed' by the game. Active is defined as having played within the last six months. Instead, we will be selling idea portfolios of Inactive players (over six months of not playing) down to levels of 10K Ideas in each industry. Players having this occur will be compensated. The short explanation for this happening is that large holdings of inactive players will significantly hamper growth and tend to create a drag on the entire market which cannot easily be overcome. By selling off excess Idea holdings, the Active players can decide the fate of these Industries.

Posted by at 10:27 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (11)

Would you like to advertise your site, product, or service on BlogShares? Chances are good that we have the perfect placement for your advertising campaign. From the Top Banner to Pixels to BlogAds, there are many placements available to fit your budget and deliver your advertising goals. Visit B$ Advertising for all the details. Feel free to contact B$ Support for more information, to make a purchase, or to arrange a custom advertising program. (thanks to AdamF for his expert graphics)

Speaking of perfect advertising locations, we're also announcing a new incentive for people who purchase Pixels. Buy $100 or more in Pixels and receive a text link in the Junior Sponsors section for the duration of your Pixel purchase. This link is seen on every page load, and gains your site considerably more exposure to browsers and search engines alike. Help BlogShares purchase a new database box and get yourself a great return for your investment. To purchase Pixels, please sign up at BlogShares Pixels. Don't forget that you can also help BlogShares by purchasing a Premium Membership for yourself or as a gift for another player!

This month, we're raffling a total of $100 in Amazon.com gift certificates. Five prizes of $20 each (one per player maximum) will be awarded on July 31. Never before have we offered so much in one raffle, and our utmost appreciation and thanks goes out to the fabulous sponsors of these prizes: Suburban Wolf, Just James, Mina, Nick, and AdamF.

As always, there is lots of behind-the-scenes development going on. We've added a Project Manager cms for our groups (such as BSEC and Index Managers) to organize and track their projects. Idea Math has also taken several steps forward thanks to dozens of hours of analysis and discussion from the GIC, and coding from Suburban Wolf. We hope to set aside a few days in the near future to test the new code. Sage and Rantz are getting set to do major index building, reorganizing, and fixing, including the utilization of the new Secondary Name field for Industry names (to help solve English versus native language place names). The moderation queue has dropped in half over the last week (from 20,000 down to 9,000), thanks in part to significantly increased moderation rewards, but also to the patience and persistance of a handful of very active moderators. Much more to come!

Please note: BlogShares is not affiliated with Amazon.com or any of its products or services.

Posted by at 11:43 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (2)

Forum Changes:
A significant change is taking place in forum rules and moderation. Please be sure to read all the details here.

Player Roles:
As some of you may already know, Mad Trollie is stepping down after a long tenure on the BSEC to concentrate on his role as Forum Moderator. It seemed only fitting that the resume Trollie has amassed over the years here be rewarded with a place among the BlogShares Elite. Only five players hold this title, and there is little doubt that Trollie has surpassed any requirements for being included. Congratulations, and many, many thanks Mad Trollie!

To replace him on the BSEC, an old friend and player who has worn many hats has returned to fill the vacancy. Just James formerly served on the BSEC, and brings years of experience and fair justice to his post. Thank you James!

Nick has recently been elected to the Chairman's role on the GIC, and with the group members, including the newest GICer AdamF, has been diving headlong into the new Idea Math proposal. We look forward to many great things to come from Nick, Adam, and the GIC volunteers. On the Index Management front, stranger has joined the ranks of the IM, and is already well into her index work. Congratulations Nick, Adam, and stranger!

Raffle!
Yes, finally, another raffle. This time, we're giving away one premium block of pixels (valued at $30) and eight smaller blocks (each valued at $10). You can buy tickets here for the raffle which will be drawn on July 1, 2006. Speaking of Pixels, be sure to check out this Mission from RUSerious!

Posted by at 2:44 PM | FrontPage | Permalink

We've gotten lots of requests over the years to donate money to the game for support or hardware, and have never had a great means to accept such offers. Well, we came up with a neat way for you to help support the site and get something in return. We have launched a drive to help BlogShares buy a much needed server upgrade through BlogShares Pixels. B$Pixels allows you to sponsor 10x10 blocks of pixels and place your own custom icon there. Buy as many as you want. Upper pixels are 30 cents per pixel, the rest are 10 cents per pixel. If you need assistance with an icon, please contact support@blogshares.com. Thank you in advance for your support, and we look forward to bringing you a great game, stable site, and new features for years to come!

Posted by at 6:23 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (4)

We're very pleased to announce that Sage Enterprises has accepted an offer of promotion to become the newest BlogShares Administrator. Over the past 20+ months, Sage has spent countless hours building the index, helping in the forums, and improving the game, and we are overjoyed that she wants more work! :) Seriously, she has done as much behind the scenes for the game as anyone, and will be a excellent Administrator. Congratulations, Sage!

On a personal note, I will be joining the BlogShares Board of Directors. Thank you Jay and Suburban Wolf for the opportunity and the confidence in me. Nothing much will change for me within the game, as I'm not abdicating any responsibilities or projects, only gaining a cooler title and a vested interest in the site. Still, I may be less available for administrative support than previously. As such, it is a great pleasure to announce that MrPilot will step up and assume the Lead Administrator position. MP has been my right-hand man for a long time now, and without his endless support, ideas, and maturity, most of the wonderful things that have been created and improved in BlogShares would never have been possible. Congratulations MP!

Sage will still be managing the index work on the site, but naturally, she's going to need someone to step up and assume the role of Lead Index Manager. Rantz has been to Sage what MrPilot has been to me, so it's only natural that this promotion go to him to reward his hard work, dedication, and follow through on the tedious and time-consuming duties required in the FOI program he stewards. Congratulations Rantz!

On the game side, you may have noticed the graph showing blogs listed in the game currently displays a decided negative growth. Nothing is wrong! This is completely intentional. We temporarily halted automatic adding of new blog listings a couple of weeks ago, and have been working on removing some of the glut in the tables. Dead blogs, spam/splogs, non-blogs, we've delisted almost 500,000 of them over this period. Sigma reporters have accounted for over 50k of this, a massive amount of one-off reports from players.

We will continue this effort for the time being, as we continue to delist 5k-30k listings per day. Although the effect on the game and server performance is minimal, it will buy us some much needed relief on the database box by lightening table sizes, avoiding adding new rows from new listings, and avoiding free space issues on the hard disk. A drive to help BlogShares purchase a new box is in the works and will be released very soon. Until next time, cheers!

Posted by at 3:26 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (14)

Mod-A-Thon:
So the GIC guys were gung-ho on the Mod-A-Thon plan and had high expectations for it. I don't think anyone could have predicted that almost 20,000 votes would be modded in only seven days time. The opening relay went around the clock and around the world, and started the Mod-A-Thon with about 6000 votes moderated in the first 24 hours. We had dozens of moderators kick in time to deal with the bulging vote backlog, and the GIC members themselves spent dozens of hours administering and modding as well. There were numerous competitions within the Mod-A-Thon, including relays and endurance events. RUSerious modded for 24 straight hours at one point to win the endurance challenge. Thank you, GIC, moderators, and contributors to the prize pool. This effort was so successful, we may just have to do it again (insert collective groan from the GIC here).

Basketball:
Congrats to Bruce Wayne for winning the 2006 NCAA Tournament Bracket Challenge. In our Blog Madness competition, we've crowned Georgetown and its associated blog, View From The Hilltop, as our BlogShares National Champion.

People and Site Updates:
* In order to concentrate on site documentation and tutorials, GIC member tengrrl is shifting roles to fill a spot as a BlogShares Editor. All the tools and permissions are up and ready so she can get things done easier.
* To replace tengrrl on GIC, former Index Manager Nick has been tapped and is already in the process of getting up to speed on the team's work.
* We've put a cap of 30 owners on any given blog. If you attempt to gift to a player, and there are already 30 owners, the gift will fail. This solves a bug in transactions on blogs with dozens of shareholders.
* You can now view up to 20 available artefacts on blogs instead of the previous limit of 5.
* Artefact Holder Rankings are now available, and the Top Chip Holders rankings have been expanded to show 100 players.
* All users can now see the BSID of blogs on the blogs.php pages. BSIDs are the unique numbers assigned to blogs which enable faster lookups and data storage. Suburban Wolf instituted these as one of his first major changes to the code way back in 2004, and they have been visible to Admin and some role players since then.
* On ideas.php, we've added a sortable 'Blog Count' column to the table as an often requested feature.
* MrPilot updated the GIC button and added one for the Editor role as well.

Posted by at 12:00 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (1)

The NCAA basketball fans among us are excited to launch a new three-week mini-game featuring blog's actively cheering for teams in the 2006 Men's NCAA Basketball Championship. BlogShares players have helped us find blogs cheering for the teams involved, which you can see in our own brackets here.

To win each round, points are scored for each team based on transactions made on the blog. The more transactions, the higher the score. Winning blogs move on to the next round, and on April 5-6, we will crown the BlogShares National Blog Madness Champion. Read this forum thread for all the details. If you are a blogger whose blog is participating in this competition, please visit this page for a special greeting and information.

Posted by at 7:13 AM | FrontPage | Permalink

Congratulations to Passer for holding the winning Albert Einstein raffle ticket (he bought about two-thirds of all tickets). Thanks again to tengrrl for sponsoring this! We've gotten a lot of questions from other players wanting to sponsor raffles, and we are more than happy to have them do so. If any player wishes to sponsor a raffle item, please contact an admin for more information.

A new promotion this month rewards completed Premium Membership purchases with chips. A monthly premium gains the buyer 1000 chips, a yearly premium is 5000. Gift Memberships are worth double to the buyer, 2000 and 10000 respectively. So if you were waiting for yet another reason to upgrade your account or do something nice for another player, this is the time to do so. This offer is good during the month of March 2006.

Several new players have taken on new roles over the last month. Congratulations to our newest Index Managers: Mina, Hildy, and Ryan Giggs. The Game Improvement Commission was launched with Bruce Wayne, tengrrl, and Passer, and today adds SpaceLord and Louie14. And filling the open seat on the BSEC will be long-time veteran Nexy, who has previously served proudly as an Index Manager. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for all you are doing for this site!

Posted by at 12:00 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (11)

Friends         BlogSharesians        Players

Lend Me Your Eyes

The Administration and Board of Directors of BlogShares are very pleased to announce an event unlike any to ever take place in the BlogShares community. This very evening, at 8:00pm BlogShares game time, a conference will be convened, known hereafter as the 2006 BlogShares Idea Math Summit. We expect it to last anywhere from 1-2 hours, but may well go longer. You can access the Summit directly here.

There is an extensive Program Guide available, with a schedule, instructions, and dozens of links for more information on the night's subject. For those who are new to IRC, tengrrl was generous enough to create a few flash-demos to accompany the instructions. We'll have proposals on Ideas math from kucinichworldpeace and Passer, a history lesson in Ideas from MrPilot, technical information from SuburbanWolf, and the chartering of the new Game Improvement Commission.

In combination with this event, I'm launching a blogging contest, with a top reward of B$ cash, chips, and a Full Year of Premium Membership, donated by Rantzalot (Sir).

I'll 'see' those of you attending this evening at 8pm game time.

Posted by at 12:00 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yes, finally! We have completely upgraded our payment interface. The new IPN (Instant Payment Notification) automates the Premium Membership upgrades so that you can access your unlimited transactions faster. Also, now available is a new Premium option, the Monthly Premium Membership subscription. At $2.95 per month, you are no longer limited to purchasing a full year.

Want to bring the fun of a Premium to a fellow BlogSharer? You can purchase one-month and one-year gift memberships as well. This process is streamlined. All you need is the player's userid#, which can be found on her/his user page, and the membership will instantly go to that player when your payment clears.

We've also launched a new raffle, generously sponsored by #blogshares regular tengrrl. Yes, you could win the Albert Einstein Action Figure pictured at right. No longer do you have to rely on soldier or beauty queen action figures to solve the mysteries of the universe, Einstein could be your secret weapon. Imagine how smart you will look bringing Albert to the office instead of that purple dinosaur or yellow sponge. The power of Albert Einstein in the palm of your hand. Buy your raffle tickets today!

Posted by at 4:03 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (10)

The Opening Ceremonies of the 2006 Olympics in Torino are here, and the blogosphere is showing up to keep us informed. You'll find several interesting blogs discussing the games in the BlogShares Olympics Industry. Highlights include James Martin's Olympics blog hosted by about.com, the Torino Olympic Games Blog, Jordan Jackson's Torino 06 Olympics Blog, and Jill Manty's 2006 Turin Winter Olympics Blog. Perhaps the most unusual one is Jake Serino's Bode By Jake blog, hosted on nbcolympics.com. Serino is a friend of controversial U.S. ski racer Bode Miller, and plans to blog his experiences as he follows Miller around during this global sports spectacular. Don't miss the official blog of nbcolympics.com, the Torino Tracker, and Access Apolo, blog of Yuki Ohno, father of U.S. speed skater Apolo Ohno.

MrPilot is also sponsoring several Mission competitions. There are categories for guessing the Most Total Medals, Most Gold, Silver, and Bronze, as well as the winner of the Men's Hockey Gold Medal. Enter quickly to be considered for chip prizes. Best of luck to everyone's nation throughout the games!

Posted by at 9:21 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (1)

BlogShares hopes that you have a great 2006 and would like to welcome our new sponsor Forex Capital Markets.

Posted by at 4:46 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (10)

Fellow members of the BlogShares community, it is with regret that I announce the indefinite retirement of Raymond, a member of the administrative team and long-time player of the game. With a family to take care of and another child on the way, he no longer has the free time necessary to maintain an active role in the game. We respect his decision as it is the one any of us would make given a similar situation. Raymond was instrumental in helping to upgrade many aspects of the game, including: the new ruleset, changes to the forums, dozens of Help pages, and resurrecting the long-neglected support mail system. He also served as Index Manager, Editor, and BSEC member during his time in BlogShares, and maintained an active presence in the #blogshares chatroom. Good luck Raymond, we'll miss you!

Posted by MrPilot at 11:40 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (11)

Congratulations to kucinichworldpeace for being selected to receive the highest honor available in the game of BlogShares. He has been admitted to the exclusive group known as the BlogShares Elite.

During the past year or so, kwp has demonstrated a fierce mastery of all things Ideas. He is singly responsible for introducing detailed play strategies which were adopted by dozens of players. His insight into Idea pricing, Artefacts, and the index as a whole has been invaluable to new player and veteran alike. Undoubtedly, kucinichworldpeace had no equal during the High-Priced Ideas era. Congratulations, and welcome to the Elite!

Posted by at 3:52 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (16)

The events of the day seem to have humbled all within the BlogShares community. Though idea prices have crashed, and the currency has been revalued, the future still seems bright. Investors are secure in the fact that their rankings have not changed, they just have a bunch of empty space in their once overflowing cash vaults. In the meantime, trading has been restored for the market and life goes on. "We will overcome this day, we will rebound", said an unidentified market trader, "Black Friday will not get us down."

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CURRENCY RE-VALUED IN AFTERMATH OF MARKET CHAOS

Moments ago Chairman Purpleledger announced a major re-valuation of the blogdollar to compensate for the devestating market crash earlier today. The currency has been re-valued on a 1 for 10,000 ratio. Thus, if you had B$1,000,000,000.00 in cash assets prior to the re-valuation, you now have B$100,000.00.

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IDEAS MARKET CRASHED! TRILLIONS LOST IN HUGE PRICE COLLAPSE!

Investors are said to have looks of utter disbelief as all idea values within the market have bottomed out. Some estimations show that the market has lost over 99% of its value. An announcement from the BlogShares Treasury Chairman, Johansen Purpleledger, is expected soon. Some are already calling today "Black Friday".

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MAJOR PRICE FLUCTUATIONS SEEN IN IDEAS MARKET; TRADING SUSPENDED

After opening strong in early hours trading, major price fluctuations have begun to have an effect on the market. Investors have been selling strongly all morning in anticipation of a market crash. Idea values continue to plummet. The BlogShares Treasury Board has suspended all market trading effective immediately in an attempt to control the price drops. Developing...

Posted by MrPilot at 2:32 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (69)

One area of the index that has troubled us at times was the inclusion of non-blog entities such as blog hosts. As of this evening, and per the direction of the Board of Directors, all non-blog entities are being removed from our index permanently. This includes such long-time favorites as MSN Spaces main page and Blogger. We're moving towards a more realistic ranking of sites indexed in BlogShares. It will be very interesting to see just what blogs comprise our Top 100 from this point forward. If players wish to discuss this event, please do in the forum.

Posted by at 7:45 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (4)

Football season is upon us here in the US, with both college and pro teams now fully engaged in regular season. BlogShares' index has grown greatly since the last football season, including the additions of College Football and NFL to the American Football Industry. Know of a good football blog not listed on BlogShares? Add it!

The Blues world lost one of its most infamous performers, Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown. Gatemouth had recently lost his home in the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and died this morning in the company of his family. BlogShares currently tracks 16 blogs in the Blues Industry, and several will undoubtly offer posts about Gatemouth's story, one worthy of telling in a blues song all its own.

BlogShares is once again raffling some cool hardware, this time something for the user on the go. MrPilot has donated a brand new 64MB USB flash drive from Micro Advantage. The drive is USB 2.0 compatible and is a great tool for moving your documents, pictures, or songs quickly from point to point. Check it out on the Raffles page.

Update: Congrats to the raffle winner, News Writer!

Posted by at 2:43 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (7)

BlogShares has seen a flurry of activity this past month. From the new Player Tutorials page to a call for Rules translators, we've had much on our plates lately. A new charter was drawn up for the BSEC, clarifying the group's responsibilities. There is also now a Random Blog page where you never know what listing you'll get.

Congratulations to The Pompatus of Love for being selected as the newest member of the elite cheatypants-fighting force known only as the BSEC, and to our newest Index Managers: tuwa, JoPro Savings and Loan, Loop Di Loop, Alexandra, Rantzalot (Sir), and Judge Fred.

The new IMs will undoubtedly see time in the trenches against the onslaught of spam the current IMs and admin are busy fighting daily. Spammers are getting creative, but we aren't giving in. We've developed new methods for blocking, finding, and delisting spam in the game. If you notice a listing for a spam site, please take a moment to use the Report Error link found on its blogs.php page.

We've also been adding hundreds of new Industries to the index, predominately locations, including states or provinces and additional cities of many nations. If you know of a location with lots of bloggers which isn't already in the index, please suggest it here, and include some examples to help us out.

Finally, a word of thanks and best wishes to DJ Swa, a BlogShares veteran and member of the Dutch Armed Forces, who is once again serving his nation in Afghanistan. Peace and godspeed.

Posted by at 9:43 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (5)

Lots going on behind the scenes at BlogShares these past couple of weeks. First and most important being the implementation on July 4 of a new ruleset for the game. If you haven't read it, please do so now. We've also whipped up a new node on Contributing to BlogShares. SubWolf coded up the much requested bond cancellation functions, which are now fully available to all players. Manhattan has been doing the IM position proud with her index work, but was also kind enough to write up tutorials for LiveJournal claim codes.

We've also spent a great deal of time working on the Price movement issues you've been seeing lately. For a more detailed explaination, read this thread. Code changes will now prevent buying or selling shares in blogs with insufficient indexing history, thus reducing exploitable bugs.

Finally, what better way to celebrate an American holiday than by winning something you want but don't need? Our thoughts exactly! And on that note, check out the new raffle prize: a mini-Lava lamp which you can plug into any usb port. Perfect for late night idea buying or early morning PRDs.

Posted by at 7:00 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (3)

Effective July 4, 2005 at 00:01 game time, a new set of rules will govern game play. This new ruleset has predominantly maintained the previous game rules, with a few notable exceptions. We've constructed a Guide to Rule Changes to help players understand what has been altered or added.

Please be sure to read both the Guide and the new ruleset. Also note that voting guidelines are now considered part of game rules. A week of Public Comment is now open on this issue in the forum where all members of the community are welcome to offer their thoughts, suggestions, or critiques of these changes. Please keep it civil.

Posted by at 2:32 PM | FrontPage | Permalink

Congratulations and a big thank you to a new batch of Index Managers:

kucinichworldpeace, Manic, M. Aurora, Nexy and manhattan.

And congratulations to rhino for winning The Pen. Another raffle will be posted soon.

SubWolf upgraded the database software today, so the pesky crashes of earlier this week should be history.

Posted by jay at 5:47 PM | FrontPage | Permalink

Congratulations to mars/iris Securities for passing the B$1 Quadrillion mark this morning, becoming the first BlogShares player to do so. A veteran of the game, mars had long ago earned his spot as a BlogShares Elite player. Now that his goal has been met, he is currently offering to divest his game assets for charity. Please visit this forum thread for more information.

Premium Membership Incentive: For a limited time, all players who upgrade their accounts to Premium Membership after May 2, or who renew existing Premiums, will receive 5000 chips from Island Dave's personal stash. Once your Premium has been activated, please message Island Dave and, once confirmed, your chips will be sent. This deal ends when ID runs out of chips, so get on board with a Premium Membership soon!

New Contest: BlogShares Blogging Contest #4 is underway, with trillions in BlogShares cash, chips, and free months of Premium Membership. Visit the forum for more information.

Posted by at 12:44 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (9)

It is with great pleasure that we welcome the return to BlogShares of former BSEC member and long-time veteran Just James after a brief hiatus. His dedication to the game and community here has been rewarded with a well-deserved Administrator position. You'll see James around a lot in the forum and in IRC (and probably sniping your rare ideas off the Ideas Market), so drop in and congratulate him on a very big promotion.

Another veteran has stepped up to take what can be a difficult position at times. Thanks and congratulations go out to King Gucci Armani II for his selection as the newest cheatypants-busting BSEC member. He's eager and ready to stomp out rulebreakers, so if you're up to no good, KGA II will be coming for you!

Recent groundbreaking code has been unleashed in BlogShares, thanks to hours of tedious and often frustratingly difficult work by Suburban Wolf. Leveraged Buy Out transactions have been fixed, and the Idea sell deadlock is no more. You'll be seeing some great new things over the next few months, including some fun surprises to shake up your summer. We hope you are enjoying the BlogShares experience, and as always, if you need help, or have a suggestion, concern, or complaint, feel free to contact any Administrator or post your thoughts in the forum. Please check Help first, though, as many of your questions are already answered therein.

Posted by at 1:29 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (4)

No kidding! We are very pleased to announce an experimental project we're calling the BlogShares Radio Hour, and we're looking for contributions from BlogShares players. The pilot episode will be unveiled in a couple of weeks, with updates to follow on time and stream information.

We want player contributions! So pick up your headset or microphone, and record us some content! You might tell us a BlogShares-related story, offer an in-depth narrative of a game strategy (such as voting or buying ideas), even commentary or opinion about BlogShares might be used. Songs, poems, jokes, anything and everything might be included in the BlogShares Radio Hour.

The current deadline for submissions is March 22 (subject to change). Please send all submissions to radio@blogshares.com. Be certain to include your player name and #, and any location information you would like to offer.All submissions become the sole property of BlogShares. We can (and will) edit entries for clarity, content, and fit.

Posted by at 1:44 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (6)

We are excited to announce a new opportunity for BlogShares players to invest in real stocks through ShareBuilder. We are launching the BlogShares Investment Club, a forum for players who have joined ShareBuilder to discuss their investments and progress.

Here's the scoop: ShareBuilder allows you to invest small amounts of money, whether as a one-time deal, or through automatic deposits. You set up an account and determine how you would like your money invested. ShareBuilder does the rest. If you want to buy into Microsoft or Google, you can do it with only a few dollars and a couple of clicks. If you can't afford a whole share of stock, ShareBuilder has the answer. You will buy only what you can afford, which often means purchasing fractions of a share. You reap all the benefits of stock ownership without the high-level capital needed with other brokers. The basic membership is free to join, with 2 other membership levels available.

BlogShares Investment Club: To join the BSIC, all you need to do is sign up for any ShareBuilder plan by first clicking on the ad to the left, and then following the instructions on the ShareBuilder site. Once your signup has been confirmed, you will receive 30 days of BlogShares Premium Membership, , and 1000 chips, all FREE for signing up. You'll also be given access to a private board in the BlogShares forum, reserved solely for players who have chosen to take advantage of the ShareBuilder program. Here, you can discuss your investment thoughts, exchange ideas and tips, and enjoy a community of BlogShares players who are taking part in this valuable opportunity.

Posted by at 4:32 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (6)

Forum Logo: Think you've got good graphic design skills? Wanna see your design used as an official BlogShares logo in the forum? Check out this mission and get crackin' on your entry. The winning entry(ies) will be used as the top banner in the BlogShares forum.

Fixes: The issue with blog owners missing their 1000 owner shares was fixed a few days ago, so you should all see this issue resolved. Also, there had been an issue previously when browsing industries that prevented players from viewing sub-industries for any industries below 3rd-level. This is now fixed, and you can view all subs as normal again.

Slash-Attack seems to have been highly successful, with a couple hundred thousand duplicate entries merged. There are still some duplicate listings that were not addressed by this script, so please continue to use the "Suggest Alternative URL" form on the blog's page.

Please don't use the Report Error link to notify about alt-urls or share discrepancies. Only use this link to report dead blogs (6+ months of inactivity), non-blogs, blog name errors, or blogs that have been voted into incorrect industries.

Places Industry: All locations are now in a new hierarchy under the Places industry. There are over 400 new cities and countries in our index, so take a moment to browse them. We are encouraging voters to vote blogs into as many correct categories as possible. IE: A blog in Houston, TX should be voted into Houston AND Texas AND USA. Please join us in the forum to discuss upcoming index changes and make suggestions for new industries.

Update: Please read this thread to understand Alt-URLs.

Posted by at 1:24 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (1)

Index Changes: We've had a hard look at the current Places and Meta location hierarchies and decided to go with a much simpler organization. We'll be reordering cities under their countries, eliminating the -Meta tag on the Industries which have them, and redefining the current Industries under Places. The end result will be a streamlined, simplified location hierarchy. Blogs will be voted into a location industry based on content and/or the location of the blog/blogger.

You'll also notice that the Weblogs industry will be changing. All current blogs in that industry will be voted out, and the category will become "Blog Services", the location for housing listings such as Persian Blog, 20.six.uk and other similar non-blogs currently in our index. Corporate will become Company Blogs, and new cities, countries, and languages will be added very soon. Other changes will also occur, and we'll keep you updated in the Index Announcements Board.

Technical Issues: We are aware that some of you are having a problem with a loss of 1000 shares in your claimed blogs. This is a widespread issue. We're working on a fix to correct this, so please bear with us.

Some blogs are also being added to the game, but not listing for trading. We are aware of this, and are working to fix this issue as well.

Posted by at 1:36 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (9)

Many of you will have noticed the changes taking place on blogs in the system. Currently, Suburban Wolf is running an extensive script to convert URLs in the game without a trailing slash to an entry with that slash. This is also merging tens of thousands of duplicate listings in the system in the process. The end result will be a vastly reduced number of duplicate listings for the same blogs.

Many of you are concerned about your blog claims, which appear to be lost, and many additional blog listings appear to be inaccessible as a result. Don't lose heart. During this hours-long process, some blogs.php pages are inaccessible until the script has run completely. Your blogs and claims to them are still in the system, and you will see them reappear once this process is complete. Claims will move with merged entries in order to retain blog ownership during and after the transition.

The indexing spiders are currently not running in order to reduce the load on the database and BlogShares resources. Once the URL-slash activity has completed and the results verified, the spiders will resume their regular operations.

Thanks for your patience in this massive operation. You can check into the forum for updates from SubWolf as he has time. So far, progress has been substantial, and again, the end result will be a much cleaner, less redundant index of blogs. As of now, SW estimates another 1-2 hours of activity, with additional time as needed to verify and validate that the script performed as expected.

Update #1 You may notice that some blog statistics, such as valuation and share holdings, will revert back to their levels of last night. SubWolf is rolling back to last night's update to ensure that everything has gone as expected. The site may be down from time to time as fixes take place.

Update #2 SubWolf's scripts are still running. It is a massive project, affecting hundreds of thousands of listings. So far, it appears to be exceptionally successful. Also: Transaction fees for ideas transactions on the Ideas Market are now in effect. See this thread for more info.

Posted by at 2:53 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (14)

We'd like to officially welcome, sprimal, Serise Carrashen, and Mad Trollie to their new posts on the BSEC. The new Index Managers include Kiran FG, Anodyne Holdings, ibebruce, Island Tiffiney, sara bear, and Sage Enterprises.

You've likely also noticed a new look to the forums. Thanks to a great deal of effort from Raymond and MrPilot, we've got a much more flexible, easier-to-browse board structure.

The Alt-URL backlog from a couple of months ago of close to 4000 suggestions has finally been cleared. Suburban Wolf will be working on a fix for duplicate entries, but in the meantime, please continue to suggest valid alternative URLs and listings to be merged with the "Suggest Alt-URL" form on each blog's page.

Posted by at 5:59 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (1)

Please welcome Dave, Ray and el Piloto to the newly-revived Admin role. They have already powered through the backlog of support requests and pending BSEC actions - I personally apologize to anyone I ignored in email in some of these busy periods. The crew is now empowered to keep me from acting as a bottleneck in the future.

We've all also been busy with a slew of bug fixes, and we pared a couple gigabytes out of the database for the new year. If something's still broken for you, please let us know. One of our next game priorities is bringing the search function back online with its new functionality. The game math is getting dusted off, too, toward destinations unknown. In the interim, here are some new features: Blogs have settable public descriptions now, with UBB markup support, so you can customize your claimed blog's BlogShares profile with your logo and whatever strikes your fancy. UBB tags themselves have been enhanced and documented. More RSS and conversation links have been scattered about to aid communication.

You'll notice new experimental ads in the left sidebar. The 'punch the monkey' ads are going away, I promise. The less freakish ones will probably remain as we work toward making BlogShares self-sustaining.

Folks percolating up the roles list, and a couple resignations due to other obligations, have left some open seats in some groups. The BSEC investigates player fraud, and the Index Managers cultivate the industry categories and the blogs within them. If you're interested in participating, see the appropriate forums.

Posted by jay at 12:25 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (8)

We're pleased to announce several additions to the site. December was a busy month.

If you're a fan of blogchips, you can now earn them by advertising other blogs on your site. As the ad system grows over the next few weeks, we will add bonus chips to the pot for any ad we find especially interesting - free exposure!

You'll notice a slew of new 'Start a conversation' or '8 comments' links throughout the site. This is a new commenting system we're rolling out, and it supports a flavor of UBB - in english, it lets you make your text bold or italics with included links and images and more. You can use 'BSUBB' in BlogShares email, Missions, and other places. More help will be available on this feature shortly.

We added several RSS feeds to the Missions and Ads systems. Visit those pages for more info. Thanks to everyone who is helping us debug. We've also switched from the defunct weblogs.com feed to the new-fangled feedmesh ping stream, so the BlogShares spiders will be much smarter about keeping up with your blog.

Posted by jay at 10:08 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (3)

The mission is now in your hands. All of them are, actually. The BlogShares Mission System now allows any member to post a request or contest for other members to respond to. Mission owners put chips into 'the pot' that can (only) be paid out to other members who enter.

So far the system has translated a phrase to 30 languages, reconstructed a BlogShares timeline, helped quiet a classroom, caused a few chuckles, and spawned a few mini-games.

One mission that needs attention is a small Java project with a 50,000 chip reward. Please help if you can. A litle simpler: find bugs on a web site.

Earn some chips in your spare time, or hire somebody for an odd job. Use your imagination, and the Mission engine could be a lot of fun.

Posted by jay at 2:17 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (3)

Tell a joke, create a popular logo, google around - earn chips doing these and more in the new BlogShares Missions.

Posted by jay at 2:15 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (2)

With the launch of QuackTrack, and the birth of some shiny new index tools, we're asking for your help in cleaning up the index.

On any blog profile in BlogShares, you'll notice a Report Error link in the upper right-hand part of the page. Use this for the following issues:

Dead Blogs--these are blogs which have been abandoned at least 6 months. Index managers will determine if the site should stay in the game.
Non-blogs such as link-farms and regular websites.
Incorrect blog titles in the BlogShares system.
Incorrect industries for a blog.

Please Do Not submit alternative URL suggestions or share discrepency issues through this link.

Great job, everyone. The index is clearly the most specific, accurate, and flexible categorization of blogs on the Internet, and will only get better with your help.

Goodbye Goats... Goats, industry #997, is being removed from the game today, December 15, at 9 PM system time. All ideas held in that industry will be destroyed, so sell them prior to that time. The other Goats industry, #996, will not be altered.

Posted by at 12:50 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (8)

We've heard this question from many players over the past few weeks, and we would like to set the record straight on this confusing industry and its sub-categories.

Meta information can be considered that which spacially, physically, or linguistically characterizes the blog and/or the blogger...

...ok, that didn't help much. Meta information for BlogShares specifically includes the language the blog is written in, as well as the physical location of the blogger.

You'll notice that there is now a sub-category of the Places industry named Continents/Regions, and under that is Africa. But, you may ask, isn't there an industry named "Africa" in Meta>Countries>Africa? There was previously, but now, that industry is called "Africa-Meta".

The Africa industry should only be used for blogs about Africa. Any blogs or bloggers located in Africa belong in Africa-Meta. Yes, many blogs will belong in both.

For right now, this is the only duality for the Places and Meta industries, but more will be added over time. Please, only vote blogs into Meta categories if they are actually based or blogged from that location, and only vote for the Places sub-industries when a blog's content deals with that location.

For example, a blog based out of Cairo with content about Cairo would belong in both Africa and Africa-Meta. A blog based in Japan about Africa would go into the (future) Japan-Meta and the new Africa industry, located under Places.

We realize this is confusing, but please bear with us as the index is transformed into a truly dynamic and representative database for the blogosphere. Feel free to bring any and all questions to the Index board in the forum.

Also, no blogs should be voted into the Meta industry. It is meant to be a placeholder, not a categorization.

Template Contest: Don't forget to get your style sheets in by December 20th. More info here.

Posted by at 8:30 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (1)

Raymond won this week's raffle, the BlogShares Box, and on the same day reset his account for the challenge of it, becoming our first Hall of Fame inductee.

New raffle: A poster from 123posters.

QuackTrack is coming along nicely, with more navigation features and fewer bugs. Help expand the world's largest blog tree by voting your favorite blogs into the right categories.

Posted by jay at 4:03 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (8)

The latest raffle prize is the official BlogShares Box 2004. Click the pic for more details. Raffle closes Friday, Dec 10 so buy your tickets now (with chips.)

QuackTrack Beta Launched!

We are pleased to announce the public beta of QuackTrack, the world's largest categorized blog index. It uses the same back-end database as BlogShares, but is a much quicker, friendlier interface for browsing. We hope it can help you find dozens more interesting blogs for your bookmark list. Like BlogShares, new features will show up weekly. Let us know what you think!

Posted by jay at 10:25 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (12)

The BlogShares Securities and Exchange Commission (BSEC) was put into place to protect users from malicious players, as well as protect the system from abuse. One of our most important tools is the Official BSEC Blog as it allows the team to communicate changes and additions to those rules in a timely manner to you, the player.

This blog will be updated to provide information on new and evolving rules, as well as for cases and pronouncements. Remember, the BlogShares Code of Conduct is one of the most important areas on BlogShares. Read it, learn it, live it.

Posted by at 9:15 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (4)

We're having a blog template contest in three categories:
We're looking for the best looking templates/styles for the following software - there's no design limits or suggestions - we just want to see the best looking styles and templates possible.


1. Movable Type
2. Wordpress
3. Blogger


We're giving you three weeks to show off your CSS!
The winner for each category gets a free premium membership & 10,000 Chips
Follow the link for details...

Continue reading "Template Contest" »

Posted by at 12:50 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (8)

Don't let the bird burn while you hunt those rare ideas or HTO PersianBlog....again. We all hope you and yours are able to enjoy an excellent day together. If not, you can always IRC over to #blogshares on intrepid.wyldryde.org (port 6667) for some holiday conversation.

The First Annual BlogShares Calendar will be ready in the next couple of weeks, just in time to get yours before the new year. This calendar features a dozen breathtaking photos shot by members of the BlogShares community from around the world. Look for an announcement on this and other BlogSharesGear like bumper stickers and shirts. You asked for the bling-bling, we're bringing it to you.

Posted by at 2:15 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Index Managers are interested in gathering a list of players who are fluent in any non-english language to assist in cleaning up the index. If you are fluent in a non-english tongue, please post your player id# and the language in this forum thread.

Your assistance will be a purely volunteer, "as you can handle it" duty which will be requested of you by Index Managers as needed. You will receive chips for your assistance. Especially needed are Japanese and Farsi readers.

Posted by at 4:27 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (7)

Posted by jay at 12:11 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (4)

Linn Skinner and the Index Managers have been working hard cleaning up the index and adding new industry categories for blogs. Over the past week, over 70 industries have been added, including Lord of the Rings and Origami.

More on contests, artefacts, voting and chips inside: click "Continue Reading"!

Continue reading "New Contest, New Industries, New Artefacts: Oh My!" »

Posted by at 12:17 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (2)

There's a new sheriff in town, the Index Manager. These folks (listed on Who's Who) are empowered to improve the Industries (blog categories) by shuffling things around and creating new Industries and Artefacts.

If you missed Island Dave's blogging contest, visit the fabulous posts by the winners to be entertained and enlightened about BlogShares trading. Watch for more contests soon, and a couple raffles.

I've enlisted the help of a few more editors, so the B$ Blog will be more lively. Coming soon: More BSEC tools for catching CHEATYPANTS.

Update - "50% of the pot" raffle ends Tuesday.

Posted by jay at 11:58 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (8)

Witness the power of a fully operational Death Star BlogShares Help System.

Endless thanks to Dave, Ray, Sage, VI, and everyone else who contributed. Not many large online games can claim their entire documentation system was written by its membership, and I'm proud of this community's undying efforts to keep BlogShares fun and fair.

Send suggestions to the team on the Documentation bulletin board. And eligible Americans - don't forget to vote Tuesday! There's a lot at stake, both nationally and in your neighborhood.

Poll: What article of BlogShares-branded clothing would you most likely wear?

Posted by jay at 10:51 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (16)

Poll: What's scarier, Halloween Night or Election Night?

The team has been in a frenzy improving the site. I can't stress enough how important the community itself has been in our continued growth. A dozen individuals have volunteered their talents and time to keep the cheaters down, the server up, and the new features rolling. It has been a real treat! Click 'Continue reading' for the tricks.

Continue reading "Five bazillion updates" »

Posted by jay at 1:54 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (15)

The new help system is now in the hands of Island Dave and the Editor team. Visit the forums to pitch in. Dave has a weekly supply of chips to gift to members who contribute to the centralized documentation and answer questions on the technical support board.

Better documentation was the number one feature requested in our anonymous surveys. Another trend we spotted was interest in moving to Wordpress, which conveniently brings us to this week's raffle: five (5) members will win one (1) year of Pro tier web hosting service from Revise Media. These folks specialize in Wordpress hosting.

Posted by jay at 4:41 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (5)

Congrats to AB Investments, Ltd., winner of that $20 iTunes certificate.

There are two different blog hosting packages we're about to give away, and I'll post a new raffle when the details are finalized.

The past couple weeks have been a little quiet, but October is going to be a big month for BlogShares. We have enhancements both fun and useful coming out, so watch this space.

Posted by jay at 12:01 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (6)

Groovy.

The winners of this week's Tag-Board.com premium membership are Farzad Esahaghi, ~scott and Falling Grace. Congratulations, folks. Send me your Tag-Board IDs (email,) and we'll get you upgraded.

Music fans: the next raffle is a $20 iTunes gift certificate. Rock on. (Though what we really want is a 64 bit Xserve G5 or two for our latest text indexing project...)

Posted by jay at 2:55 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (10)

Femme held the winning raffle ticket (after buying 16,000) and is the lucky winner of the Movable Type lifetime license granted to us by Six Apart. Congratulations! The next raffle has triple prizes.

We found and fixed a couple glitches in the new Idea valuation math. Big thanks to AlanDean, SubWolf and C for these improvements to the core game logic. More to come.

Chips went up in value since their creation, so I dropped text ad prices. Now you can attract viewers to your blog at a rate of 20 impressions per chip.

Posted by jay at 10:43 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (5)

In what is destined to be a record-setting contest... Six Apart has granted us a "100% lifetime discount" code for the A-list blogging package Movable Type to raffle off to one of you lucky BlogShares members. Buy your tickets by September 18th.

Congratulations to MrPilot of MrPilot.org, winner of last week's raffle, a copy of O'Reilly's Essential Blogging. It was synchronicity that the Six Apart folks wrote large parts of that book. The Trotts are just. that. busy.

Because of all the other ways to spend chips these days, the text ad queue has shrunk considerably (less than half a million left). If you post a great entry on your blog, drop a few chips on ads to get exposure. Most visitors to this site are bloggers themselves. Start something!

Posted by jay at 12:28 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (1)

Good to the last commodities drop. Ioannis Verdelis [blog] held raffle ticket 34156 and wins the coffee/tea gift at Java Global. Next raffle prize: Essential Blogging, written by a team of blogsphere heavyweights and published by every sysadmin's second best friend, O'Reilly.

Posted by jay at 7:25 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (5)

Microbusiness opportunities available Santa Cruz Tech has several research and commercial projects going on at any given time. Earn a resume' bullet point, BlogShares chips, or sometimes even cash by helping out. If you have skills and some spare time, email jay@blogshares.com and tell us what you're into.

If you want to earn a small pile of chips, I'd like to talk to anyone familiar with HTML who speaks spanish as their primary language, and also someone to disburse chips weekly to the BSEC and other groups (for a cut).

Posted by jay at 8:26 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (9)

Hot Stuff Coming Through Buy your raffle tickets now for Saturday's drawing: a $30 credit and free shipping at Java Global, official international coffee and tea supplier to the BlogShares crew.

Posted by jay at 12:35 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (7)

No Paypal or credit card? But you want the benefits of a BlogShares Premium Membership? Mail that $15 as a check or money order to: BlogShares / Santa Cruz Tech 303 Potrero #42-101 Santa Cruz CA 95060 USA Coming up: Coffee basket raffle prize

Posted by jay at 3:19 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (10)

When you buy text-ads with chips keep these rules in mind:

No profanity
No mentioning other members of this community in a way that could be possibly be construed as negative.
Try to keep it PG-13

You're free to your political speech just keep it cool.

If an ad violates these rules it will just be shut down, no refund - if this becomes a problem we might start fining chips for inappropriate ads. We don't have time to play nanny here.

Posted by at 12:54 PM | FrontPage | Permalink

Mishoko Sodwee won the 10,000 chip raffle with one of his 305 tickets. Somebody lost that #blogshares bet that someone would buy more than 10,000 tickets to win (1425 was the most). We're at over 100,000 categorized blogs in the hierarchy. Keep voting!

Posted by jay at 1:26 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (5)

And a merry Friday the 13th it was. The Olympic games are on. Chip salaries were distributed. Editors now have a a mailing list. SubWolf made a thousand fixes, improvements and tools. C and Aine are hammering hard on the Industries hierarchy. Dozens of other folks are pitching in to tighten this site up. Rock on. The first There (the virtual world) player to send me BlogShares mail will receive 20,000 TBUX (main server) that I need to get rid of. Are there any "Wind in the Willows" caliber children's book illustrators out there? I found you a job.

Posted by jay at 1:25 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (6)

Jaime "Phoenix" Martinez won this week's raffle for 1,000,000 ad impressions. We have no idea what he's going to post. The next raffle is for 10,000 chips. There's a running bet on #blogshares that someone will pay more than ten thousand chips to win. Thank you, everyone that volunteered to participate in the emerging documentation project. A new Table of Contents is forming and we'll have the code in place later this week to allow Editors to create and update the manual.

Posted by jay at 3:17 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (8)

Vote! We fixed the moderation bug. A 1000 blog "slush" will remain in the queue at all times to prevent the wonkiness we saw when the queue hit zero. So, go vote blogs into categories, secure in the knowledge your vote will soon be moderated and you'll earn karma (and chips). Random user-submitted BlogShares haiku: difficult, i think losing all the time is tough blogshares makes me cry.

Posted by jay at 3:55 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (5)

We ... found a bug. BlogShares members have been 'voting' blogs into categories ('Industries') and the backlog of votes awaiting approval had grown over the months to a daunting 60,000. A couple weeks ago we rolled out moderator incentives (chips) and today that queue hit zero. As a result, moderators got the same screenfuls of blogs repeatedly, and karma awards got screwy. I temporarily raised the karma level required to moderate to 10,000 so we can undo the junk votes and fix the moderation scripts.

In the meantime, help improve the system (and gain some chips) by telling us what categories a blog belongs in. More on voting, courtesy the crack team over at the revived Unofficial BlogShares Strategy Blog.

Posted by jay at 8:52 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (5)

In the midst of this week's fierce competition, David "Rutty" Rutt held raffle ticket 87421 and wins the shirt. Rutty, email me your address and indicate which BlogShares admin you want to sign the silly thing. Next week's raffle is for a million text ads on our front page. BlogShares has a new proxy server running in front of Apache, which should help us avoid the wedges we've seen this past week. As always, the whole team is kicking butt to keep up with exponential growth.

Posted by jay at 12:44 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (3)

More than 1 MILLION HITS and 100,000 UNIQUE VISITORS this month. Whew! Update: Make that 150,000 visitors and 2 million hits. Double-whew. If you would like to help BlogShares improve its help system, see this bulletin board thread. In case you haven't seen them, there are now micro-surveys with chip rewards in the right-side toolbar when you're logged in. More on surveys here.

Posted by jay at 2:26 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (3)

Congrats to sprimal, who bought the pot and won this week's raffle for a HaloScan premium account. Update: He's auctioning it off for chips. Everybody else got a one-time 25 chip credit for fun. Members of the BSEC and Math Team have received their first weekly 1000 chip stipend. Don't spend it all in one place.

Posted by jay at 12:09 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (5)

SubWolf is making progress on the search function, and chip transfers should work in IE now. Vote moderation also got some compatibility fixes. Moderation now requires 100 karma (up from 25) and new voting standards documentation is in the works.

This may sound repititious, but we've made another slew of performance tweaks, resulting in a system that's faster on average, even though it does more and the database has doubled in size -- BlogShares now tracks over 1.1 million blogs and 4 million interconnections.

Posted by jay at 12:14 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (3)

"Just kidding... I'm not pregnant, it was just a ball" -- Jamie83, winner of the last caption contest. Runner up: Luis was the only one who had seen where the ball rolled out of bounds. "There's no cup worth getting dog crap on my head," he thought. -- Guither Honorable mention: "Get in my belly!" -- Zim Winners, leave your BS ID on the thread for your chip prizes.

Although we never planned exchanges between B$ funny money and BlogShares chips, a market has sprung up on the bulletin boards. Laila is offering B$1 Billion per 1000 chips, up from earlier bids of 10k each.

Seeking opinions: Shorthand symbol for 'BlogShares chips'? B# Bc c# wot?

Posted by jay at 8:15 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (10)

The original winning ticket number was 15259, owned by Kyrah Jade Kayles, but her name is thrown around so much around BlogShares I couldn't keep a straight face to announce her as THE winner.

So, we'll give Kyrah the prize (extending her existing membership or granting it to another member) and do a second drawing.

(1 minute later...) Charlie is our second winner today. He recently became an Industries moderator and has shown great enthusiasm over this past week, as evidenced by his holding about a third of all the tickets bought. Thanks to everybody who participated! Play another raffle.

Posted by jay at 5:09 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (3)

If you link to BlogShares, put your userid in the URL to get five (5) free chips when you send someone new to our site.

http://blogshares.com/?referer=YOUR_BLOGSHARES_USERID

For instance, to give SubWolf chips, http://blogshares.com/?referer=6448

You can spend these chips on ads on our front page and various raffles, with more in the works.

The system tracks IPs, so any given user will only be able to give you (or any other BlogShares member) one award in any 8 hour period.

Posted by jay at 11:25 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (2)

For several months, registered members have improved BlogShares by voting on which categories ("Industries") a particular blog belongs in. When moderators review and approve those votes, the members have received karma points. Till now, the only use for karma points was to become a moderator yourself after accumulating 25 points.

Now those karma points also give you chips, at a rate of 25 chips per karma point. You can spend these chips on the text ad block to the upper right. More ways to earn karma and spend chips are in the works.

You now also earn karma (and chips) by moderating votes, which had previously been a completely volunteer task. Moderating will result in 1 to 3 karma points (25 to 75 chips).

Point values and exchange rates will fluxuate according to the site's needs and we'll probably make keen little graphs of it.

Update: Win a BlogShares premium membership in this week's chip raffle. Good luck!

Update 2: Win chips in our caption contest.

Bonus: A javascript view of the industry hierarchy is in beta.

Posted by jay at 10:04 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (5)

1. All outstanding BSEC resolutions have been... well, resolved. Apologies for the delay.
2. Sorted out a few shortcuts this morning. Try the following examples...
   
   Keyword Search (cheeseballs): http://blogshares.com/cheeseballs
   Keyword Search (princess): http://blogshares.com/princess
   Blog Listing (Mine): http://blogshares.com/?http://www.subwolf.org/v2/
   User Profile (6448): http://blogshares.com/?6448
   
   To clarify - keywords, just throw words after the main site address. Blogs, a question mark followed by the blog URL. User profiles, that same question mark followed by the User ID. Laziness has new meaning. ;-)
3. We fixed an old email bug, so message bodies in your system notices should be OK now.
4. Much more to come...

Posted by Suburban Wolf at 9:52 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (8)

BSEC is back now comprised of Rutty, JustJames, Arvind & MrPilot. The BSEC is an executive body that supports users, hunts down and brings CHEATYPANTS to justice and determines what exactly CHEATYPANTS is. These guys are in a lot of different time zones so only 3 out of 4 votes will be needed for them to get something done.

PS. If you're all about democracy and want to influence the way the game works and is run headover to The Math Team board and get something going, have a look at what they've done already over here.

Posted by The BSEC at 11:20 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (12)

The next three blogsharites to sign up as premium members will receive a Google Mail invitation. If there are even three bloggers out there without @gmail yet.

Update: We have given out a few invites but got a fresh batch from Google, so free gmail accounts are still available with a premium sign-up while supplies last.

Posted by jay at 5:37 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (2)

So, anyone been having trouble pulling up or buying/selling shares in some particular blogs lately? More or less than usual? Anyway - yep, we know about it, and a long-term, permanent fix is in the works. It's all about the URL's, you see, something you would think can be remarkably simple becomes 10x more complex when you factor in:
* The database storage method.
* How a requested URL is submitted.
* How the site code handles that URL.
* What the Vogon's had for lunch.
Patience, we'll have it fixed within the next 48 hours, and until then, only 0.000427% of the blogs in the system are inaccessible. :)

Posted by Suburban Wolf at 7:45 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (2)

... This Is What You Get. After spending several hours going through every post in the Feature Requests forum, here's the lowdown so far, plus other happenings. ;-)

• Karma Rewards - Initial Implementation: Double Artefact Usage.
  You vote correctly, get good Karma, you should be rewarded for it, and this is the first of several perks for your effort. The bad news? You need 750 Karma to take advantage of this feature, but other rewards are in the works that will not require such a high score to achieve.


• Easy Message Deletion
  So you purchased then claimed 100 bonds, now you've got 200 messages sitting in your inbox that you want to get rid of... now you can clear the whole lot out with a single click.


• Automated Rankings
  No more reminding an admin to run the monthly rankings script, it's now automated, so you know when the next month rolls around, your info will be up to date.


• Spider Optimizations
  You may have heard about it, the little buggers were getting so efficient, their bandwidth requirements were going up into the several-megabit range. So, we've had to slow them down a bit, but found a few more optimizations to squeeze all the performance we can out of them in this reduced state, hopefully without frying network switches.


• Bug Fix: Folder Deletion Caused Missing Stock
  Found and quashed a bug (Discovered by MrPilot) that caused stocks in a folder you delete to vanish into the ether. Also discovered another 900 or so stock entries in the same situation, moved them en masse to everyone's main folders. So, if you had some stock pop up out of nowhere, that's why.


• Good People
  Finally, kudos must go out to Alan Williamson over at Blog City, who responded to my queries in record time, providing all the information I needed and more. Thanks Alan, it's appreciated.

Posted by Suburban Wolf at 1:51 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (4)

Please thank in advance the new Math Team, comprised of the following volunteers: Admiral Justin, Alan Dean, Aine, Sprimal, and the current programming team. They will be guiding the rule and functionality changes of BlogShares in the coming months. The initial charter is posted on the Math Team bulletin board.

Posted by jay at 6:43 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (9)

click for slightly bigger

Posted by jay at 1:43 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (1)

We are creating a volunteer advisory board for BlogShares called the Math Team. These folks will have heavy input on the changes to the underlying algorithms powering the game: idea production, artefact usage, valuations, etc.

If you are interested in helping guide BlogShares, post a reply here (bb registration required) that explains why your background, knowledge and skills qualify you for inaugural membership in the Math Team.

Programming experience is a plus, to help the team understand the specific challenges in implementing any given request, but more important are:

- a thorough understanding of BlogShares play
- interest and experience in markets and game theory
- empathy for players both newbie and veteran

The Math Team will coordinate with the core programming team to determine the feasibility of any given proposal and spot potential side-effects and backlash. The processes will be informal and organic at first, getting more formalized as everyone learns how to best interact.

Our hope is that the Math Team will be able to pick out the good ideas presented by the membership at large, debate their merits and ramifications, and present to the programmers proposals that can be implemented without spending hundreds of hours reworking the code.

Democracy is a tricky model to implement in this environment, so we're asking for the best and brightest to come forward and represent the rest of the players who would like to see gameplay improve.

Side notes: For your health, you may not serve simultaneously on the BSEC and the Math Team.

Posted by jay at 12:14 PM | FrontPage | Permalink

We have a new suggestion box.

Posted by jay at 2:15 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (34)

We hear at BlogShares have recently received a vicious communique from the director of the internet federal reserve - Sir Johansen Purpleledger.

Sir Purpleledger has given us an ultimatum: either we must curb this rampant inflation or he will be forced to shut us down.

Here is an excerpt of his letter,

"Good God man! What do you bloody fools think you are doing. You can't just print money like that - who on earth do you think you are. Fine maybe EverQuest can print money in these quantities but you can't keep it. Hell if you printed money on toilet paper it would be so cheap you could sink the entire toilet paper industry (I'm on to you lot and you better not do that, my nephew Friedrich runs the Luxembourg Toilet-Paper Cartel and if you touch his market share you'll be out of the business for good)."

Our immediate response is to shut down the ability for players to issue new bonds - the bond market is apparently "... summarily & categorically out of control."

We'll be taking more across the board action as time allows in order to curb inflation and get Sir Purpleledger of our back.

Posted by at 12:17 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (8)

I had promised a free month extension to BlogShares premium accounts; just now I extended all memberships by two. Happy Woody Woodpecker Day. (Shaggy was born today as well.)

update PremiumMember set expires = expires + interval 60 day;

Posted by jay at 3:17 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (9)

SubWolf and C have made some dramatic improvements to the back-end of BlogShares. Lag is now (usually) minimal and the spiders are making a full run every 24 hours. The BSEC is actively policing abuse. The forums are lively, more talent is coming on board, the numbers are picking up... it's a good day to be a B$er. Thank you, everybody.

Posted by jay at 4:56 PM | FrontPage | Permalink

The database modifications cause some issues - the improved speed caused several SQL queries to interact strangely - fortunately none of them where critical.

The following pages will be down for a few days
top100.php top100users.php top100volume.php top500.php topblogs.php topstock.php toptraders.php

Posted by at 5:59 PM | FrontPage | Permalink

Database upgrades are complete, the spiders are definitely benefitting from the upgrade. We'll see how the rest of the site benefits - thanks for bearing with us through the upgrade.

Great thanks to blogshares team member SubWolf!

Posted by at 1:39 PM | FrontPage | Permalink

We will be making some major upgrades to the database today the site will be going down for several hours in about an hour or two.

Sorry to do this on the weekend but this also when we have the most free time to commit to improving B$.

If it works out, give subwolf a medal.

Posted by at 6:15 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (1)

We've fixed share and mailbox bugs and we're now focusing on SQL efficiency. A documentation wiki is in the works.

Posted by jay at 9:50 PM | FrontPage | Permalink

Forums are back. None of the old lost content, unfortunately, but a place to discuss the game and make player deals.

Posted by jay at 9:48 PM | FrontPage | Permalink

We installed a new SQL server (4 GB RAM) on the backside of Blogshares this evening. The site will probably never be zippy but it's certainly more usable. Let me know if you see any problems.

Update: It's going to take more resources than this, even. We're adding hardware, tuning the environment and tweaking the php and java to speed things up. We appreciate your patience.

Posted by jay at 5:33 AM | FrontPage | Permalink

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Posted by jay at 8:09 PM | FrontPage | Permalink