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 (11)

By now, most active players have noticed that we are selling off the chip holdings of inactive players. The net effect has been a significant (60% or more) reduction in the value of chips, as this untapped supply has found its way to the market.

Continue reading "Chip Sales" »

Posted by The GIC at 10:02 AM | GIC News | Permalink | Comments (1)

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

As of October 3rd, 2008, there are 344 Blogshares industries with ZERO blogs. Your mission? Go find blogs to fill in those gaps. Blog about your journey and enter here for prizes, too! Details in the Contests page

HUGE PRIZES!!!!

OMG!11!!!!!1! PONIES!

Curious about how you're doing against the competition? Gotcha covered. Check out the Contest Tracking Page!

Posted by The GIC at 12:02 PM | GIC News | Permalink

Some of you have noticed an increasing number of blogs added to the index in the past week (click the image for a larger view).

While the impact isn't huge, yet, it has the potential to grow very quickly. Last Spring, our former Admin (and still friend) AdamF developed a solution called CleanFeed. The basic concept is to take in the content of the ping cloud and sort out the wheat from the chaff. SubWolf and I have been working over the last couple of weeks to tidy up and get CleanFeed online, permanently. It's moving along pretty nicely, but there are still some limitations on what the system can do.
The numbers are pretty staggering. In the course of a few minutes, we grab 30-50 thousand pings from the cloud. About 9% of those appear to be "good" blogs. Our blacklists screen out 46%, and unsafe file extensions or banned top level domains filter out 31%. We also see 6% with no dates or not enough posts, 6% time out, and 3% return an error when CleanFeed tries to read them.
For now, you should see an average of 10 entries per minute added to the index. You'll have lots of opportunities for chips, karma and sigma from voting these new blogs and killing off our mistakes. If you see any patterns emerging, please let us know so we can tweak the filters.

--
Ken

Posted by The GIC at 6:08 AM | GIC News | Permalink | Comments (1)

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)

Operation Potent Wind is designed to introduce two new effects on the Blogshares economy: an increase in blog values, and more variation in value among the various blogs. The first phase involves elimination of one of the game's oldest features, a B$ 25,000 cap on outgoing link values. In the graph below, you can see that the distribution of blog values follows a power law between B$ 0 and 25,000, but then ends at the original limit.
(click on the graphs for larger versions)

Our first step toward eliminating the cap was to double it to B$ 50K. We decided that this would be healthier for the game than simply letting things float, as it would give players time to adjust to the new conditions. The chart below shows the end state distribution after this change -- about 75% of the formerly capped blogs were now at their "natural" state.

At this point, we had originally planned to implement a new algorithm for blog link value, and eliminate the cap, but I felt there was additional value to be gained in stretching out the transition. The next chart shows the impact on outgoing link values seen from increasing the limit to B$ 100K - we get even closer to a true power law, but it's possible there is still more room for improvement.

Looking at the 700 or so blogs stuck at the outgoing link limit, we can see that over half have no outgoing links, and only 112 have more than a single outbound link. This means that we are probably at the point of diminishing returns, and don't need another step in outgoing link value before moving on to Phase 2.

One final chart in this post - the daily valuation of the total blogs market since we started Potent Wind. For the first week or so of Phase 1, you can see a generally stable trend, followed by a huge leap on January 6th. In the early part of the project, we allowed blog values to propagate naturally as players indexed their blogs. This effort concentrated on the few hundreds of blogs with the most value, and gave us a relatively stable market value for the first time in recent memory.

On January 6th, we fed the remaining capped blogs directly into the spiders, and realized a huge leap in overall blog value. We then let things settle for another week, and raised the cap again. You can see from the chart that blog valuation appears to be accelerating upward, with a glitch on January 1th caused by the elimination of a top-5 blog from the game.

Our next step will be to introduce the new algorithm for outgoing link values. We will be removing the limits, and players should see a whole new class of blogs grow in value.

Posted by The GIC at 5:28 PM | GIC News | Permalink