System Time: 13:10 15 Oct 2008 - 6 Players Online

Blog

The BlogShares Blog

On the home page of BlogShares there is, naturally, a blog. This one is maintained by the game's Board of Directors, Admins, and the Game Improvement Committee. They post site information and keep everyone up-to-date on the latest happenings. The full blog, with all previous front page posts, is hosted at Blogshares.com/bs.

What is a Blog

Blog Description

Weblogs, called blogs for short, are generally online journals of some sort and can be used for an unlimited range of subjects and purposes.

Blogs run from individual diaries to arms of political campaigns, media programs, and corporations, and from one occasional author to large communities of writers. The totality of weblogs or blog-related web pages is usually called the blogosphere.

The format of blogs varies nearly limitlessly, however, the following must be true for the blog to be considered valid for inclusion in the BlogShares index:

Blog Requirements

It is difficult to know just what is and what is not a blog suitable for inclusion in BlogShares. For the purposes of this game, blogs must fit the following criteria:

• The blog is authored by a clearly defined blogger, such as:
  • a specific individual
  • a specific individual posting as another
    • parody blogs (fake celebrities)
    • blogs written by someone's cat, dog, infant, etc.
  • a group of individuals
  • a specific organization
  • a specific company

• Posts appear in reverse-chronological order, or at the very least, the most recent post appears first.

• Posts are individual and dated.
  • Timestamps, while helpful, are not required.

• Individual posts have some sort of permanent URL (permalink) with which to link to them.

• Past posts are available in some sort of archive in the blog.

• Commenting and/or trackback capability is often enabled, but not a requirement.

• Blogs can feature any subject, be personal, non-personal, or business-related, and offer content unique to the blog with each new post.

• Blogs must be human edited. The following do not follow this guideline:
  • Blogs posted to by automated scripts
  • Blogs that are link or post aggregators
  • Blogs that contain only feeds of other blogs.

• Blogs are only the main, 'home' page for the blog, and not:
  • link pages
  • archives
  • individual posts
  • intros
  • summary pages
  • profiles.

• Blogs must have at least one post in the last six months.

Special Cases

These are few special cases or common mistakes made about deciding what is and is not a blog.

• Two sites which are commonly and incorrectly assumed to be non-blogs are About.com and Flickr.
  • Primary About.com pages (such as this) are blogs.
  • Primary Flickr pages (such as this) are blogs.

• Flickr category, collections, and group pages are not considered blogs.

• MSN Live Spaces Photo Albums are not considered blogs, only the blog module can be counted. If the blog module appears on the front page it is a blog.

• LiveJournal Communities are considered to be blogs, so long as they are publicly readable.

Social Network Blogs

The following are valid social network blogs, and should be added / linked as follows:

• Twitter Blogs
  • URL by username. i.e. http://twitter.com/username
  • Title is typically "Twitter / username"
  • Only public twitter pages are valid for addition. Friends-only are invalid.

• Pownce Blogs
  • URL by username, sent items only. i.e. http://pownce.com/username/sent/
  • Title is typically "Pownce : username"
  • Only public pownce pages are valid for addition. Friends-only pownces are invalid.

• Jaiku Blogs
  • URL by username. i.e. http://username.jaiku.com/
  • Title is typically "Jaiku : Display Name"
  • Only Jaiku's with original content are valid. Those that only aggregate twitter / pownce / etc. posts are not valid.

• Plurk Blogs
  • URL by username. i.e. http://www.plurk.com/user/username
  • Title is typically "Display Name - Plurk.com", however is configurable by the user, and should be set accordingly.
  • Plurk blogs do not properly pick up outgoing links at this time

• Kwippy Blogs
  • URL by username, sent items only. i.e. http://www.kwippy.com/username/kwips/
  • Title is typically "username's kwips page"

• Brightkite Blogs
  • URL by username. i.e. http://brightkite.com/people/username
  • Title is typically "Display Name (username) - brightkite.com"

• Tumblr Blogs
  • URL by username, i.e. http://username.tumblr.com/
  • Title is configured by user, set as displayed.
  • Tumblr's must match above blog guidelines, as they are heavily user configurable.

• MeeMi Blogs
  • URL by username, i.e. http://www.meemi.com/username
  • Title is typically "www.meemi.com/username"

What is NOT a Blog

In BlogShares, there are many blogs that are not considered to be blogs, such as the following:

Non-Blogs

Non Blogs are web pages that do not conform to our definition of what a blog is. Often, they are a result of what was a blog no longer being one.

Example Non-Blogs

• Regular webpages.
• Blogs without dated posts.
• Blogs without archives.

Dead/Inaccessible Blogs

• A Blog not posted to in the last six months.
• A 404 (Not Found) error page.
• The blogger indicates that the blog is no longer being maintained or updated.
  • Also known as the "Goodbye Cruel World" post.

Inaccessible Blogs

Inaccessible blogs are blogs that are either unreadable by a portion of the public, or unreadable by the site spiders.

Example Inaccessible Blogs

• A Blog you must login to read.
• A Blog that requires a password to read.
• A Blog that requires you to verify your age, sex, location, etc else to read.
• A Blog that requires additional navigation (i.e. 'Click here for blog' links)
• A Blog that requires a specific browser to read.

Spam Blogs

Spam blogs are artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings. The purpose of a spam blog can be to increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Spam blogs are usually a type of scraper site, where content is often either inauthentic text or merely stolen from other websites. These blogs usually contain a high number of links to sites associated with the spam blog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites.

Note: Link farms, which contain no content posts, are considered spam. Blogs which link to many, many others do not fall into this category if they contain real content.

Example Spam Blogs

• Aggregators
• Standard Spam
• Commercial Spam

Forums

Forums are websites where users sign up to discuss various topics. Topics may be started by anyone, commented on by anyone, and taken completely off-topic by anyone.

Example Forum

Malware / Spyware

Spyware or Malware blogs are any blogs (or websites) that attempt to install any program on your computer without your consent. These should be considered dangerous, and removed from the index.

How Blogs are Added to BlogShares

Currently, there exist a number of ways in which blogs have found their way into the BlogShares game system.

• Prior to about 2006, many blogs were added directly using popular ping clouds - this practice has been discontinued since it was resulting in a lot of spam.

• Any user of BlogShares can add a blog to the system that is not already listed, provided it meets the above criteria of "What Is A Blog?"

To see blogs that have been recently added to the game, check out the Added.php page.

Your Blogs

On the right-side of the page, in the Members Area, there is a link to [Your Blogs]. Click this link to see a table with all your currently claimed blogs listed. From here you can perform up to 5 functions:

This gives you additional functions that you can perform on your Claimed Blogs, see Blog Listing for an explanation of those options.

What Are Blog Shares ?

-> Shares redirects here.

Shares in a blog can be viewed as similar to shares of publicly traded corporate stock, with each blog being a company. Each share represents a financial interest in the success of the blog. Upon being listed for trading, all blogs start the game with 5000 shares. 1000 are automatically reserved for the blog's actual owner, with the rest being Non-Owner Shares that are owned by the public. For more information on becoming the owner of your blog's listing in the system, see Claiming Your Blog.

Every blog in the game goes through a three-step process prior to being fully available to players for trade.

First, the blog is added as described above. Next, once the URL for the blog is added to the BlogShares system, the blog must await a reindexing. This will cause a spider to parse the blog, and gather initial information from the site. Basically, this involves verifying the blog's URL and then recording the outgoing links. Also, the blog's URL is compared against outgoing links from other blogs, also referred to as "incoming links". After this, the blog's listing in the game will reflect any incoming or outgoing links which are made from/to other blogs listed in the system. Links to/from non-blogs or blogs not yet in the system will not count toward your blog's valuation.

Remember that BlogShares is a totally fictional market, and shares in the game in no way reflect actual ownership of a blog. Although when a blog if formally claimed, the true blog owner gets 1,000 shares free, he/she may do whatever they wish with those shares, without it reflecting any intent to sell or transfer the blog in the real world.

Alternate URLs

-> AltURL redirects here.

One of the problems with relying on automated grabbing of new URLs for the system is the fact that the programs have a hard time understanding that http://blogshares.com , http://blogshares.com/ , http://www.blogshares.com , and http://www.blogshares.com/ are all the same site. Instead, the current system will create four separate entries for the above example.

When you run across duplicate blog entries for the same site, don't panic! This is perfectly normal, and you are likely to encounter this numerous times during game play (a fix is currently being put into place).

The solution to this problem requires a manual adjustment by an administrator. In order to alert an admin that duplicate URLs exist for one site, there are two places to do so. For one, scroll down the blog's page until you find the "Suggest Alternate URL for below the Options and Members Area boxes on the right-hand side of the page. Enter the URL for the blog's other entry in the system (use the actual URL for the blog, not the URL to the blog's page in BlogShares). Click Suggest. The other location is on the middle column on the blog's page, below the Share Tracking and Share Owner's sections. Use the same steps to report an error here.

From there, an administrator will verify the request, and if appropriate, will merge the two entries. At that point, the blog will have only one entry with one URL as the main one on the blog's page, and the other appearing in the lower section of the blog's page.

More on alt-URLs here.