Planting and Pruning in the Desert of the Real. by elran
According to their site, BlogShares is “a fantasy stock market where weblogs are the companies.” This fantasy is just a really, really complex and sophisticated game, but it’s real enough that professors, engineers, even financial writers have commented on it and begun to play.
What began in 2003 as an “exploration of an emerging social network” and an experiment to prove the Power Law theory, seems to have taken on a life of its own. To give you an idea of how fast the site has grown, in just over 2 years, BlogShares has gone from indexing 40,000 blogs to almost 4,000,000. Today the game has added many different forms of currency including Shares, Ideas, Chips, B$, raffles, and text ads to name a few. Ideas as a form of currency? Sounds lovely to me.
As with every system that requires voluntary contributions of time to function, people play for their own reasons (or write open code for their own reasons, or make art, or sing in the Sunday choir.)
Some want to rank in the top 100. Some play for the strategy, or to test their trading skills. Others play for the extra site exposure (which can translate into ad income), or simply to find more blogs to read. Like any successful virtual micro-economy [Ebay comes to mind], it works because everyone is able to find their own reason to participate or contribute.
And real world things seem to get done in these virtual micro-economies without any actual money.
What Ebay and BlogShares seem to have in common is a way for people to convert material things (products, services, even junk) into virtual currency. This type of currency can take many forms (paypal dollars or blogshares dollars). But once in this state, the object is charged with a certain amount of energy (a virtual market value). The amount of energy is directly proportional to the number of people who participate in a given community or marketplace. More people, means more matter (or potential energy). If this energy is then applied in a certain direction (for example by purchasing something), it sets off a chain reaction that continues indefinitely.
While in motion, the boundaries between virtual and real market cease to exist. People with billions of BlogShare dollars (B$) can buy real things. For instance, I saw someone who had a logo designed for his website and payed for it entirely in B$. But the effects of this transaction will not stop there, it keeps going and going. Think entropy or Energizer bunny. Think Newton’s First Law of Motion, where “an object in motion tends to stay in motion,” and then think about how the Internet space is filling up with all kinds of these waves and frequencies, and how a new blogger is born every second. And how it’s possible, with much hard work, for that blogging to accumulate enough momentum that it generates enough money to live off of. (check out this post, and actually, all of the sites by Marshall Brain)
How will these money-less economies develop in the near future? Will they extend their reach even further across the boundaries of virtual and real? Are those boundaries real?
Essentially, Blogshares is a secondary level of mechanisms branching off from the blog phenomenon, which is a secondary branching from personal websites. Blogs make web publishing easy and so streamline access to the one-to-many communication of the Internet. And systems like Blogshares, Technorati, TruthLaidBear, Bloglines, Feedster, Blogpulse,(etc) help overcome the overwhelming muchness of all those blogs by providing different ways to access and to rank them.
And so these are all different formulations of the same old game of interconnection between all of us humans and all of our ideas. Large architectures of our combined interests and energy. And what’s more real then that?
A version of this article by Elran Oded was originally published on TechBlog under the title “Blogshares: Welcome to the Desert of the Real.” In this edited and expanded version the authors continue to explore the boundaries between and real and virtual. This version was coauthored by Elran Oded and Risa Dickens.
Leave a Comment