BlogShares is a “fantasy stock market for weblogs.”

The idea appears to be that folks get $500 virtual dollars to invest in weblogs whose valuation appears to be based on “the incoming links to it and a host of other calculations”. Translation, if “higher priced” weblogs link to you, your valuation goes up.

At this exact moment, RinR has a valuation of $93.72 with an outgoing link value of $32.29. RinR has .0089% of the total weblog market which, wow, really means nothing to me. I’ve laid a claim for this weblog which means that I had to stick an image on the front page of the site. It’s on the right side below the search form. This proves that I own my weblog and allows me to IPO the site. Strangely, I feel after this IPO I will still be eating cheerios for dinner.

My gut tells me that while an interesting toy, Blogshares will suffer the same fate of Friendster. HEY INTERESTING IDEA — IT’S VIRAL — MUCH SUCCESS — NO BUSINESS PLAN — SERVERS FULL — NO MONEY TO BUY MORE — END OF TOY.

[3/30/03 Update]: The current top player is Mena Trott. Why? Because given the rule set Blogshares uses, Moveable Type is the most valuable weblog. Trott is co-creator of the site/product and; therefore, gets a chunk of the initial shares making her the instant Bill Gates of the fledging Blogshares community.

Additionally, here’s my current holdings:

Rands in Repose – 1000 shares @ $.02

NY Times – 10 shares @ $18.87

Popdex – 5 shares @ $4.09

WSJ – 5 shares @ $2.34

Agonist – 2 shares @ $10.05

Movable Type – 1 share @ $273.13

My portfolio is currently valued @ $576.02 — the Movable Type stock is up ~ $50 since I invested two hours ago. Wuuuuuh?

[4/2/03 Update]: Several days later and my portfolio is now worth a cool $952.66 dollars. I sold my WSJ at a slight profit, but relative to the gains of the rest of the portfolio.. it was a pittance. The Movable Type stock has essentially doubled. RinR IPO’d earlier this week and has held steady at two cents a share. Even with such a dismal share, a majority of the available shares have been sold. I’d like to say that I’m committed to increasing shareholder value, but that’d just be silly.

[4/7/03 Update]: Five days later and with zero trading activity my portfolio has dropped to a dismal $436.39. The majority of the loss appears to be Movable Type dropped from ~$600 a share to it’s current price of $71.47. No news as to why MT dropped to a tenth it’s price, but the Blogshares site appears to be handling decent load with dignity.