Seyed Razavi's Blog Shares is a fantasy stock market for weblogs. By tracking the links between web sites, and doing a little simple math, BlogShares allows people to buy and sell shares based on the economy of attention online. Add a message board, and play money, and you have rich role-playing, the potential for cheating and perhaps influence peddling.

Today I played BlogShares (see my profile). I had some starting capital; I decided to invest not according to the quality of blog, but based solely on the stock price and social networks. I looked for weblogs within one to three degress of separation from Game Girl Advance, weblogs with prices under $.08. Some weblog shares I purchased were valued at zero, which seemed to be a temporary condition (see: blogshares forums: Bug? buying stock at 0). Other weblog shares I paid a bit more money for, if they had certain other key investors, folks I deem as weblog link-distributing hubs. In the case of MonkeyX.com, I bought shares in that for well over $1 since many of the most valued stocks on BlogShares are web tool makers. MonkeyX is the website of the guy who made BlogShares and I forsee more incoming links to him and his site.

I had an email exchange with Seyed Razavi:

Recently I've been studying multiplayer online games, and the rules systems they use to structure strong societies. So I enjoyed ready your honor system policy towards cheating and exploits.

Yeah, there is good gamesmanship and acceptable manipulation and there's plain cheating. Right now [we're] in beta - [cheating] isn't hard so the honour system really comes to the fore. There's a little community brewing on the site and it's in everyone's interest to keep things honest.

The whole site is a social experiment... The most visible part is the whole stock market thing but the really interesting stuff goes beyond that. I love the roleplaying posts people are doing and I think as things settle down some really interesting behaviour will come to the fore. At a minimum, quite a few people have mailed me to thank them for introducing them to this or that blog... That goes to the core of what it's all about.

I was pondering how power law distributions of attention on the net work and decided that a game that simulated it would a) make the nature of attention explicit and b) show that human behaviour transcends these generic models. Some people get the concept, whilst others just look at it at face value and miss the irony of it.