How’s this for an interesting complementary diversion to your daily blogging habits? You can now buy and sell shares in a simulated stock market that deals in blogs called, what else, BlogShares.

BlogShares is a fantasy stock market for weblogs (aka blogs), web sites written by amatuers and professionals alike. The purpose of this manual isn’t to try to define what a blog is and so it’ll assume familiarity with blogs and blogging.

BlogShares is partly a game where registered users can speculate on the value of a blog by buying and selling shares in them. It is also an evolving snapshot of a limited portion of the Blogosphere (the universe of blogs) tracking the single commodity that drives BlogShares: the hyperlink. Blogs are valued on the basis of their incoming links and add value to the market by linking to other known blogs. The valuation process is based on a principal of popularity or how many other blogs like a particular blog. However, in BlogShares not all participants are equal. The value of an incoming link is a factor of the linker’s own popularity. This has some interesting effects on the network of blogs which are discussed in market observations.

Stupid Evil Bastard is already listed with a valuation of $2467.45 and a current share price of only $.32/share ranking it 446th out of 500. Yeah, I know it means we suck, but try to think of it as being more like one helluva bargain.

Anyway, this site is just the Alpha version of this little blog popularity game so the URL will be changing before too much longer once the “real” site is ready to go. Still, you can go help test it and play along and see how well you do.

Found, as per usual, through Scott’s site who is officially blaming Solonor for it.