BlogShares

» see blogshares.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

To play BlogShares you had to already be inside the anglophone blogroll economy, and I never was. The game priced a blog by counting who linked to it, so the pleasure of it was watching your own name acquire a number and then watching other people trade on it. In 2003 I was nineteen and at university in Turkey, MSN was where the entire social layer of my life sat, and the blogs I read were in English and had no idea I existed. There was no seat at that table for a reader.

The thing was written in early 2003 by Seyed Razavi, an Iranian-born UMIST graduate working as a software architect in Manchester. The design is one sentence long. Blogs are the companies and their share price comes from inbound links from other indexed blogs. Players traded with a currency called B dollars that was never worth anything and was never meant to be.

It got large fast for a side project. Joi Ito wrote it up at the end of March 2003, Boing Boing followed, and for most of that year checking your own valuation was a thing bloggers did the way people now check follower counts. At its widest the index tracked well over two million weblogs sorted into more than two thousand industries.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how the game worked ~

Underneath the share price there was an economy with far more moving parts than the premise needed. Blogs produced commodities called Ideas inside whatever category they had been filed under, and Ideas traded on their own market. There was a second currency, Chips, that you earned through referrals or were handed as gifts. There were artifacts you could build and leveraged buyouts you could run against other players, plus forums and a private messaging system for arranging all of it.

The best part was the regulator. The BSEC, the Blogshares Securities and Exchange Commission, was staffed by players and existed to investigate cheating in a game with no money in it. A convicted cheat was publicly labeled CHEATYPANTS. That combination, elaborate market mechanics with zero stakes and a volunteer enforcement body taking it seriously anyway, is a fair description of what people built on the web before anybody worked out how to charge for it.

~ the two crashes and the third ~

The first ending came in December 2003, nine months in. Razavi announced that the site would not be coming back from its latest technical failure, that the crash had proved the game needed an active operator and a developer rather than one person doing both in his spare time, and that there would not be enough income to cover the next month's hosting. Boing Boing ran it on 3 December. Then it came back anyway, because Jay Campbell of Santa Cruz Tech took it over, with a lot of the code coming from a player known as Suburban Wolf.

The second was the database server failing in late 2011. That one took months and the game was back online by 16 March 2012. The third came with no notice of any kind. The last working capture of blogshares.com is 14 September 2016, and by the first week of October the address had stopped serving the game and was redirecting visitors to a single comic image on xkcd's servers, which somebody chose deliberately. By June 2017 it was a NameBright parking page. In 2026 the domain forwards to a hotel site in Krakow, which is an afterlife nobody plans and most dead domains get.

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