Blogshares went ‘live‘ about 6 hours ago (they use some funky time preference that is not customizable at this point, Euro-centric even!). I sent Seyed $10 to become a Premium Member (you get both secret handshakes and many womens) and ran into a snag.
You see, I wanted to buy as much stock in all of the blogs I control (which is 10 now). I knew that I would receive 1000 shares in each of the blogs once the reset occurred, what I did not know was that each of the blogs I owned that received these 1000 shares counted as a transaction. The current set up for today is: you can only make 10 transactions in the first 12 hours of Blogshares going live. This was done so that Premium Members would not buy all the shares of ‘good’ stock floating around (non-Premium members cannot as many during the 12 hours).
So, I made the best of a not-so-bad situation and bought a $10,000 bond from the BS100 which has already matured to $10,214.41. In retrospect I think I would have wanted to buy a bond in the BS1000 because that is where alot of changes are always occuring and I’m all about rapid movements. The bond I bought was a BS100, which is similar to the Blue Chips or DJIA (Dow Jones Industrial Average): not necessarily mature companies (in terms of existence) but definitely the most popular (in terms of how many blogs link to it). And since there was a month of ‘testing’ in which 45000+ blogs have been scanned to see what they link to, these 100 will probably not fluctuate much (though if everyone decided to stop linking to MT or Radio you could see their price crash).
For those of you who want to know what the most ‘popular’ blogs are in the Blogosphere, the Top 100 is just for you (these are based on incoming links).
This brings me to what Anders Jacobsen discussed earlier today: selling links on eBay. Apparently (and yea, I knew this) the fact that blogs link to each other, in a maddening way boosts the Google PageRank of the blogs that link to one another. Some individuals consider this cheating the system, because link-farms (spam sites that have hundreds of links which link to one another and you can buy a spot on the list so your site appears higher in search engine results) are considered to be ‘unethical.’
I see no problem with bloggers linking to one another, in fact, that’s what makes them so useful. I can learn a lot about a person just by seeing who they link to on the side: what they are interested in reading. In fact, if one is to moan and groan about blogs linking to one another, then one should also complain about any site that does, including: CNN, Slashdot, BluesNews… any site that links to another site – after all the idea of PageRank is to show numerically how important and legitimate your site is (Google considers it a ‘voting’ mechanism – each link is a ‘vote’ of legitimacy).
Now this guy named Tony Pierce offered to link to another site by posting an eBay bid: whoever bid the most he would link to (sure you can say it’s similar to opt-in ‘Link Farms’ but it can also be seen as advertisement revenue). And yes, someone paid $30 to have Mr. Pierce link to their site, I would do the same (hint, hint).
Which brings me to BlogAds.com. I signed up about two weeks ago for both kicks and because one day someone might want to run an ad on my blog (Richard Giles mentioned it too). However, they take a 20% cut of whatever I sell – that’s ridiculous. I could merely create a “If you want to advertise here, contact me” and then set up whatever code I need to make an ad for them.
I thought a little more on the idea and decided that Collectrix could offer a ‘free’ banner service for our clients. Coding could be linked with a javascript (similar to how Blogads works) and we could automate it with a combination of PHP/MySQL. Well, before I jumped the gun and asked my geek friends to code it, I did a simple Google search for “open source text ads” and wouldn’t you know it, my idea not only exists but has been expanded upon 1000% — and it’s all open source via the GPL.
It’s called PHPAdsNew and it is a spin off of TextAds an open-source PHP system that stopped development about a year ago (gotta love how new teams pick up where others stop).
It can do just about any type of advertisement for a site: Text, PopUp, Banner and even Flash. And the best part of it all: it’s free to use, install, modify, sell, etc. – say good bye to the 20% cut. I’m in the process of putting together the ad system now and yes, have formulated a business plan through charging for ‘installation.’ So if you have a blog, want an advertisement system that doesn’t take a 20% cut, we could possibly work out an installation deal with you (not too difficult).
Well, enough self-promotion.
Lastly, if you don’t have much of an audience currently, make sure you write for the kind you would like one day. What I mean by this is: today search engines scour your blog and index your musings. Tomorrow someone could be looking for the very thing you are talking about, they query a search engine and your site pops up. They click and read and become hooked (or at least visit frequently). Note: there are many ways to optimize your blog for search engines, SearchEngineWatch has some good tips on that as well.