B$ Strategery

Project Bootstrap is well under way. This is the code name I've given to my effort to get the values of my blogs back up to where they had been a few weeks back, before the market slid into the toilet.

I had made some early headway, but was foiled when some other blogs that link here changed their links, and crashed their incoming values to me, and it's been a slow slide ever since, despite my best efforts. At long last, things have stabilized, and we're now on the upswing again.

A few other blogs that link here have taken my advise on linking, and increased their outgoing links to about 3x the incoming, and have further linked to those that link to blogs that link to them, seeding things further, and this is now paying off by a nice upward swing.

At this point, just having one more blog increasing their links this way would result in an even greater boost, I'm sure...

Regarding my last entry, having more than 3x outgoing as incoming is OK, you still get the boost, but obviously the outgoing value is split among all of your outgoing links. One blog I know has over 8x as many outgoing as incoming, and is still seeing the boost.

A rough formula: Outgoing Value * # of Outgoing Links / Blog Value. If you're not hitting the sweet spot, this value will be close to 1. If you're hitting it, it will be something around 5-8, depending on the exact ratio of links.

I don't have an exact formula, and probably never will, but the sweet spot for maximizing outgoing link value seems to be to have about 3x as many outgoing links as incoming ones, give or take a few percentage points either way. If you have 10 incoming links, having 30 outgoing will gain you a boost. 20 incoming means 60 outgoing, etc.

Obviously, linking to those linking to you should help. An idea I've been playing with is to also link to blogs that link to blogs linking to me. As long as I have extra links to spread around, seems like a sound strategy.

Problem is many blogs linking to me are in a freefall at the moment, and many have the wrong number of outgoing links to stabilize things at the moment. Might have to ride the fall before the upswing can begin.

That is the question...

The game has a great tool called 'Ask your stock broker', which will let you see at a glance what blogs you hold shares in will benefit from reindexing. Unfortunately, if you're looking to reindex, say, a blog that links to you, there is no easy way to tell if it will go up or down in value. Do not assume that if your blog is on the rise, that reindexing anything coming in or going out is a good idea.

I've found it handy to whip out the old calculator and punch in the numbers manually to see if it's worth it. I usually just enter up to the hundred thousand place (B$25,485,434.10 becomes 254, etc, no rounding), and total up everything over 100k in value. If this is greater than the blog's current value, reindex. If it's very close, then I'll redo the numbers going down to the thousands place (B$25,485,434.10 becomes 25485), and see what happens there.

If you're reindexing something that links to you, never reindex if the value is going to drop.

I hadn't been paying attention, obviously, because this whole topic passed me by. Apparently, players investing in corporations who have more than B$ 1Q invested lose out on interest payments. Whoopsie! Obviously, the quick fix is to withdraw funds so that your invested balance is below 1Q, but what to do with the rest?

A solution suggested to me by another player was to create your own new corp, basically a sole proprietorship, with only you as the member. Corporation interest rates depend on the value of your shares holdings, but with the new math, it isn't hard to amass sufficient holdings (I have no idea what the cutoff here really is...) to earn the max rate of 0.5%. So, invest some sum less than 1Q in your corp, then donate any additional funds to the corp that you wish, and make sure that this is set as your primary corp.

You will then earn interest on the invested amount, and the corp will earn interest on the donated funds, which are entirely under your control. Also, be sure not to reinvest your earnings, or your invested amount will increase to over 1Q, and you're screwed again.

I was starting to make sense of things, generally, but this one seems to be a new twist. On the 25th, the outgoing value dropped greatly, with the addition of one incoming link. But earlier, the same incoming and outgoing numbers kept a high outgoing value.

I suspect that the code is being tightened on what ranges or ratios between these values causes a boost.

Same as the last one, blog value rose, but the outgoing value dropped greatly. What changed was that the number of incoming links increased, and outgoing decreased.

Here's an interesting one, the blog's value has gone up, but the outgoing value has dropped on the most recent reindex. Incoming links dropped, and outgoing links increased.

Here's one that looks like the blogroll isn't catching every time, possibly those frequent times when blogrolling.com goes down. Note the change in outgoing link value in relation to the number of outgoing links.

Blog valuation is the combined total of the incoming links. The incoming link values are the outgoing link values of those blogs. Generally, the higher the value of a blog, the greater it's outgoing link value. At least, that's how it used to be...

Under the new math, this is still generally true, but some blogs put out more value than other, higher valued blogs. This is one of the interesting twists in the new math. I'm investigating some examples of this.