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March 15, 2008

About...

Blogshares is a fantasy stock market where weblogs are the companies. Players invest fictional dollars in a wide spectrum of blogs. Blogs are valued by both incoming and outgoing links, and can add value to other blogs by linking to them. Prices increase or decrease based on trading and the underlying value of the blog. No actual ownership of blogs is transferred: BlogShares is purely a fictional marketplace for entertainment purposes only.

This blog will contain tips and other nonsense for anyone interested.

The new math

Several 'new maths' have come and gone, the latest being to change how blogs are valued in the game, and this has led to a lot of renewed interest in shares play, and new strategies to increase profit for those players with blogs in the game. I'm working on understanding the math, and use it to my advantage.

Player Eaglehawk has created a blogroll (a list of blogs that can be included on a player's site to provide links to other blogs in the roll) in the hopes of adding value to players blogs. This sort of thing has great potential, I believe.

March 16, 2008

Blogroll

Some players are using the new blogshares.com version of the blogroll, rather than the original blogrolling.com version. Unfortunately, the javascript version of this is of no use, as the code that parses the blogroll doesn't know how to find the links in the blogshares version of the roll. Ack!


I rewrote a php script that allowed me to use this blogroll here:


<?php

// The standard script for inclusion of a blogroll from blogrolling
// experiences awful timeouts when blogrolling.com is offline.

// blogrolling.php retrieves your blogroll, and caches the results.
// upon failure of blogrolling.com, it presents the cache to the
// visitor, in stead of waiting 30 seconds before a time out
// occurs.

// (c) 2005, Cathelijne Hornstra
// This script is licensed GPL.
// Modifications by Jim Wright for BlogShares


// Just include from another php file. The webserver needs write
// permissions in the dir where you are calling blogrolling.php from.

// Change into anything you want/need
$cache_lifetime = 60;
$cache_file = "BSblogroll.cache";
$cache_message = "Cannot reach blogshares.com, looking for a cache file";
$cache_notfound = "Sorry, no cache file found";

///////////////////////////////////////////
// No need to change anything below here //
///////////////////////////////////////////

$blogrolling_host = "blogshares.com";
$blogrolling_path = "/bsblogroll.php?type=html";

if($conn = @fsockopen("$blogrolling_host", 80 ,$errno ,$errstr , 1)){
$request = "GET ";
$request .= $blogrolling_path;
$request .= " HTTP/1.0\n";
$request .= "Host: ";
$request .= $blogrolling_host;
$request .= "\n\n";

fwrite($conn,$request);

while(!feof($conn)) {
$rawroll .= @fread($conn, 255);
}

fclose($conn);

$blogroll = strstr($rawroll,'

if (!(file_exists($cache_file))) {
$file = fopen($cache_file, "w+");
fwrite($file,$blogroll);
fclose($file);
} elseif ((time() - filemtime("$cache_file")) > ($cache_lifetime * 60)) {
$file = fopen($cache_file, "w+");
fwrite($file,$blogroll);
fclose($file);
}

} else {

if (file_exists($cache_file)) {
$blogroll = file_get_contents($cache_file);
} else {
$blogroll = "$cache_notfound";
}

echo "$cache_message";
echo "
\n";
}

echo $blogroll;

?>

March 19, 2008

Link values

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.

March 22, 2008

Bouncing

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.

Inc. LinksOut. LinksValueOut. Link ValueMarket Share
12:27 13 Mar 20083647B$701,962,988.85B$14,935,384.870.000535347 %
03:14 12 Mar 2008344B$949,399,561.34B$23,734,991.530.000523554 %
09:33 07 Mar 20083349B$1,482,723,172.61B$30,259,658.620.000515518 %
05:22 06 Mar 2008294B$2,001,767,836.92B$50,044,198.420.000398807 %

Outgoing drops when value increases

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.

Inc. LinksOut. LinksValueOut. Link ValueMarket Share
16:30 15 Mar 20084573B$612,589,518.29B$8,391,638.610.000762129 %
19:42 12 Mar 20084772B$768,558,687.84B$10,674,427.610.000651856 %
08:42 11 Mar 20084572B$932,672,310.11B$12,953,783.470.000948474 %
17:17 07 Mar 20084472B$1,378,411,609.05B$19,144,607.070.000566954 %

March 24, 2008

More of the same...

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.

Inc. LinksOut. LinksValueOut. Link ValueMarket Share
18:35 24 Mar 2008169430B$240,193,425.24B$558,589.590.002302039 %
22:15 22 Mar 2008168430B$225,171,509.30B$523,654.910.002623686 %
20:20 20 Mar 2008167432B$215,866,633.71B$2,822,258.270.002319916 %
21:21 18 Mar 2008165432B$230,679,289.24B$2,122,457.590.002393613 %
20:14 17 Mar 2008164432B$203,863,089.22B$2,359,527.650.002343670 %
18:39 14 Mar 2008161433B$124,483,359.91B$1,437,453.350.002107312 %
19:42 12 Mar 2008162433B$118,944,327.63B$1,373,492.240.002246822 %
01:39 11 Mar 2008163433B$131,457,634.49B$1,214,390.160.002836590 %
15:10 09 Mar 2008165431B$200,718,483.84B$1,862,817.480.002775711 %
22:13 05 Mar 2008164432B$303,869,051.64B$3,517,004.070.002334993 %

A new twist...

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.

Inc. LinksOut. LinksValueOut. Link ValueMarket Share
16:05 26 Mar 200844117B$580,049,341.64B$4,957,687.540.000583753 %
05:58 25 Mar 200844117B$568,162,725.97B$4,856,092.530.000668977 %
17:56 23 Mar 200843117B$535,036,840.72B$26,105,754.530.000723254 %
17:02 22 Mar 200844117B$532,409,243.97B$22,616,540.930.000700457 %
20:18 20 Mar 200845117B$497,397,552.74B$24,011,132.880.000625127 %
19:23 19 Mar 200845117B$549,205,881.51B$18,657,926.280.000676486 %
16:57 18 Mar 200845117B$581,484,233.49B$24,849,757.840.000583006 %
17:36 16 Mar 200845118B$618,297,066.17B$26,199,032.460.000647581 %
15:19 15 Mar 200844119B$653,288,785.67B$27,449,112.840.000669885 %
14:55 13 Mar 200846119B$712,079,285.80B$29,919,301.920.000840431 %

March 26, 2008

Corporation interest

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.

March 27, 2008

To reindex, or not to reindex...

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.

About March 2008

This page contains all entries posted to B$ Strategery in March 2008. They are listed from oldest to newest.

April 2008 is the next archive.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

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