BlogShares is a fascinating experiment in valuing something vague and amorphous, in this case the individual ‘value’ of any given weblog (on-line column, like this one). Constructed as a fantasy stock exchange, the BlogShares system analyzes any weblog it can find — over 1.3 million of them so far — with a full range of seemingly serious valuation measures. According to their web site:
BlogShares is a simulated, fantasy stock market for weblogs where players invest fictional money to buy stocks and bonds in an artificial economy where attention is the commodity and weblogs are the companies. Weblogs, or blogs for short, are valued by their incoming links from other known blogs. In effect, links become the business deals in the simulation and players speculate on the fortunes of thousands of blogs by buying and selling shares.
Each weblog has an analysis page much like a stock or company analysis you’d find on an on-line investment site (here’s the page for this weblog). Players can buy and sell using virtual money to build their virtual fortunes (or go virtually broke).
Cute, you say. Vaguely interesting, but seemingly pointless. The point is here: assigning value to something vague and abstract is a challenge arts managers face every day — when speaking to their boards, their audience, their donors, their communities, and their public representatives (I’ve touched on this before). The more we explore the dynamics of value, the better we’ll be in that challenge.
I’m not suggesting we build a virtual marketplace to attach cash values to cultural organizations or cultural activity (although that would be really interesting). I’m just admiring the sophistication and effort expended to attempt such a thing for the parallel world of weblogs. Learning through simulation, exploring through fun — it beats an econometrics class any day.
