You are then "given" 1000 shares of your blog (these shares are reserved for the blog owner). You can trade these to "purchase" shares of other blogs.

Links/popularity drive blog "value."

As the game grew, getting more and more popular, more rules and such were invented, largely in effort to emulate the way "real" markets worked. Artifacts may be "purchased" and they allow you to manipulate the statistics to drive up or lower the "value" of a particular blog. There can be hostile takeovers, for instance, "splits," and the like.

I had to tech edit a book about blogs that discusses Blogshares so I registered a year or two ago; I'm proud to note that, after not paying attention at all for over a year, I still "own" 14 shares of Making Light.

I pinging "Crooked Timber" with the Obsidian Wings" URL and the system accepted it. Don't know if that means anything, since there is a subsequent vetting process.

http://www.brunching.com/rapture.html

http://www.positiveliberty.com/2004/04/selling-short-open-letter-to.html

They have fixed some of the problems by now, but it remains essentially impossible to lose money. Where's the fun if there's never a risk?

That said, people seem to only pay a certain amount of attention to the PE ratio if you seem stable.

Anyway, that's a shame about the blogroll pressure peer pressure. It all seems very juvenile to me. I mean, the only time I can imagine someone legitimately getting a resentment about someone de-linking, is if the person is a friend or something. And there actually people I know in-person, who don't link me at their blogs... But I don't think it's because they hate me. haha.
I'm less likely to click on a lengthy list of links anyway. Some blogrolls, I just don't believe the person could possibly be reading that many blogs on anything like a regular basis.

And my LJ doesn't seem to be well tracked, because so far as I can tell they've missed a few dozen incoming links, and not noticed any outgoing links more recent than before the last time they admitted to my having any incoming links.

I ponder paying the $15 to have a premium account, but sort of like the 20 trade a say limit, and what it does to my ability to play the market.

TK