Reorganizing

May 4, 2009 at 4:14 pm · Filed under shares, sigma

I just finished reorganizing my shares portfolios. I do this every so often. I dump it all into one folder and over the course of a week or two go through every single blog (or I try to anyhow). Title changes? Fix the titles. Deads? Sell them off and delist. Nearly dead? Usually sell off and set a watch on the blog to delist. Not voted? I vote them, although I usually try and keep my blogs voted. New blogs

Why go through all that bother? you ask. I don’t have much of a portfolio as far as shares go–and frankly, I probably never will. Well, it keeps things tidy and I like that. A lot of players have sixteen million folders. Many have lots of deads. Some of them have incredible amounts of spam. Well, that’s great for them, I guess. It’s also great for the sigma hunters out there. In my opinion, it also attracts a lot of attention to one’s holdings, but to each his own.

I’d rather have stuff voted so that when it does go dead and the p/e is at 2000+, I can PRD it down low enough to sell. I’d also rather be the one with the karma and the sigma. I’d rather have the deads, the non-blogs, and the spam the heck out of there, so that I don’t take a hit if another player delists it on me. And frankly…well, I like to know what I have.

So it’s done for the next couple of months and I feel pretty good about it.

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I’m #1! (for now)

February 13, 2009 at 4:38 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

composite rankings

composite rankings

Feels so good!

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How to get your blog in the game?

November 8, 2008 at 10:53 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged

If you’re playing already, this is easy. You do a search on the url of the blog. If it’s not there, you have the option to add it. Easy 20 chips and 1 sigma point.

If you’re not playing already, you need to either join and add it in, or find someone who will do it for you.

Remember it needs to fit the definitions of a qualified blog.

The game can be played as a non-premium player, i.e. for free.

This is how I got started playing the game. I was looking at my stats and wondering who the heck these people were. Then I got in and saw that my blog was only worth $3000 (which is not surprising, this was a personal blog that had about 3 readers).

How to get the value of your blog up? Well, does anyone else link to it? Is that blog in the system? Has it been reindexed? If it’s not in the system and it’s a qualified blog, add it. It’ll show up.

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Understanding the market for bonds

October 4, 2008 at 12:23 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged ,

A new player was asking me about how the bond market worked in the game and how one went about pricing bonds. He asked me to write a post about it so here goes.

People who buy bonds are usually looking for convenience. They are willing to pay more than market value because of that. Figuring out how much above market value is the trick.

There basically two reasons why someone shops on the bond market.

1. To obtain enough ideas to build artefacts

If the artefact is easily obtainable, it’s probably best to issue a bond in 5000 or 10000 idea increments.

If it’s a rare one, say the way the Seuss artefact is, then you can get away with smaller bonds.

2. To obtain rares

These are usually sold in increments of 10 and are bought usually by people who are looking to raise in rank by obtaining as many industries as possible and by collectors (like me!).

Pricing. These are questions you need to ask yourself.

1. How many ideas are there extant?

2. How many blogs are there in that industry? Do they have incoming? If so, how many?

3. Are there other bonds for that industry already?

4. How many players have ideas in this industry? Is it a lot? A few?

Advertising

Use the forums or the main room on irc to get the word out about your bonds.

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Getting started on Blogshares

October 2, 2008 at 4:58 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged

I’ve helped enough new players out that I’m thinking some basic advice is worth a post. In no particular order…

  1. It’s worth it to introduce yourself on the forums. People often send new players chips or blogs and are very welcoming.
  2. Get yourself on IRC. A lot of valuable advice and help can be found there.
  3. Read the help. It’s a complex game and it can be daunting, but it’s where you should start.
  4. Start buying up 10001 of every cheap idea you can. Build every artefact you can.
  5. As you have more wealth, buy 1 of every industry you can.
  6. Look at inactive player holdings. Do they have deads in their ports? Anything worth snagging? Chances are no one is going to come after you.
  7. Figure out your game goals.  What is it you want to accomplish? Do you want to focus on shares? Ideas? Rising in composite rank?

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Never thought I’d say this

September 5, 2008 at 3:58 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged

but I’m getting a bit sick of sigma hunting.

I’ve been doing everything. Going through my ports, inactive players’ ports, typing in names and words into the Blogshares search engine (there are no longer any blogs with “cashew” in the title), random blogs, cleaning industries. You name it, I’ve done it.

And I’m finally starting to have my fill of it. Need to keep plugging away. Sigma is one of the few ladders with room left for me to climb. It’s also one of the two categories where the player has to do the work without help.

Back to hunting deads….

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A fate worse than death

August 2, 2008 at 7:13 pm · Filed under fun

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Confessions of a Sigma Hunter

March 19, 2008 at 6:04 pm · Filed under sigma

I’ve been reporting deads for the past few days using my old method: type in a word into the B$ blog title search engine. Open up the blogs, report the deads, vote the live ones, report the title changes.

Usually this gets you a ton of unowned worthless $1K blogs. Sometimes though you hit some very interesting results. Like now. I’ve been putting in some keywords for some industries that are very hot on the B$ market. Didn’t really know what would be there. Didn’t expect much to be honest. What do I find?

Dead blog after dead blog, mostly worth 1K that a player has bought recently. Like days ago. I understand having a few deads in your portfolio. It happens. But why would anyone buy up dead blogs from 2 or 3 years ago that have no value?

Time to see what knitting blogs are still with us ….

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Improving Blogshares

January 26, 2008 at 1:42 pm · Filed under ideas, shares, tools

The GIC has posted a contest. Consider this my entry. These are the two things they want to know.

  • When you start your blogshares day, what is the first page you load?
  • If the hompage [sic] had modules that you could select, what kind of data / information would you want in them?

I actually go to my shares page. Which is kind of weird cause I hate the shares play part of the game. I guess I like to get the housekeeping that goes along with shares over with first.

In answer to the second question, it’s my ideas portfolios, the players market tool, messages, and (sigh) my shares portfolios.

Unasked, but I’ll volunteer it anyhow. My big complaint with the Blogshares page is the overall busyness of it. It is so text intensive that I think it can be a bit overwhelming to new users. I know it was to me.  A cleaner, fresher look is probably in order. I know they depend on sponsor and ad income, but there has to be a better and more attractive way to present that.

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Seek and ye shall find

January 18, 2008 at 4:03 am · Filed under ideas, rares

This is a great tool for searching blogspot.com via location, which works really well for demographic ideas. When blogger went to their new beta platform, that tool went down, much to my consternation. Then around August 7th, I saw this post on the same blog with the tool. So I set out to seeing if I could open up industries.
I refuse to link to the blog or the post that is inspiring me to write this. Suffice it to say that I was proactive in opening up blogless industries when other players were not, and that I upset the status quo by threatening a former (now banned) player’s ranking.

The game has undergone a lot of changes over the past few months. Most of them really good. One of the best changes was to take ultra rare demographic industries and change them to findable ones. The only downside was that some of the original votes cast for those were never purged. I posted in the forums to get this fixed and have now seen that attempt at correction totally twisted into something it is not.

I believe I play this game with integrity. I get really upset when someone impugns my character. Going back to playing the game now.

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