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 ….

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.

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.

At this moment, I have all available industries. The four remaining are empty and will always remain so. I’m not the first to achieve this, but that has never mattered to me. The point is I have them all.

Down to 4 artifacts needed. Until they release more….

Well, there are two Seuss blogs now. That is a good thing. Players will link to these blogs which will increase the drop sizes. Ideas will drop based on how many incoming links there to a specific industry and based upon the position of the industry on the blogshares profile. If a blog doesn’t have any incoming links or if the industry you want is not in the top 5, those ideas will not drop when you reindex it.

I’ve continued to search for more Seuss blogs, but to no avail. It’s probably due to a mix of things. Geisel’s books are almost part of the background. When he first started writing, his books were fresh and new and like nothing anyone had ever seen before. Now they’re standards.

Just doing a search now and I brought up something on Google Books, a Geisel biography The Man who was Dr. Seuss: The Life and Work of Theodor Geisel.

One very nice person commented on another post about the post they had made on their own blog. The problem is that to vote content, you need 5–count ‘em–5 recent posts on a topic to qualify.

Believe it or not I’m #1 in ideas! Not that it really matters, sooner or later people are going to get the ideas. They can link to them, find them, win them at Chances, trade for them, etc. It will happen. You just need some determination and a lot of patience.

Anyhow, here is my proof:

Meanwhile, I’m once again behind on artifacts. They released a bunch of them, some of which are not easy to get. But again with patience, eventually I’ll get them.

Another player has found a blog, thank goodness. Content votes are a tricky beast. Actually a lot of votes that are not obvious are problematic. Moderators, those who have amassed over 750 karma points, have the ability to vote for or against initial votes. Some moderators will go above and beyond to verify a vote before rejecting it. Demographic votes are usually easy enough. Unless of course, the city has a different name or the spelling is off just a bit.

It’s funny that there are not more blogs out there about Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss). He’s probably one of the most well-known and beloved children’s authors in America. A whole generation grew up watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas and the Cat in the Hat. Chuck Jones directed the former. He and Seuss collaborated on a number of projects.

During World War II, a number of Hollywood figures joined up. Frank Capra, the director of It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and You Can’t Take It With
You, was put in charge of the Armed Forces Motion Picture Unit. Chuck Jones met Geisel there. Capra was under the impression that Geisel knew something about filmmaking and pointed out the Moviolas. Geisel asked “What are Moviolas?”Jones and Geisel collaborated on a series of instructional cartoons, which I’d love to see. Years later when some of the Dr. Seuss books were being animated, it was Chuck Jones directed.

A new artefact has been released. Yes, I know how to spell artifact (they spell them the other way in the game). This is for Dr. Seuss. The problem is that there are no blogs for Dr. Seuss. None. There must have been some at one time because a bunch of players have some ideas for it. But whatever the blog(s) was or were, they don’t exist now.

Rankings are partly determined by the number of artefacts you have. At the time of this writing, I’m missing 2. The Dr. Seuss one and another doozy for Pink Floyd. At least there are blogs for Pink Floyd.

I’ve been hunting for a couple of days now and so far no luck. Dr. Seuss qualifies as a content industry. Meaning that in order to vote a blog into the Dr. Seuss industry, it needs to have at least 5 posts with significant content devoted to Dr. Seuss. This is a tall order.

Now I am a big Seuss fan. Theodor Geisel (Seuss was, of course, a pen name) revolutionized children’s literature, was a fantastic illustrator, and created possibly one of the more bizarre musicals of our time.

I speak, of course, of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. The hero, Bart, a small boy is the unwilling student of piano teacher, Dr. Terwilliker. Dr. Terwilliker is played by the late, great character actor, Hans Conreid. There’s a sort of nightmare/fantasy where the main action happens. And Dr. Terwilliker turns into a crazed dictator of a piano camp with designs on Bart’s mother. The costumes, music, sets, even the characters are all bizarre. It’s great fun.

Unfortunately, it did horribly at the box office and it is the only film Seuss ever did. Way ahead of its time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this game–what I want to get out of it and what is fun about it–lately. My real passion is collecting.

Thanks to a couple of tools that I’ve discovered (tools that are far from secret, btw), I’ve managed to “open up” some rares.  Basically this means that there are some industries that have no blogs in them. They are idealess. If you can locate a qualified blog, you open it up. The problem is that many of these industries are in impoverished areas or in “census-designated places”(i.e. non-existent names).

It’s a real challenge to locate qualified blogs for these. Then you have to get them to drop. Ideas won’t drop unless there are incoming links. If there are no incoming links, the trick is to link to them in your own blog, reindex your blog, and then reindex the blogshares profile of the industry you are trying to make drop.

Then you have to catch them before anyone else.

There are some players who are desperate to hold onto the rares they find and make sure no one else or only their friends get them.  So they either remove the links as soon as possible or every day at the appointed time, they reindex and catch the ideas themselves. The other day I was issuing a bond to a friend and another player sniped it. That’s perfectly legal, but it’s not particularly nice behavior. But then there are a lot of tactics in this game that are perfectly legal, but mean spirited.

I don’t get that.  In a way ranking in Blogshares, is pretty much like an unending game of king of the hill. There will always be someone who is trying to be number 1. There will always be someone who will get those ideas–somehow. What the heck is the point in trying to hog them all?

At this point, I have achieved most of my game goals. I would very much like to have ideas in all of the industries, but beyond that, I just want the industries opened.

I have recently started entering some of the contests that various players offer for BlogShares. A fellow player, who goes by the handle of Rantz, has for a reason I cannot possibly explain, an affinity for the number 23. Given that I love the number 42, I really can’t judge the guy. Anyhow, he’s founded the 2,300 Chippies corporation (some corporations are more fun than anything else). The rewards are chips. Since chips equal money and also contribute to one’s rankings, it’s incentive indeed.His most recent contest is interesting. I have a shot with some of its facets, specifically this one. Namely blog about the contest. I’m going to have a go at the logic puzzle (although, Rantz, if you’re reading this, vegemite? and don’t tell me Google is my friend. I looked it up, but it just sounds so darn bizarre. I should be able to complete the voting/modding part. I love doing that. And collecting the Geek ideas is probably something I can accomplish as well. The math one–not a chance in hell.