Blogshares

There is this nifty site called blogshares.com where your blog is a company and shares in it are traded, real time. When you join it and 'claim' your blog, you are automatically allotted 20% of the shares which you can hold or sell to the 'public'. The rest is 'traded' openly. Periodic 'valuations' of the blog are carried out and the value of the blog rises or falls according to the number of blogs linked to your blog.

There is also a very useful community where you get help and some pretty useful tips. You can even 'advertise' your blog there, gaining more exposure for your blog. You earn something called 'chips' for voting blogs into 'industries' and some 'karma' for it. When you reach a certain karma level, you get to review what others have voted, earning chips all the while. You spend these chips for advertising your blog and participate in raffles to win some things. Some even sell their chips online (real selling, for money!)

In real life, companies make products while in Blogshares, blogs, rather industries, churn out 'ideas' (no idea what that means). If you have some 'ideas', you trade them and even issue 'bonds' on them. New to blogshares, I am yet to try these.

They also have the largest online category of blogs, called quacktrack - the world's largest browsable blog index, as the site says.

For the last few days, they have been running certain 'missions', where you have to do what they bid and earn chips for it. One such mission is to design a chip. Using my rudimentary photoshop knowledge, I have designed one..

the 100x100 version is
There is also 500x500 version.

This colour is what I got after trying to get the colour of old gold coins.

The winner gets 25 000 chips and a 'non-stupid' entry gets 100 chips.