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.

Whaz da shizzle my nizzle?

American culture has now invaded all our lives. The song Amerika by Rammstein is a very good illustration of how intrusive it is and how Americanised the world has become. I always wonder what something means when listening to Rap music and watching American movies. Too much of slang has entered our lives with too little knowledge backing it up. Two websites come in handy when you want to know who Jane Doe is in Kill Bill 1, or what Snoop Dogg is singing about in 187, or what nerd and hacker actually mean - slangcity.com and urbandictionary.com

Slangcity.com is a growing website where you get to know the meanings of slangs used in movies, songs and television.
Urbandictionary.com does the same thing but it is more comprehensive, huge and has meanings from UK as well.

Blogging culture

The popularity of blogs in the recent times is what the popularity of websites was in the late 90s, especially during the dot.com boom. At its height, websites such as geocities, xoom, etc provided free space. They depended only on advertising and had no other revenue stream (read revenue model.) Some went under after the bubble burst and some were acquired by sites that had deep pockets and started offering premium services in addition and restricting free usage. A host of other activities developed around it, like free counters, free scripts, free images, "bullets", and whatnot. Now, we have free blogging sites, free counters that offer even more information, free image hosting sites, free templates, and whatnot! While the previous 'websites' had some gaudy stuff like animated gifs, garish colours and unreadable text, blogs are much more presentable primarily because the user cannot edit the pages much. The same cannot be said about the 'content', though.




With due apologies to the creators and/or syndicators of these cartoons.

Message from Mother Nature

Testing this posting through ftp to my blog in another server. First post is a public service announcement from Mother Nature "Don't Mess with Me you ignorant twit! I created, I can take you back!!"



My deepest condolences to the innocent lives lost in the recent earthquake/tsunami.