Can anyone explain this to me?
Why would a fantasy blog trading league exist? How can you pick the winners? (And will my value plunge now that I've questioned the purpose of it all?). I used to be in fantasy Survivor leagues, and we could easily pick the winners, but in blogs? Nonetheless, my sincere thanks go out to Jean Luc Picard for buying the Drunken Housewife, a vote of confidence, I'm sure (unless he's planning on shortselling or something).
8 comments:
"fantasy" blog. like "The Little Mermaid" or "Lord of the Rings". cool idea but nothing to do with reality world.
accept the acknowledgement, wave, smile, then ignore it.
I agree with hughman though I'll never admit it on my blog. I got "picked up" a little bit ao by this thing and I'm about as worthless as worthless gets...
I'm sure you'll earn your "investors" a bit of fantasy cash...
But how can you earn cash if you ARE JUST SOMEONE'S BLOG?? What determines a blog's value? Hits?
They don't have my snazzy URL and don't know of links in to me, so they are missing much of the (little) value about here.
This is where some of the reading material recommended by my readers has come in handy.
The book Flow by Csikszentmihalyi discusses the conditions that are common to "optimal" experiences, which he calls flow. That is, experiences in which people derive the greatest mental rewards.
The author pinpointed nine dimensions that determine whether an activity could give rise to flow experiences, and he noted that several classes of games, such as chess and poker, were among the possibilities.
I suspect the fantasy league's rules are set up (perhaps unwittingly) to meet these criteria.
If you're interested in further reading, check out this paper. Figure (2) provides an interesting illustration.
Hey, 2AM, I have personally entered into a flow state in two activities, but they were very different from participating in an online fantasy game (although I really enjoyed doing the Survivor league, which was done through an onlite site). My flow states were achieved through sculpting one time (I went into a bizarre zone where time had no meaning, and I made a sculpture which resides in my kitchen to this day. Then I never sculpted again. One day I will take it up again) and through kinky sex a few times. It's my understanding that some surgeons enter a flow state, and maybe I should have been a surgeon, because my flow-achievement moments were kind of like surgery (I was using tools, I was not alone). I currently do nothing which will put me in a flow state.
P.S. But who can tell me how a blog would be considered valuable and how it would gain? I can see how my blog is valuable to me: it is a creative outlet, it gives me ego rewards when people like what I write (and that is severely lacking in my everyday life as a mommy). And the fantasy league is missing the stuff which might give it value: people who have links up to it or who quote from it; also one of my posts is going to be in an anthology this year of "The Best Creative Non-Fiction" from a reputable publisher.
My flow states were achieved through sculpting one time (I went into a bizarre zone where time had no meaning, and I made a sculpture which resides in my kitchen to this day. Then I never sculpted again. One day I will take it up again)
Maybe during one of your creative lulls you could post a picture of this artwork?
and through kinky sex a few times.
Csikszentmihalyi devotes about a page or so to sex as a flow activity, ending his discussion by saying that like sports (another source of flow experiences), people are more likely to sit back and passively watch the experts do it rather than engage in it at a level that flow occurs.
It's my understanding that some surgeons enter a flow state, and maybe I should have been a surgeon, because my flow-achievement moments were kind of like surgery (I was using tools, I was not alone). I currently do nothing which will put me in a flow state.
There are situations that maximize the likelihood of flow, but one can turn the mundane into flow as well.
One of the case studies in the book talks about a guy up in Chicago who worked most of his life at a railroad car assembly plant. Most people who worked there hated it, but this guy would spend his spare time figuring out how all the equipment there worked and wound up being able to fix just about everything.
The skills he acquired in his craft spilled over into his home life, he built a small irrigated garden, complete with sprinklers designed to produce rainbow mists and lights to provide the effect even after the sun had gone down.
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2amsomewhere
OK, I did some digging on this.
The Blogshares market is designed to do two things. One is the game element that I touched on in my eariler post. The other part of it is to validate some speculation about the blogosphere itself.
From the websites about page:
The overall objective of BlogShares is the exploration of an emerging social network while providing an addictive and fun environment for bloggers to join and help add to the worth of the social network. Another one of the purposes of this site was to prove the Power Law theory. Part of this theory is based on the fact that 20% of the population holds 80% of the wealth. This can also be attributed to weblogs, 20% of the blogs contain 80% of all incoming links. BlogShares hits a home run with this theory.
Each blog is categorized into an area of interest (an industry) and then given a starting value based on an objective metric: namely the number of inbound links to the blog itself. In turn, that blog's links affect the base level prices of other blogs traded on the exchange.
On top of this base statistic is a value that fluctuates based on market trading. It's whatever a buyer and a seller can agree on to execute a trade. The measure is purely subjective.
Every buyer hopes that the shares will gain in value over the time that they are owned. On the other side, the seller believes that the amount gained from the sale could be directed to more productive uses.
The subjective value is a fuzzy measure of your blog's mojo. As crazy as it seems, markets that trade on things like this tend to track and predict outcomes better than individual, educated guesses. Think of the Iowa Electronic Markets' success in predicting election outcomes.
Of course, their measure of value may not be the same kind of measure you use to determine whether your blog is a successful endeavor.
Indeed, a Bowenian therapist would argue that to choose your blog content on the basis of maximizing Blogshare price would be a poor level of differentiation of self. Such an approach would be an example of relying on the validation of others.
The research of Csikszentmihalyi et al. found that when there was a high level of self consciousness (i.e. basing future actions on what others might think), flow experiences were undermined. And, yes, writing can be a source of flow.
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2amsomewhere
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