gambitch - now available in blue

Friday, January 06, 2006

Slightly over a year ago, I started playing on BlogShares. It all starts rather simply; you start with 500 dollars, try to buy some shares, sell them for a profit, and repeat the process. Then BlogShares grew and became a more complicated game, which is the way this works. Along the way I enjoyed the buzz of using my 21 transactions a day to buy and sell shares. So I've been sticking with the game.

And now I've just hit my portfolio maximum of 1,000 blogs in which I own shares. In most of them I'm the dominant owner. So what do I do? Look for blogs I want to discard from my portfolio; usually the dead ones and those that are overheating go out first. Except it's a bit hard to swim through my portfolio and identify just which ones deserve to go and which ones are still worth holding on to.

Along the way I learnt that I could report dead blogs and pocket the money on any shares I owned in them, when they were sold and the blogs eliminated from the system. Which is kinda cool. And since 21 transactions get used up rather quickly, sometimes I have plenty of time to decide what else I want to do with the game.

It was only a matter of time before I became all too aware of how the system just grew and grew, but the monitoring of blogs was becoming really poor. Too many dead blogs were sitting in the system's database with no one realizing they were dead. So now, as a secondary part of the game, I search out dead blogs and report them. And suddenly I'm looking at 200 or 300 reports sent in to the game's administrators each day. It doesn't take that much time, really; I could still do my work. But what's staggering is the sheer lack of maintenance.

I must have ranted about this some time before, but maintenance is often the most neglected thing. Where blog writers are concerned, many do not have the courtesy to take their blogs down when they're totally expired and the writers have no intention to write any further. In some cases they could be left on for the sake of reviving memories, but if that meant so much, why not just save it on a hard-disk or something? The internet is a repository with too many dead electrons. It's a matter of time before that becomes a maintenance nightmare.

It's the same on BlogShares. There's a massive database that needs maintaining, but it doesn't seem to be particularly well done. Getting a few dedicated staff could help lighten the load early and reduce the problem, but if that is overlooked, the problem will be unnoticeable at first, and then when it hits, it hits really bad.

Kinda like how the cholesterol builds up and narrows the arteries.

So now, my gameplay at BlogShares is diversifying into doing little things that help the cleanup. What I can contribute is not much, but if nobody does it, it will get nasty later on.

You'll know what it's like when you do your annual spring-cleaning for the new year. Or when you move house.

gambitch [ 8:56 PM]

Sunday, January 01, 2006

It's always nice to start the new year by scoring a goal. But one of my friends, who actually played in goal because of a leg injury earlier on, had an absolutely phenomenal game saving shot after shot - including a rare couple from me.

Eventually I put one past him in the unlikeliest of circumstances, but he had a better game than I did. I definitely conceded more goals in the end - I was playing both striker and goalkeeper, depending on a combination of my mood and my energy level.

But the new year started well. Let's hope the rest of it measures up!

gambitch [ 9:55 PM]