A diversified portfolio

 Warren Buffet says to buy what you know, so I’m investing prudently over at Blogshares. Current holdings:

• tins ::: Rick Klau’s weblog (1500 shares)


• Bag and Baggage (100 shares)


• Ernie the Attorney (100 shares )


• McGee’s Musings (100 shares)


• The Shifted Librarian (50 shares)


• (More to come, but the site limits you to five “purchases” per day before imposing “commissions” on trades.)

Like Joi Ito, I wish I could sell some blogs short. And as long as we’re thinking of ways to extend what could be a very interesting social networks experiment, here are some other ideas:

• Site traffic as a leading indicator. Traffic spikes should have some corollary to stock volume, and could be taken into account when factoring price and demand.


• Quarterly traffic averages as “consensus estimates”. If a site significantly outperforms (or underperforms) its quarterly average for traffic, this is akin to a company making or missing its number. You’ll likely see the “stock” of a blog rise or fall in traffic stats before the links disappear from blogrolls. You could even publish traffic stats relative to quarterly and annual averages.


• Inclusion of metadata. Blogs traded on blogshares.com could be categorized by type, industry or other factors. Once done, you could measure not only the relative value of stocks in particular “industries” but you could also measure the popularity in those sites from across other industries. End result would be an identification of the “industrial” stocks (i .e., those with broad appeal that act as a kind of mutual fund for many stocks – think G.E.) versus “vertical” stocks (those who are primarily linked to from within their own industry).

This is cool stuff.