The (still Beta) Blogshares site seems at first glance to be an amusing and mildly distracting game. If we were to take it a little more seriously, it could subtly change the whole blogosphere.
Blogshares:
Blogshares is, briefly, a stock trading game where you buy and sell stock in weblogs. A weblog's value is determined (in the main) by the number of inward links it receives (although demand for shares is also a factor). The value of an inward link is determined by the value of the linking site and how many links are on that site. This site has (at the time of the last Blogshares trawl) 25 outgoing links. The site value is $1,000, so each link adds $44.00 to the value of the linked site.
Effect:
Already Mark Pilgrim has found a way to make himself some (virtual) dosh. His outgoing link value is $1,099.51. So he's prepared to put a temporary "sponsored" link on his page in return for 100 shares in your weblog.
I think the main effect though is to put a notional value on your links. If this influences people toward rationalising their links, even if only slightly, it has to be a good thing.
Over at the now defunct aardvark.dj blogspot site I've heavily edited the permanent links. This has been done for 2 reasons, one of which is the increased value of each outgoing link.
If you are not keen on a particular blog, do you really want to be inflating its value with a link? Similarly, if you're keen on a blog why dilute the added value you give to it by linking to crappy sites?
Apply this thinking across the whole of the blogoshpere (I hate that word btw) and you should get a slow burning rationalising of the spiders web of interlinking leading to a genuine increased (intellectual) value of the remaining links.
Alternatively, those whose blogs are worth a damn are going to be spending all day batting off requests to link to some crappy blog written by a complete nobody.
