Have you ever heard of Blogshares.com? I stumbled upon it when checking my referrals, and was astonished to find that total strangers were buying and selling shares in my blog!

Here, look at this. That’s my blog’s Blogshares history. Apparently, it was selling for 44 cents a share on October 8. By October 29, the price was $426.91 a share. So whoever bought it made a 97000 percent profit in three weeks!

There’s even a press release about someone ‘restructuring’ me: “Scott D. restructured Sean Gleeson gaining 593 shares at a total cost of B$75,595.19 using a Spy Machine (artefact).” Did that make any sense to you? Me neither.

So to learn more about this strange new world, I signed up for a Blogshares account yesterday. They fronted me $500 for a grubstake. A day later, I now have about $1.5 billion. No, really. See my profile, and look at the “Total Worth” number at the bottom.

Sweet, huh? But… hey, it’s all fake! From their home page…

BlogShares is a fantasy stock market where weblogs are the companies. Players invest fictional dollars on shares in blogs. Blogs are valued by their incoming links and add value to other blogs by linking to them. Prices can go up or down based on trading and the underlying value of the blog.

So I can’t do anything with my billions, except play the game some more, and try to get more billions? And I was getting all excited…

Meanwhile, I can only assume something’s gone horribly wrong with the TTLB ecosystem today.