The profileration of ready-steady tools for making weblogs has lead to an explosion of 1) people posting reverse-chronological reflections and references and 2) tools for those people to toy with their data and reputations.

Last summer, I encouraged Joi Ito to get a personal web site he could update easily. Now I read Joi's site to keep up on these tools and the people that use them. In a few short months, he's become deeply embedded in the technology and culture of the web, reflecting the evolving ethic of a loose-knit band of active webloggers. Meanwhile, I'm still dedicated to using this page to let you know about the state of my intenstinal health.

Today I saw "BlogShares" on Joi's site - a stock market approach to tracking weblog popularity. Nothing like playing with fake money! I get to test my capacity for prognostication without consequences. Like a game! A massively multiplayer online game!

Justin's Links is listed on BlogShares, some guy named Joey bought 120 shares! At around $ 2.94 a share I believe. I'm honored by that, but I fear it's a bad investment. The BlogShares market values sites based on their number of incoming links. Links.net has shown a steady decline in incoming links since 1995, when I stopped writing regularly about sex sites on the web, which was the Iraq news blog of its time.