Here is the interview with creator of Blogshares, market of weblogs:
Interview with Seyed Pouya Razavi, creator of BlogShares
"When I saw his name I thought he might be Iranian. I sent him an email and he confirmed it. Pouya Razavi is the creator of BlogShares, fantasy stock market of weblogs.....BlogShares came from some analysis I was doing on the nature of attention on the Web based on power law distributions. In the course, of doing the experiment I needed an algorithm to define the value of links and I borrowed my knowledge from how Google does it's PageRank. It wasn't an exact copy but used the same principal of determining authority of the linker based on the authority of people which link to him/her.
From there came the idea of a virtual stock market where players could invest in the popularity of weblogs or rather speculate on the shifts of attention within the network...."