A Redirect, A Header, and Some Parameters

First, if you're looking for member lists of Empire Avenue communities, it's all been moved to Empire Avenue Eavesdroppings (see below).

Now, on to the good stuff: 4 new & hopefully worthwhile Empire Avenue blogs, all updated (initially, but if you want to contribute for any, hit me up!) and managed by me. To preface their introductions, let me give you some background info.

This is all the result of Empire Avenue only allowing you to access 50 "recent" members of any of their communities. Since communities could be larger and the API (Application Programming Interface...geek speak for "the secret codewords needed for my stuff to give your stuff data") currently doesn't offer any means of listing members, there was only one other option: downloading Empire Avenue. Ok...not quite. It just required downloading every user's main profile. Lucky for me, my city offers municipal fiber-to-the-home (geek speak for "super-fast internet as a city-provided utility...like water"), so the download doesn't too long. I'm still trying to build the member lists for the personal & private communities, but all city & interest communities have lists. But I digress.

I realized I can offer much more than just lists of communities & that access to all that data (especially prices & portfolios) could provide some killer means for analyzing the data. But if I just creamed everyone & kept it to myself, who would I share that pleasure with? Nobody, that's who.

So each of the blogs is meant to share with you the wonders that good, plentiful data has to offer. Enjoy!

1. The Inside Traiteur (this blog) - A "traiteur" is a Cajun faith healer that provides help when (HTTP) requested & asks for nothing in return. This is my Empire Avenue general discussion blog. Any personal observations that are EA related will be found here, if they don't deal with strategy, data, or picking stocks. To be honest, I'm not too sure what all I'll be populating this blog with, yet. I figure a loose definition of "Miscellaneous" will allow it to organically find its place in my mind & the universe. I will be offering to help others solve problems they have in/out of the game, though. The way I see it, if a stranger's asking me for my help, that's definitely a faith-based service being provided by a Cajun, so "traiteur" isn't just a folksy play on "trader", but actually fits within that context. Oh...and if you didn't get the little HTTP joke above, sorry, but it wasn't meant for you (and, of course, explaining it would kill it).
   
   
2. Empire Avenue Eavesdroppings - This is the blog dealing with the data crawl (the big download I mentioned above?). Here you'll find all kinds of EA data sets & general statistics compiled for everyone to have access to. Currently, the main offering is the member lists of communities, which will be completed soon & regularly updated.
   
   
3. Empire Avenue Market Taker - EA's got "Market Makers" that scrounge through our online activities & uses what they find to effectively "build" the imaginary stock market we know & love/hate. This blog's for all kinds of investment strategies (good, bad, ugly, and evil) and related observations. Also, I'm working on the Market Taker: an app to make managing everything in the game much more simple & streamlined, ideally making it easier to takeover the market! This blog will be like any other software development blog; I'll use it to announce new versions/features/bugs, discuss ways to use the app, get user feedback, etc.
   
   
4. Empire Avenue Market Raker - From Wikipedia: 'A rake (Old English raca, cognate with Dutch raak, German Rechen, from a root meaning "to scrape together," "heap up")'. Using the data I make available at Eavesdroppings, I'll analyze the market & create piles of interesting stocks. Some heaps may be fun/quirky (.ie stocks with prime number of followers over 100?), some could be aggregated trends (ie. top 20 most stable stocks for past month), and some could be straight-up, first-come, first-served, feeding frenzies (ie. 5 random stocks with 0 shareholders). Am I really stretching the rake metaphor for the sake of a lazy play on "market maker"? Yep. Does anyone care? Doubtful. In fact, I bet you've already opened the blog in another browser tab/window just to see if there are investor-less stocks listed.

So there you have it. I'm pretty excited about all of this, especially since I've never really had much of an impetus to blog before. If I wasn't interested in any of this, I still wouldn't, so a special thanks to everyone at Empire Avenue for indirectly encouraging me to learn new things! And again, if anyone would like to contribute to any of the blogs, let me know! It'll be a little while before everything's ready for multiple people to be able to contribute & there will be special requirements (ie. you're likely not regularly contributing to the Market Taker blog unless you're actively developing it with me...and, yeah...looking for people to do that, as well). But I'll address all that some other time; I've got other blogs to write posts for!