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The Tech Buzz Game is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trendsAs a player, your goal is to predict how popular various technologies will be in the future. Popularity or buzz is measured by Yahoo! Search frequency over time.
Predictions are made by buying virtual stock in the products or technologies you believe will succeed, and selling stock in the technologies you think will flop. In other words, you "put your play money where your mouth is."
Of course, I'm not revelaing my nick, just in case I perform badly. ;-)
As a trivial example, enter a persons name (celebrity) and the app will return then number of indexed pages which mention the name, then enter adjectives (cool, sexy, smart, uncool etc.) and the app will return how many pages contain both items together. Gives a barometer of buzz.
It just bases it on the number of times the word appears in web searches, which isn't a good measure of... well... anything... except the number of times the word appears in web searches.
And it would appear that the system can be gamed. How many people *really* search for LISP, anyway?
With the arrival of the Web and stuff like this, my eyes just go wide at the possibilities. Very cool.
