Yahoo!’s new Tech Buzz fantasy investing game is an ingenius marketing research tool and fun game, for new media fanatics. The project relies on the four key principles of The Wisdom of Crowds to create a rather valuable public resource, and private pool of data consisting of the combined wisdom of a diverse base of contributors – technology fans, early adopters, researchers, academics, critics, testers, and so on. I mean, only people interested in this would play, and would take an interest in the results – so if you are, register now to get $10,000 magic Internet money to invest – I did!
The game has eight categories of markets – New Markets, Open Source Software, Entertainment, Gadgets, Network, OSDD (Operating Systems, Databases & Development), Wild Wild Web (including Ad Services, Maps, Browsers, RSS Feed Brokers, and other miscellaneous online categories), and Experimental – to choose investments from for your portfolio. I’m going to look at Browser Wars, P2P, and Weblog Empires to begin with.I wanted to go wild on Social Networks, but how come there’s no Myspace listed? I’ll have to look into that. Plus, I’ll be watching the Online Music market closely! I’ll post updates, and let’s see if I have any claims to being an oracle.
