The term "wisdom of the crowd" comes to mind when looking at Ziitrend, a social prediction platform that taps users to help predict the future - everything from the 2008 election to recently released stock predictions.
It only makes sense to take advantage of the explosion of user-generated content on the Web. Ziitrend, launched in 2007, enables users (ziibbos) to select a topic and throw in their two cents as to the eventual outcome of any given pressing question. Ziibbos can also create topics and solicit predictions from fellow users.
It works like this: When a topic is created, tags are associated with that topic. For example, "who will win the 2008 Presidential election" might have tags of politics, Obama, McCain, President, and so on. When a user predicts a winning candidate, should that candidate win, that user gets a positive score associated with those tags. When that user makes another prediction with any of those tags, their vote is weighted more heavily than a user without a positive score assigned to those tags. Eventually, a ziibbo can be deemed an "expert" on certain topics.
Ziitrend's latest category is stocks. Unlike other categories, the stocks listed and tags associated are chosen by Ziitrend. You can make predictions based on whether the particular stock will rise or fall, based on three days, two weeks or one month - not a bad way to get a pulse on how people are feeling about the market, if enough users are involved. The weighting system for stock predictions is the same and you can view best rated, worst rated, most accurate, best scorers, etc. Check it out ... who knows, you may become a regular financial guru.