Can the "wisdom of crowds" predict the big 2008 tour?
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Blog: The Police reunion was the surprise of early 2007, and Van Halen with original singer David Lee Roth will close out the year. Can the hive mind predict the big tour of 2008?
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As long as I've been involved in the tech industry there's been the concept of The Year of X, where X has been artificial intelligence, personal information managers, local area networks, CD-ROMs, P2P. Proclaimed by tech pubs, most likely to help their ad sales reps sell space, they focused the attention on areas the industry was investing money, in hopes of being there when lightning strikes, when wealth is created, as it often is in the tech industry. Sometimes the "year of" prognostications are right, more often they're wrong.  In that sense, there's no doubt that 2007 is the year of the social network in Silicon Valley. This may not be the year when huge wealth is created, but I don't doubt that the area is fertile, and I don't say that lightly, because I'm often a contrarian when it comes to self-induced Silicon Valley euphoria. There are a couple of ideas I've been getting ready to write about, I'm not quite ready yet, but here they are anyway. 1. When people get together to discuss Twitter, and perhaps other social networks (and Twitter is that, a bare-bones social network), they often discuss as if there were a common user experience, but this is a misperception, there are many different experiences, they may group into large subsets of the users, and they may not. Some food for thought. On Twitter I try to keep a ten percent ratio of people I follow over people who follow me. For other people, maybe most, the ratio is 1-to-1, they follow approximately the same number of people as follow them. Scoble follows thousands of people. For him Twitter is like a very fast chatroom. For me it's like weblogs.com on a busy day in 2002. I've seen people who follow 0 people, for them Twitter is a publishing environment. Very different experiences. To each of them Twitter is a different product. Note that when reporters cover Twitter, before they've become users, they probably write about the home page at Twitter, where complete strangers report on the kind of spaghetti sauce they like. That may be why so many articles dismiss Twitter as useless.  2. Integration is so tempting, but elusive. The other day a friend on Twitter wrote about a movie he liked. I looked it up on the NY Times movie review site (a newly revealed location now that their archive is open and a very valuable one, another topic I plan to cover, the wealth of the NY Times archive). I would have then liked to have clicked over to Netflix to order it. And even better, I'd have liked to have looked at what other movies he likes. Now we're very close to having this, we just need a way to co-relate two identity systems, Twitter's and Netflix's. And think of the value in integrating Amazon with Twitter. The mind explodes at the possibilities. This is what I meant when I said earlier "they&#185;re not trivial problems, they&#185;ve been there since the Internet outgrew academia and started being used for commercial purposes." This issue is now coming to a head, as the users can see the next step clearly. How to integrate the systems is known technology, but it's not a solved problem economically and politically. We need to get clear on the opportunities, and feel free to dream when the barriers between the networks come down.
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Views you can use to get clues on tomorrow's news.
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ÂHide The Truth, Entice The AudienceÂ seems to be a new method of getting sizeable audiences to flock to theatres.
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Business & money: What are the global experts meeting in Switzerland predicting for the US economy?
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Joel Barker wrote an interesting book entitled, "Paradigms:The Business of Discovering the Future". Originally written several years ago, I find it relevant today. In his book Barker has more of an interest in how we think about the future than making predictions. read more
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NASHVILLE (Billboard) - Look for these five artists to make a big splash on the touring scene in 2008.
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It's a battle between the expert and the crowd. Who's going to win?
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Comment is free: Polly Toynbee: Labour must prepare for the worst in 2008, but if that doesn't happen and it shows passion and daring, it could win big
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No one can see the future. But there's no harm in some enlightened guessing. From whales to light bulbs, here's TIME's thinking person's guide to what's coming up
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That's what Jane McGonigal predicted in her keynote on serious games at the Game Developers Conference Tuesday. Photos: The wisdom of game crowds
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I'm writing this from CES 2007 &#151; the latest and greatest Consumer Electronics Show, where 140,000 attendees crowd 2,700 exhibits packed into 1,660,000 square feet of space in more halls and hotels than I'll bother to count. There's a lot of noise here, and a certain amount of signal; though the ratio of the former to the latter is no less lopsided than it always is. Everybody's not only showing their good sides, but paying millions to crow about it through mass quantities of advertising and PR. \
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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters Life!) - Prediction markets have been used to forecast election outcomes, football games and even the capture of Osama bin Laden.
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NEW YORK (Billboard) - The first few months of the year are an ideal time for rising acts to grab their share of attention and, they hope, sales. That's true for upcoming releases and new promotional boosts for sets already on hand.
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The global concert series was a target for cynics, but it should be measured by its political impact, not its carbon footprint
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Can search term data predict the next American Idol?
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The Top 20 Concert Tours ranks artists by average box office gross per city and includes the average ticket price for shows in North America. The previous week's ranking is in parentheses. The list is based on data provided to the trade publication Pollstar by concert promoters and venue managers.