Here’s something neat. Though setting up a full fledged prediction market to do some serious business forecasts should probably engage the services of a professional firm, such as NewsFutures, there is now a do it yourself prediction market called CrowdIQ that looks very interesting indeed. The site lets you create your own market, which might be a nice way to dip your toe into this fascinating phenomena

Crowd IQ’s prediction markets cover sports, entertainment, pop culture and business too. Some subjects that are currently being traded include Apple Buzz, Bird Flu Pandemic, Enron, Interactive Television—and oh yes, whether Tony Soprano will be a goner by June 1. (I hope not, but with David Chase, anything’s possible).

Wonder what the odds are that prediction markets will become a mainstream corporate forecasting tool? (We’ll be writing about this in our April issue of The Information Advisor, which is a special issue about Web 2.0 and business research)

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This is some interesting news–FIND/SVP, the business research firm that had once been the publisher of The Information Advisor changed its name today to Guideline. See the press release here.

FIND/SVP purchased GuideLine back in April, 2003. GuideLine is a custom market research firm founded in 1969.

It’s a pretty cool entry page, but it will be interesting to see if FIND will be able to do any better in making the transition from a firm with a 1970s/1980s mindset about business research to a 21st century one. It’s been something of a struggle for the firm, as its previous bread and butter business research “retainer” model has diminished over time and it tried to figure out how to stay relevant and important in the world of the Web

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Well, the conversation has evolved from Web 2.0 to Library 2.0 and to Librarian 2.0,–and the definitive discussion of the latter two is still probably Stephen Abram’s must read piece in December 2005’s Information Outlook, Web 2.0 – Huh?! Library 2.0, Librarian 2.0.

But what does it mean to be a “Business Information Professional 2.0?” It seems to me that some of the key elements would include:

• Helping facilitate strategic internal discussions around a piece of critical business information
• Helping staff/clients discover who else is collecting the same URLs or visiting sites (kind of an internal Del.icio.us or Furl.net)
• Being an active guide in helping staff/clients understand the various types of reputation systems that are evolving to help evaluate the credibility of bloggers, blog postings, wikis, and sites that rely on user ratings. Even just instructing on how to use and understand Technorati’s recently launched “rank by Authority” slider bar, and BlogFinder would be helpful.
• Encouraging user-tagging of internal documents by those closest to the field to help create a live naming system that will help in identify emerging trends and events that the entire organization should be paying attention to.

What else?

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There’s tons of stuff out there on the Web these days on how to tap into the blog conversation to monitor discussions of companies, products, people, etc, but is there one simple place to turn to to learn how to get started?

The buzz on the best new source is the “beginner’s guide” by Andy Beal, president and CEO of Fortune Interactive, an interactive marketing agency

I’ve looked at it, and indeed, it is a simple but comprehensive way to get started.

Now you can get going!

Technorati Tag: blog monitoring