* Playing the Hollywood Stock Exchange and guessing baby names
The wisdom of crowds has been much discussed over the past couple of years. The idea is that by allowing a large group of people – the larger the better – to rate, grade, or otherwise interact with some content or service you can derive insight into the values, user opinions, or other attributes of the content.
One that has interested me for a long time is the Hollywood Stock Exchange or HSX. HSX allows you to buy and sell “shares” in movies or celebrities.
Playing the HSX board is free and no real money is involved – my current worth on HSX is H$2,321,117.42 — which is not to say that I’m really good just that I made a couple of good investments such as Jamie Foxx (symbol: JFOXX) which is up 41% (although my Katy Holmes shares have done nothing which is not surprising).
What HSX does is provide intelligence about public opinion of the movie business. While it reflects to some extent the obvious (such as Shrek the Third will be huge) it occasionally identifies movies that are being overhyped.
While HSX relies on users who want to play the game, and do so for the sake of winning the game rather than any other reward, it limits its reach in terms of players being self-selecting and therefore not a random sample.
I just discovered an interesting Web application that relies on existing online content rather than solicited user input to make a judgment about something that is hard to determine: The gender of names.
I discovered the service when a friend recently asked me whether someone’s name was male or female (I will omit the name for privacy reasons). Not knowing the answer I started looking for resources on names and the derivations and found Baby Name Guesser.
Baby Name Guesser uses Google to find examples of a name and from those examples deduce gender. For the name in question Baby Name Guesser concluded: “Based on popular usage, it is 6.273 times more common for **** to be a girl’s name.” This was interesting as the name was being used by a male. Moreover, Baby Name Guesser commented: “The popularity of **** is: 1.903 (where 0 = extremely rare, 6 = super popular).”
This is a simple but interesting example of using the wisdom of crowds to derive a snapshot of context and relevance. As and when the Web morphs into the Semantic Web this kind of exercise should become not only much easier but far more accurate.
