I did yet another presentation yesterday emphasising the importance of not sitting on your ideas waiting for them to be perfectly executable before you do something about them. (cf Ze Frank and braincrack.)
And now my bluff has been called.
A while ago I had, what I thought was quite a good idea. I called it trendaq. And I registered trendaq.com. Now someone's offered to buy trendaq.com off me and I'm not sure what to do. I really want my idea to happen but it's not something I can do on my own, and if it's not going to happen I may as well sell the domain. So I thought I'd stick the idea up here and see if anyone thinks it has any legs.
In a nutshell, it's a futures market for trend forecasters.
You'll all be aware of the value of predictive markets; the idea that lots of people placing bets on predictions about the future are really effective forecasting tools. Well, that seems to lend itself really well to the amorphous business of trend forecasting. That makes sense, right? But, more interestingly, I thought it might be a really good way of making some of these trend folk a little more accountable. So if you're claiming that 'pink is the new black' you can go to trendaq and back up that prediction with trendaq cash.
I can imagine it working it like this:
Someone (a trends person, a forecaster, a futurologist, whatever) speculates about some kind of trend and points to something measurable that will change as a result of that trend.
So, if they're forecasting that people are tired of online communities then they might use the diminishing rate of the creation of facebook and myspace accounts as a surrogate for their trend.
Or, if they're declaring that diverse musical fusion is the next big thing then they might point to downloads of tracks by Balkan Beat Box as your success indicator.
Or, for really quick things you might use tweetvolume, or google zeitgeist, or whatever.
I could even imagine that people who collect and distribute trend/attitude tracking data might want to get involved, they might want to volunteer their own data as the currency of predictions. This'd be a brilliant thing to do with TGI or Yankelovich data. Or media readership data.
And, then of course, other people could climb aboard and place bets on those trends, or against them.
So, at the end of that, you'd see:
1. who are the smart and effective trends people
2. what are the trends that 'the community' seems to believe in
3. whose data is useful for looking at and understanding trends
Does that make sense? Seem like a good idea? I think it's a good idea, but I have no idea how you'd do it. Is this something you could get off the shelf? Could I pay someone to do it? Would anyone like to invest?
And, of course, the big question - is someone already doing this?
UPDATE: In googling the word trendaq, I notice that I've already written about this. Aggh. And people have responded with some similar things. Oops. But nothing that's quite the same, so I still think there's something in it.
