MMJ | Meta-Markets Journal

Today is Labor Day, a celebration of the economic and social achievements of workers around the world. Just the right time to introduce our new project, User Labor, to address the issue of the economic sustainability of social web services. 

With User Labor, we propose an open data structure, User Labor Markup Language (ULML), to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of user labor for distribution. We believe that universality, transparency, and accessibility of user labor metrics will ultimately lead to more sustainable service cycles in social web.  

User Labor is a product of Meta-Markets. While working on fair-values, we had a hard time extracting consistent usage data from web  services, because there are no standards on what information web services offer through their APIs. Therefore, it is difficult to talk about user participation in a unified way across services, which is essential for assigning value to assets in Meta-Markets. 

Once we finished working on the first draft, we realized that User Labor should not be limited to Meta-Markets, it can have a much broader application. Ultimately, we are hoping that the metrics in ULML can initiate discussions around rewarding the content providers of social web and creating sustainable participation economies.

Here is a screenshot of how you can see your labor in Meta-Markets. Clicking View User Labor link will provide you with a breakdown of your participation in Meta-Markets terms until today. 

You can read more at User Labor website. 

Also see:

• Engin’s post on User Labor at xdiscipline
• Burak reports on User Labor

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NASDAQ stock exchange has launched a new internet only index, the NASDAQ Internet Index. The new index (^QNET) will track the performance of internet companies doing work in all ranges including search engines, ISPs, ecommerce companies, web hosting and web design firms. There are 93 companies listed in NASDAQ Internet Index including Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, and international companies such as Sohu from China and Shutterfly from India. I published the full list as a Google Doc:

List of Companies in NASDAQ Internet Index http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pjau4gArJn35DuOD9LVFlMg

I looked for some general stats about the market itself. NASDAQ has approximately 3,200 companies listed, trades about two-billion shares daily, and handled over 1,000 IPOs in 7 years. We can’t compare at all but just to give some stats here, Meta-Markets currently has 307 entities listed, meaning we handled 307 IPOs in 5 months. Not so bad. Of course the context of Meta-Markets is very different. In NASDAQ people trade shares of companies, in Meta-Markets we trade shares of our socially networked products.

NASDAQ has other indexes for various industries. The NASDAQ Financial Product company oversees the development of new NASDAQ indexes, plus the administration and marketing of NASDAQ indexes. Seeing a dedicated company for creating and managing new indexes is inspiring for us in many levels.

* Photo credits: © Copyright 2000, The Nasdaq Stock Market, Inc.

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Google’s new open web API initative OpenSocial is currently resonating everywhere on the web. OpenSocial enables developers to create social web applications that can run on any social network platform that has the OpenSocial interface standards. It is released by Google and a wide range of partners including Orkut, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, Viadeo, iLike, Flixster, RockYou, and Slide. The list is growing, you can read more about Open Social’s business implications elsewhere including O’Reilly Radar, Techcrunch, Techmeme, New York Times, and Marc Andressen’s blog and screencast.

It is confirmed that MySpace and Six Apart are also joining the club. It is not known that if Facebook will join the club or not.

OpenSocial clearly hits the topics we have been exploring in Meta-Markets. On the one hand OpenSocial will enable people’s personal information (profile, friends, and activities) flow on a network of service providers and third party applications. On the ther hand the value of our socially networked creative products will become more ambigious. Our intellectual property that is generated by our labor, through our social relationships, and our living (activities) is not measurable by us but only by the service providers, who charge advertisers based on detailed stats. As these “networks of social networks” grow, complexity rises, and the value we generate becomes just more ambiguous for us.

With Meta-Markets we approach this complexity by providing an actionable space—24/7 live stock market—to experiment with the value systems of the social web. We are looking forward to try the new OpenSocial API when it goes online, and see how we can use it in Meta-Markets.

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This is probably what most Meta-Markets people say after signing up. We are well aware that when you first come to Meta-Markets, there is some learning to do, especially if you are not familiar with how stock markets work. For this reason, we prepared a 5-step tour to make the first encounter smooth. You can look at it here. It lives in the help section in case you want to look at it later.

Take the 5-step tour

We kept this one short and sweet - it helps a lot to know some at the beginning. On the other hand, no sweat. Most of the learning happens as you get your hands dirty.

Please post your comments if you have any feedback on the tour.

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We have just finished working on Feedburner market. With this new feature, you can trade shares of your blog in Meta-Markets through Feedburner. As you might know, Feedburner processes your blog’s feed statistics and provide you with tools to improve your traffic. But, why would you trade your blog’s shares in Meta-Markets? Because, ultimately you might want to increase your blog’s traffic. And before this, you might want to know how much value people attach to your blog and its contents.

For example, AC Nielsen measures the value of TV channels through ratings. They install recording devices in pilot homes to identify watching patterns, and based on those, they announce “this is the rating of X channel”. Similar to this, Meta-Markets may determine your blog’s average rating, the fair value of your blog. Based on the number of subscribers, your blog will have a reference value in Meta-Markets once it is offered to public. When you offer shares of your blog in Meta-Markets, people will start trading shares of your blog considering this reference value. The value will naturally fluctuate and you will witness people’s opinion on how much your blog is worth in Meta-Markets.

Curious on your blog’s Meta-Markets value? Start trading your blog’s shares here.

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