MMJ | Meta-Markets Journal

Although Meta-Markets is about socially networked things, we are not talking about the overhyped “social graph” here, these are hand-made vintage financial graphs that we’ve released today: the Market Index Graph and the Fair Value Graph.

Market Index

A stock market index is the composite value of its stocks. It represents the performance of a whole market and reflects investor opinion on the state of the economy. In Meta-Markets we have an index for each market. The index shows both the daily average price and the volume of transactions. Besides getting an overall view of each market’s activities, you can also compare say Flickr Photo Views market with Facebook Profile Friends market and decide where to move your money.

The images below are the screenshots of the market indexes. We can tell both the Feedburner feed subscribers and the Facebook Profile Friends markets are on the rise!

Fair Value

In Meta-Markets the fair value of a stock is the value generated in the stock’s domain. For example, the total views of your Flickr photos is the fair value. Fair values constantly grow both by your effort and by other people’s autonomous participation. The fair value graph shows the history of change in the fair value growth. For example, we can see the increasing number of your Facebook friends over time. So your Facebook stock’s share holders can have a more articulate understanding of their investments.

Here is my Flickr stock’s market value and fair value graphs. My market value had first big ups and downs, but now it is getting more stable (you never know!). My fair value rised from 7.39β (July) to 11β (October), not so bad for a cameraphone-updated photo stream.

These Meta-Markets graphs not only show brute force financial information, but also tell a sociological fable, perhaps like the master Jean-Luc Godard’s “Two or Three Things I know About Her” told in 1966.

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When European Central Bank launched an architectural design competition in 2003, they asked architects to design a building complex that symbolizes the European Union and its currency, the Euro.

Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) proposed the design above. In their proposal they say:

“The European Central Bank is a bank without tradition, presiding over a currency with no history. The Euro is the only currency not backed by a state. Like Europe itself, the ECB is modern by default, simply because it is unprecedented in its effort.”

OMA’s icon for European Central Bank was the direct translation of the finance graph to a building form. It seems that this default form has no ideological reference, but it is clearly a perfect reference to the ideology of statistics.

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To show your stock’s activities on your website pick up the Meta-Markets sparklines widget. Dara Kilicoglu created an application to visualize Meta-Market stocks based on Edward Tufte’s Sparklines. It dynamically creates a word-size graphic that can be inserted anywhere in the text.

To show your stock’s graph just copy this code below and paste to where ever you want on your website. Replace _ID_ with your stock’s id, which can be seen in the stock’s URL (e.g., http://meta-markets.com/entities/79):

<script src="http://www.darakilicoglu.com/mmsparklines/entities.php?_ID_" type="text/javascript"></script>

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47 Stocks in the Delicious Bookmark Counts market. 13 August 2007.

Poster showing the activities of each stock in the Delicious Bookmark Counts market. Download the two A3 page PDF poster. Print it, show it, poke it.

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