We’ve talked about setting up public markets on Inkling here before. I just set up a market for predicting the winner of the Women’s World Cup 2007 tournament, which is kicking off in China this weekend and wrapping up on September 30. (Women’s football/soccer.)
Took me about 45 or 50 minutes, start to finish. A lot of it was just cut-and-paste team names and info. Easy, easy, easy! Sixteen teams, each with a name, abbreviation, description, and starting price. A bit of general market information, an image uploaded.
The market even includes a link to the official FIFA RSS feed that puts news headlines right on the market page! (Hey Chris, the link can go to any feed you want. The link could go to a special market blog for an X group.) All of this set up was easy to manage.
Sure it is possible to do things badly. But for straightforward event markets like this sporting event, very easy. Of course, Chris Masse’s chief complaint earlier wasn’t that the setup wasn’t easy, but that Inkling’s choice to keep it simple makes it hard for market managers to try out more complicated markets. Maybe so, but they had to start somewhere, and getting the basics done well is a pretty good place to start.
(Still haven’t figured out how to embed the Inkling chart widget into a Midas Oracle blog post [UPDATE], so the above chart is a static image that links to the market page at Inkling.)
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EDITOR’s UPDATE:
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This widget will show real-time results of the market.
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This widget will show a small graph representing market performance over the past week.
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1. Congrats.
2. Put your most important sentence(s) in bold.
3. When you insert an image,
- select “Show Full Size”
- select “Link to None”
- click on “Send to Editor”
and when your image is inserted, then select it, click on the link icon, and insert the link to the Inkling market page.
http://www.midasoracle.org/authors/how-to-post/
4. To be an X group, you will have to continue publicizing it, during the rest of the competition.
5. But the way, I’m starting slowly Midas Oracle .COM, which will contain ONLY info for traders. I wonder whether you would like to publish there. Not sure. Just started this new blog. Not yet a clear idea of what kind of journalism I want there. Info for traders only (charts, breaking news). If you have an idea, tell me.
http://www.midasoracle.com/
6. Again, thanks for your interesting blog post.
7. I have just managed to embed the Inkling widgets. I am adding them to your blog posts, at the bottom.
http://www.midasoracle.org/2007/09/08/yes-virginia-midas-oracle-can-embed-the-inkling-markets-widgets/
So, if you update this blog post, do it without the “visual editor”, as explained in the blog post just linked above.