Yahoo has announced an event around Predictive Markets, called confab.yahoo. It's described as an "open micro-conference series" and is being run by Yahoo!’s Technology Development Group. The reason it caught my eye was this:

"We started confab.yahoo because we want to push the web and its applications up to the next level. After slightly more than a decade, we as an industry have only scratched the surface of the web’s potential. The opportunities are virtually infinite, and we aim to bring together the people that can inspire the next generation web."

The next generation web is what R/WW is all about, of course :-) The feature panel is one entitled 'Prediction Markets: Tapping the Wisdom of Crowds' and is being moderated by author James Surowiecki (whose book 'The Wisdom of Crowds' is oft-cited by web 2 fans). The other panels feature an impressive line-up of speakers - including from the Big 3 Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Prediction markets are, according to Wikipedia, speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions. The idea is a great one to apply to web technology, because it is such an exciting and fast changing environment. On a related note, check out the blog for The Institute for the Future. It's a non-profit research organization located in Palo Alto, California and has some excellent background material about predictive marketing and technology.

The event is on Wed Dec 13, 5:30-8:00pm. Unfortunately I'm unable to attend - so if anyone wants to volunteer to be a R/WW guest blogger for this, send me an email :-)