Meta Markets

How will information gatherers and hunters survive in the digital age? Some signs are already apparent. As blogs matured they became a real force in the economy by consolidating opinions , analysis and gossip that sways, shapes and creates public opinion.

Witness Tila Tequila's (The Baddest Bitch in the Block) MySpace site where her profile has been seen a mere 123,875,022 times and you can see how clicks do turn into big bucks. Of course we have known that for a few years already although it has taken the entertainment industry quite a while to catch up, at that.

But there are more interesting things happening which are just (barely) outside of the mainstream and that I expect will become the next big thing (remember you saw it here first!).

Take a look at Meta-Markets for example. Their opening blurb says:

Meta-Markets is an online stock market for trading socially networked creative products such as YouTube videos, Delicious bookmarks, blogs, or social network profiles.
In NYSE or NASDAQ people trade shares of companies. In Meta-Markets people trade shares of bookmarks, profiles, videos, or blogs. Just like companies, socially networked products have ever growing values. When product owners issue their shares in Meta-Markets, they raise capital – today play capital, but tomorrow real capital. With Meta-Markets we aim to help people to retain the value of their immaterial labor in social web services.

Meta-Markets evolved from work done at the Physical Language Workshop in MIT as a research project in online economies and "sustainable life forms". Projects like OPENSTUDIO from PLW is another example of an emerging market community that allows artists, curators, buyers, dealers and viewers to create an economy that "breaks free of the shackles of the tired gallery/patron model representative of the classic schmism between the creative and the lucrative."

Even though today, as Meta-Markets says, you are dealing with "play-money", it will become tomorrow's real capital.

Tulum I, by Arturo Sinclair

And, hey! I just sold my first art work today for a whooping 2β Buraks!