Friday, October 20, 2006

Tag, You're it!

As our list of markets being run has grown, the traditional approach of sorting by alphabet or category has become a bit unruly.

A popular way today to classify and look for information is to create a "folksonomy" where the creators of the market assign keywords or "tags" to the markets - in essence the card catalog for Inkling is created by the crowd - how apropo :)

So market makers, when you create a market, be sure to put in a few tags for your market. Traders, if you go to the Directory page, you can now view markets "by tag" which will display something called a "tag cloud." We're still working on the interface a bit on this as it's going to get unruly soon, but you'll get the gist. You can also search for a specific tag and all markets using that tag will be returned in the search results.

Happy tagging and searching!

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Discussion Boards per Market

Now that we’ve gotten through the market publisher revamp, we’ve had some time to focus on some additional features people have been requesting.

When you go to a market to trade, you will now see just below the trading wizard a “Discussion” area. The latest comment is always shown on the market page, but if you click “Continue to discussion” you can get to all the comments.

The discussions are open to anyone who has a login. As always, nothing vulgar please! :)

Monday, October 16, 2006

Sparkling new market publisher

For the past several months we have been running a highly visible public experiment to see if we could take the complexity out of prediction markets and allow people to create their own.

Several hundred markets and thousands of users later, we’re ready to unveil the next generation of our market publisher. We’ve learned a lot from your feedback, watched where our interface consistently fell down, and have revamped the entire thing.

As always, please send us feedback about what you think and we’ll continue to iterate and make improvements.