Buzzing in the blogosphere recently is Yahoo's new Tech Buzz Game.

Essentially, it's a kind of virtual stock market for gauging network predictions, a la the the Hollywood Stock Exchange or John Poindexter's ill-fated Pentagon terrorist futures exchange, which, like other "predictive markets," are based on the principle that large numbers of people guessing (or betting with virtual or real money) have a startling ability to forecast real results accurately, such as elections, market trends, terrorist attacks and so on.

Yahoo's new Buzz Tech Game focuses on tech trends. Among the dozens of topics followed are several of interest to the world of online marketing, including Annoyances, where Spamware is crushing other topics including Spam, Viruses and Pop-ups, Anti-Spam, where the realtime blacklist is easily outperforming SpamAssassin, Cloudmark and other commerical solutions, Browser Wars, where IE is incredibly kicking Firefox's ass, and Ad Serving, where I'm sorry to say DoubleClick is at the bottom of the list led suspiciously (in that the index is also a Yahoo service) by Overture.

Another suprising observation is how dull the buzz is around a couple of supposedly buzzable topics, Weblog Apps & Services and Social Networks, both of which have no real clear market leader (in the index) and all related stocks are trading at under $3, compared to $23.72 for Oracle in the database category, $25.49 for Xbox 360 in the Rumor Mill category and $33.25 for TiVo in the DVR category.

Of course, it appears this service is brand new, so if you're reading this post even a few days after I put it up, the ranking may well be radically different. It certainly bears watching where this will go in the weeks and months to come and how accurate it is for predicting how hot these various markets may become.

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