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"UPDATE: We have 500 Nostradamical invites for Mashable readers.  Visit the site and use the code MASHABLE to get access.\nNostradamical, a UK startup that's currently in private beta, is ironically a little late with its Ruby on Rails-powered, \"crowdsourcing\"-inspired predictions site. \u00A0And predicting its success depends on the site's ability to plug into other audiences rapidly.\nThe short, lazy description: it's \"Digg for predictions.\" \u00A0The long one, courtesy of the\u00A0Nostradamical site:\n\n- Use collective intelligence to predict future world events.\n- Create your own events. Tag and publish your predictions.\n- Create lists that group together predictions under one theme (e.g. My Oscar Predictions).\n- Rise through 7 levels of status and gain fame as an 'Oracle' of the future. Promote your blog or website.\n\nThe essence of that: make a prediction, and watch good predictions rise up as other people vote on their likelihood. \u00A0Vote correctly and you earn cred. \u00A0\nWisdom of What Now?\n\n\n\n\nIncidentally, this is fundamentally not the way the Wisdom of Crowds works. That theory says that the most accurate prediction is made when users vote independently, without having seen the votes of others. \u00A0A Digg-like system, as mentioned many times on Mashable before, creates a herd-like mentality where your opinion is influenced by the people who came before you. \u00A0\nAnd Yet, Salvageable\nYes, it's not novel and it's not technically a Wisdom of Crowds app as the About page claims. \u00A0It has a silly name, too. \u00A0But, the\u00A0Nostradamical team sure as heck knows how to build a Web app, and that's half the battle. \u00A0Everything works, it looks good, and it's fun to play around with.\nThe secret, I think, will be to plug into other ecosystems to gain a user-base...blog partnerships ala PollDaddy (a polling company that got a great deal of traction by working with blogs like Mashable), Twitter syndication, Facebook apps, an API and the rest.\nThe Likely Outcome\nAlas, most startups don't get enough runway to achieve that critical mass and figure out the revenue model later. \u00A0No, if\u00A0Nostradamical is to survive, it'll likely do so by foregoing the consumer market (or at least treating it as a loss leader) and end up building prediction markets for internal use at companies.  \nDon't believe me?  Go check up on this 2007 list of 20+ Prediction Markets...where are they now?"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/10/28/nostradamical/>