At his session today at Etech, Yahoo Labs head Gary Flake introduced the Tech Buzz Game, a joint project between Yahoo Labs and O'Reilly Research. The game is a demo of a "fundamentally new type of auction," Flake said.

He explained that there are many ways to get opinions, including individual opinions, expert opinions, voting, electoral college, markets aggregate opinions. Markets are a system where people who perform well earn more votes (dollars) than people who don't.

With the Tech Buzz Game, "We're allowing people to make bets on what will be the winning emerging technology trends." As an example, Flake offers this question. When Apple releases Tiger, the new version of OS X, when will search queries for Tiger overwhelm searches for Panther? If you bet right, you'll earn more fake dollars and you'll be able to make more bets.

You can buy long or short to make bets about what's going to be hot.

The underlying computer science idea for this market is called dynamic pari-mutuel auction. Flake said: "This is a fundamentally new type of auction. If this doesn't revolutionize auctions it will revolutionize gambling."

From the game's FAQ page:

The Tech Buzz Game is a fledgling research project and demo, rather than a full-fledged Yahoo! product. We've launched the game now for a variety of reasons:

• 
  To see if search buzz (including spikes and trends) can indeed be predicted by the collective wisdom of crowds in a market
  To provide an index of "what's next" for technology enthusiasts
  
• To separate the wheat from the chaff among the various technologies that O'Reilly is constantly watching and tracking; to measure which forces in the technology industry are truly disruptive and which are mere flashes in the pan
  
• To discover how Yahoo! Research Labs's dynamic pari-mutuel market mechanism behaves in the "wild"
  
• To investigate opportunities around predicting trends in search engine behavior, and how they relate to events in the real world
  
• Last but not least, to entertain and engage ETech attendees and other participants in the game
  

To play the game, visit the Buzz Game page.