We’re back…
Hey folks, sorry for the site service disruption over the last couple of days. We had some domain issues with a Chinese company. But hey, it’s all sorted now. Nostradamical.com is back up for business with the latest long term predictions on world events.
And how about checking out our new Nostradamical video over at YouTube - it was great fun to make. We hope you like it - let’s get the views up!
Streaming our prediction market to Twitter
If you’re not on Twitter, you’re not on the planet
We’re now streaming all the prediction activity from our members at Nostradamical.com to our Twitter page. We’re doing this via our FriendFeed page which I have to say has a lot more flexibility and features that Twitter. But hey, these days Twitter is everybody’s darling!
So whenever one of our members makes a forecast or prediction it is streamed to our feed at Twitter. Cool, eh? Join the conversation and forecast your predictions on world events at Nostradamical.com.
8 Fictional Futurists We Love
At Nostradamical.com we love predictions. Our community is thinking about the future, mostly. So we were chatting this week on our fav time travel characters in popular fiction. Here they are…
1. Doc Emmett Brown (Back To The Future 1, 2 & 3). The wild eyed scientist played perfectly by Christopher Lloyd is obsessed with time travel and buggy space-time continuum problems. Back to the Future really introduced the whole ‘disruptive’ future events thing that was continued later in some of these other movies / programs. Nice little comparison against Harry Potter here (if slightly random). Visit his MySpace page here (?)
2. Hiro Nakamura (Heroes). The Japanese comic book nut with the ability to manipulate space-time is the moral backdone of the Heroes series. He’s funny, heroic and let’s face it, has one of the coolest powers in the Heroes clan. Oh and the latest series, ‘Fugitives’ has started…woo hoo!
3. Daniel Faraday (Lost). The mumbling scientist from the visitors to the Lost island initially seemed to be a malicious character. However it’s clearer now that he is more concerned with unravelling the mysteries of the island, whilst jumping back and forth through time. His experiments on time travel at Oxford seem to have lead the Lost heroes to his mother who seems even more mysterious…oooh
4. Doctor Who (Doctor Who). Much more child orientated these days by the BBC than it felt in it’s hayday. However you cannot deny Doctor Who as one of the original time travellers (Time Lords). Although he seems to change actors with the weather these days. Plenty of DW resources here and here.
5. Donnie Darko (Donnie Darko). This slow burning cult classic features a fantastic storyline based around time travel and alternative realities. The film starts weird but makes more sense as it goes on. And that bunny? Creep as hell. Love it. 
And a sequel is in production…eh?
6. HG Wells (The Time Machine), An oldie but a classic. Really one of the first portrayals of time travel in film, this is a great primer for later films like Back to the Future. However the 2002 remake sucked.
7. Bill & Ted (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure + Bogus Journey). Yes, two those crazy dudes that went back through time in the first movie to retrieve key characters from history, and then died in the second film…all this before one of them went on to save the world in The Matrix. This was ‘The Space-Time Continuum for Dummies’.
8. The Terminator (The Terminator). Arnie’s seminal 80s cyborg that spawned no less than 3 sequels and a fascinating universe of interconnected storylines…a great franchise with some truly great scenes, although T3 was a bit rubbish. Soon to hit our screens is the latest franchise reboot with Christian Bale as the leader son of Sarah Connor, this is a great franchise indeed. My fav being T2 of course. As he said back in 1984, ‘I’ll be back’.
Honourable mentions - movies and people:
- Timecop - Van Damme kicks his way through time.
- The Time Bandits - fun, cute and a little weird…but certainly a new spin on things from Terry Gilliam.
- Austin Powers - quite funny, sometimes
- Highlander - Not really a time travel movie, technically.
- Timeline - OKish time travel from the director of Lethal Weapon
- Millenium - Forgotten classic about an ailing future. Nice ideas.
- Star Trek: The Voyage Home & Star Trek: First Contact - The Enterprise crews runs out of storyline ideas so has to go back in time to find a solution, twice.
See a list of other time travel movies here. A useful discussion of time travel in movies is on Greencine.com.
Have a prediction on future events? Browse Nostradamical’s predictions here or publish one of your own. We’re a prediction market and a microblog at the same time. Oooh.
We’re getting real time social gossip from SocialMention.com
At Nostradamical.com we’ve started using the SocialMention.com API to pull in realtime blog posts, news, videos and comments against each one of our predictions in our prediction market. This makes it easier for our users to gauge the latest web opinions on predictions like, ‘Will Chris Brown do jail time before his 21st birthday?’, ‘Will California legalize marijuana with bill AB 390?’ and ‘Will Facebook acquire Twitter in 2009?‘.
SocialMention.com is a real time search engine that searches blogs, microblogs, news, videos, comments, etc and pulls items back giving your search terms a ’social rank’. It’s a great tool.
Got an opinion on current world events, news and gossip? Think you know what’s going to happen next? Publish a prediction at Nostradamical.com and compete to climb The Pyramid. It’s easy, fun and a great way to express your opinions.
Alternatively, browse our current predictions and make a forecast.
Announcing Facebook integration at Nostradamical.com
Login and get stated in seconds with Facebook Connect
We’ve added Facebook integration to Nostradamical.com using the wonderful Facebook Connect platform. This means visitors can now login to Nostradamical.com using their existing Facebook login, which is super fast and easy. It also means users can publish their Nostradamical predictions back to their Facebook profiles to share them with Friends.
To login and starting forecasting predictions like, ‘Will California legalize marijuana with bill AB 390?‘ or ‘Will Lindsay Lohan cave and finally strip for Playboy? ‘ just click the ‘Connect with Facebook’ button on our site.
The Facebook Connect platform, launched last year is Facebook’s step into the ’single sign on’ world and competes with OpenID for example, in that users no longer need to setup new accounts and passwords on sites that use Facebook Connect. FB Connect launched in mid 2008.
Making our site open and accessible
So this means our visitors can now login in seconds and start forecasting predictions on world events at Nostradamical.com. So it’s another step towards making our site open and accessible to multiple networks. We also have widgets for display you latest predictions on your site, blog or social networking profile. Oh yeah and we’re also connected into Twitter and Friendfeed.
Facebook-Connect-mania…
Mashable has a good write up on the top 10 best implementations of Facebook Connect at sites like Vimeo, Joost and CNN.
How we did it
So this part is for the tech heads amongst you…
Nostradamical.com is built on the excellent and highly intuitive Ruby on Rails framework. To connect in with Facebook we used Mike Mangino’s excellent Facebooker plugin for Rails and tutorials from the Elevated Rails group. Thanks guys!
There is also a great tutorial on implementing Facebook Connect with Rails and Restful Authentication here at MadeByMany.
For anyone interested in implementing Facebook Connect with Rails check out the above sites and the touch-down pages at the Facebook Developers Wiki. The Facebook Community Forum is also a good source of advice. For bloggers check out this quick guide.
What’s next?
We’re working on ideas to develop our Facebook integration to make a more seamless experience across Nostradamical.com. Got a suggestion? Send us some feedback.
Otherwise, browse our predictions and start forecasting. It’s easy, fun and a great way to express your opinions on current world events. Get it right and climb The Pyramid.
We’re also looking to integrate our Prediction Engine with One Riot to pick up the latest social data related to each prediction that our members post. Check back at our blog for more info.
Technology: 100 years of past predictions (sort of) - video
So we’ve launched our first YouTube video which rapidly charts the computing technology milestones of the last 100 years and asks, ‘where are we heading next?’. We’re really excited about it and it was fun to create. Check out our YouTube channel PredictionTV (cheesy but ‘Nostradamical’ was taken…).
The concept
We wanted to ask, ‘what have been the key milestones in computing technology over the last 100 years that have lead to where we are now and where we are heading?’ Think iphone, Atari, ARPNET, microchips, robotics, code breaking, etc… At Nostradamical.com we’re all about predictions.
We also had a little fun thinking about the key milestones that could happen over the next few years from now. For instance, at Google’s current rate of growth how much power will they need by 2015? When will Facebook reach 1 billion users (they recently hit 175 million)?
Going back in time…
We had some fun phrasing the questions you would have asked had you had Nostradamical.com earlier in the last century (yes we know that was not possible). For example, “is the Sony Walkman just a teenage fad?” . Apple and Microsoft have both had interesting milestones over the last 20 years. One of favourite past quotes supposedly attributed to Bill Gates in 1981 was, “640K ought to be enough for anybody“. Although Gates apparently disputes this.
Thanks to…
I big thanks to PBS.org, About.com, and Computerhistory.org for their great sites on computer history. We also found some useful info at http://www.brainyhistory.com/ which helpfully lists out the detailed history of each year - thanks guys.
Like it? Please comment the video and checkout current technology predictions from our members.
Get ahead of the curve: 8 useful social search tools
At Nostradamical.com we’re all about predictions - predictions on future events, world affairs and hot topics on the public’s mind. So naturally we’re interested in the whole social search and ‘real time search’ debate.
We’ve listed out some real time & social search resources currently available that give users the ability to monitor what’s on mind of internet users the world over. The debate continues over Twitter’s overall dominance of real time search.
One Riot
Firstly our fav is One Riot - currently in Alpha. What’s cool about One Riot is that without even searching you can get the hot topics of the day right off the front page. And they are actual topics, not random keywords. Nice work guys. Check out their blog for more discussion on the week’s hot topics.
SamePoint
SamePoint.com is a social search engine that categorises Social Mentions, Discussion Points, Bookmarks, Wikis, Network,s B2B Networks, Groups, Life Casting, MicroBlogs, Reviews, Podcasts, Documents, Video, Images, News and Web. It has a Google Trends-like page that lists current trends.
SocialMention
SocialMention.com has a nice clean interface and presents social search results across a variety of sources from blogs to social networking data. You can get RSS feeds on your results. For example you can track our own mentions right here. Again, they have a nice trends page here.
Facebook Lexicon
Facebook’s own tool - Lexicon - is quite interesting to use but actually lacks the visual interest and punch of something like SocialMention.com. It feels like more of an experiment than a useful tool.
Twitter - Twist
Twist, the app from Flaptor indexes current trends from Twitter and allows users to monitor ‘keyword frequency’ inside the Twitter cloud. It’s interesting to compare the frequency of words like ‘twitter’ against ‘facebook’. However a look at the top 10 most popular terms yields some bizarre entries like ’sunday’ and ‘monday’. Given I am checking this on a Monday morning I guess Twitters are tweeting about their weekend activities and being back at work on a Monday. But, this is not really giving us an insight into ‘hot topics’, but rather ‘hot words’.
Google Trends
Google Trends, as you would expect is a heavyweight offering from Google with plenty of drill down functionality. You can compare search trends my topic, location, etc which gives detailed insights into specific terms and related words. My favourite page is the ‘hot trends’ page which gives a list of hot terms for the day. If you don’t know where to start this is a good place.
Twingly
Twingly has a nice microblog search function similar to SocialMention but with more limited functionality.
Delver
Worth mentioning also is Delver which is a social search page based more around your own network. Great for keeping in touch with hot trends in your immediate social universe.
Between these tools you can get a real feel for what’s out there. However the real ‘real time’ search market is yet to be fully harnessed with clear trending information and meaningful insights. Let’s keeping watching this space.
If you recommend more tools please let us know!
Crowd Gazer: Who’s predicting what in Feb ‘09?
Welcome to ‘Crowd Gazer’, the monthly roundup of who is predicting what at Nostradamical.com and what trends we are seeing from our user community. All predictions and forecasts at Nostradamical.com are created by you, the public.
Up, up and away!
So January saw us off to our public launch with a great response through AllMyFaves and TechCrunch. We had a great sign-up response and some fantastic predictions posted by our new members.
So what’s cooking on the Nostradamical.com prediction stove in February 2009?
In Technology:
Twitter’s future seems secure from Facebook, whilst Steve Jobs looks like he’ll keep on truckin’ at Apple for the time being. Go Steve, go!
It looks like Power.com’s future in 2009 is tenuous for the moment and AOL doesn’t appear to be a future player according to our forecasters.
This month’s announcement of Amazon Kindle 2 looks shaky with so many other iPhone, smartphone and netbook options out there. It’s a great product though.
In Entertainment & Celebrity:
There is a strong chance Heath Ledger will get a posthumous Oscar for his fantastic performance in The Dark Knight. Not long now until the Oscars. Let’ face it, it would be a great award for a great actor.
With the start of Lost Season 5 this month it looks like our forecasters think John Locke - the leader of the ‘Others’ is not actually dead. A no-brainer we’d say given he’s one of the main characters. Still it’s great to see Lost back on TV.
This month saw some hot activity around Taylor Swift’s rise up the US charts with her song Love Story - clearly user Heatwave is a big fan. Sadly the prediction of a number 1 slot was wrong. Better luck next time.
Lastly, and of our favourites…we’re tracking Rick Astley’s potential chart comeback with interest. Could this be our first self-fulfilling prediction?
In Sport:
In the US we’re seeing some interest in the Florida Gators repeating as National Champions in the 2009/2010 season. Oh and we got the NY Giant’s Super Bowl prediction wrong this time. Who wants to make next year’s Super Bowl prediction now? Be our guest.
In Europe this month sees the Rugby Six Nations tournament reach blistering levels of excitement as Wales are tipped to repeat their success last year as Grand Slam Winners.
In Business it’s all doom and gloom with various predictions on collapses and acquisitions. Could Fiat be in total control of Chrysler by the summer? Will the Bank of England’s base rate hit 0% by the summer? Oh and while we’re on the subject, let’s go all out…will the US economy collapse in 2010? I think it has already?
As for the Yahoo-Microsoft relationship our forecasters don’t think Yahoo will survive 2009 without being sold. What do you think?
In World Affairs:
In World Affairs we’ve seen a lot of activity around the Iran / Israel political debate. What are the chances Iran will send nukes into Israel this year? Gladly unlikely. Oh, and will Israel attach Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2009? Unlikely, but scary as hell.
Lastly, in Evil:
In Evil we have two of our favourite predictions. Firstly is seems fairly unlikely that Osama Bin Laden will be found this year again. Where is this guy?
And looking longer term we’re happy to see some creativity sparking with a prediction on whether or not the world will end on December 21st 2012 as ‘hyped’ by various sources. At least this one will be easy to confirm!
Do you have a new prediction? Browse Nostradamical’s predictions and publish your own here. All predictions and forecasts at Nostradamical.com are created by you, the public - it’s easy, fun and a great way to publish your opinions.
Get instant updates and start share your opinions on world events:
- Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/nostradamical
- Join our FriendFeed room at: http://www.friendfeed.com/nostradamical
- Sign up for your free account at Nostradamical.com to create predictions, and rise up The Pyramid.
10 tips for writing good predictions
We’ve been asked several times how our members can write good predictions that will get interest and popularity from visitors. As Nostradamical.com is like a large multi-user blog many of the tips for good blogging apply for good prediction writing.
So here are our top 10 tips:
- Avoid obvious predictions. They’re not that interesting. Predicting that ‘YouTube will grow in popularity this year’ is so obvious as to be fairly boring and really not much of a challenge for other people to forecast. You won’t get many views.
- Make the prediction publicly verifiable. Our predictions must be easy to verify in public with a true / false answer. Ambigious predictions will be removed. Also ‘private’ predictions like, ‘will my girlfriend leave me this year?’ will also be flagged by users and removed.
- Make the prediction time dependant. Limit your prediction to a time window so it can easily be measured and confirmed. Don’t leave a prediction open ended (e.g. ‘Will China grow in power’) as predictions at Nostradamical need to be limited to a specific end date.
- Be interesting but not obscure. Think of our site as a blog that anyone can use so use it to publish your opinions on things that interest you. However if you want to get visitors and forecasts to your prediction make it interesting to people.
- Don’t spam. Just don’t. You won’t get far.
- Ride the zeitgeist. Predict what is happening in the world and what is the next big trend or piece of gossip. There are several good sources to understand what’s on the world’s mind. Check out the following: Google Trends, Google Insights For Search, Twist & ReTweetRadar (Twitter hot topics in real time), Technorati’s What Popular, Google Alerts or Yahoo Buzz. Also, understand who’s really out there and check out Technorati’s State Of The Blogosphere.
- Predict the medium term, not the long term. Yes, global warming will be affecting us more in 20 years. Yes, China will be the next big super power. Yes, The Maldives might not exist by 2050. But really, who’s going to wait around to see if you’re right? We’ve built in a 1 year horizon to our prediction engine to purposefully restrict long term predictions.
- Link to useful blogs and information sources. Linking creates the glue that holds the web together. References to other useful sites make your prediction post more interesting and ultimately valuable to visitors. See this useful post on linking. You see, I just did it.
- Add images and videos. People like images but they like moving images even more. It just makes things more interesting and fun. When creating a prediction you can embed a lead image and put video links in your prediction body content. Try it, it’s fun.
- Use bullet points and lists to make it snappy. Basic rules of better readability. Chop your content into short readable chunks. Do it, it works.
If you’re interested in learning more check out our full content & community guidelines.
We’re live ! Nostradamical.com public beta launch today
After 4 months of Private Beta testing and tweaking today we launch into Public Beta. So sign up and create some predictions!
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Tweeting to Twitter: We love Twitter and have built in a direct Tweet feature to our site so you can publish your forecast directly to your Twitter page every time you make one. It’s a fun fast way to get your opinion to your friends. More here - http://www.nostradamical.com/twitter
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Publishing to Friendfeed: Got a Friendfeed account? You can publish your Nostradamical prediction activity straight to your Friendfeed page so tell your Friends what your currently predicting. More here: http://www.nostradamical.com/friendfeed. Each Friendfeed post is also published to our Nostradamical room at http://friendfeed.com/rooms/nostradamical. Why not join our room?
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Widgets! We’ve given birth to our first widget with more on the way. You can now display your hottest predictions on your blog, website or iGoogle page by sporting our flashy Widget. Check it out here - http://www.nostradamical.com/widgets
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Creating Collections: Got a collection of predictions like ‘My Oscar Predictions’? You can group together predictions into common themes on one page with a collection.
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Community Control: We’re making it easier for the community to control the quality of predictios on our site. You’ll see a ‘Flag’ link on each prediction page. From here members can flag predictions that may not be to community guidelines. For example,
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Design improvements. You’ll notice tweaks here are there with the view to making the site as user friendly as possible. Disagree? Drop us a mail!
Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/nostradamical or pick up our feeds here: http://www.nostradamical.com/feeds.
