Nostradamical.com/blog

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Don’t spam. Just don’t. You won’t get far.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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!

• 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
• 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?
• 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
• 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.
• 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,
• 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.