Web 2.0 research – love, hell and real estate

Few weeks ago Financial Times has a cover page story about Web 2.0 research being developed by major investment bank. The purpose was to analyze whether some blogospere trends can help to predict how prices of varius assets change. Idea is simple, when many people begin to blog about certain stock then it could get popular and rise, so if you spot this trend develop you may beat the market.

I think that web 2.0 research has a great potential and it will even set standards in the most democratic way you can imagine. I was wondering the other day should I write “globalisation” or “globalization”, my web 2.0 coach told me do not look for a dictionary, just google it. Globalization won. Maybe in few years typical personal data would include pagerank and number of google hits.

I a heading tomorrow for a four-day seminar for central bankers organized by a major investment bank, we will discuss how to make more money on our reserves for our citizens, and diversification will likely be a lightmotive, I guess. I may not be able to blog for a few days, so let me leave you to ponder over some of the web 2.0 quick research, see below:

When we blog we use the word love much more than hate

But we prefer hell to heaven

With the exception of winning football championships Japan popularity wins over Italy:

But we generally prefer to pizza to sushi

Bush is much more popular in blogospere than Harry Potter, although he runs well ahead of Putin

US and China are of equal size in blogosphere, while US GDP is still much bigger

And while real estate market is tanking in the US, it still beats stocks and bonds in the blogospere (maybe because it is tanking).

When I watched blogosphere in the last few months I had a feeling, that on number of occassions blog-street was ahead of Wall Street which so far was ahead of Main Street. A new era of social research has definitely started.