Meta-Markets is a non-profit stock market for social web content.



Overview

Meta-Markets is a non-profit stock market for social web content. In New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ people trade shares of companies. In Meta-Markets people trade shares of their social web assets from online bookmarking, social networking, photo and video sharing services. The initial version of Meta-Markets contains four stock exchange markets: Facebook, Flickr, Feedburner, and Del.icio.us.

Meta-Markets leverages the affordances of community participation with stock exchange dynamics to reevaluate individual units of social web content as commodities; and it creates a forum for their exchange. Members issue their social web content (e.g. a Flickr photos) to Meta-Markets via an initial public offering (IPO), which puts a percentage of shares of the asset on sale via a Dutch Auction [1]. Bidders collectively determine the initial trading value of the asset and help the issuer to raise capital to invest back in the markets. During the IPO process, the fair value [2] of each asset is formulated on data originating from content domain (e.g. the total number of views of a Flickr collection). The fair value is an interpretation of the impact the asset creates in its domain. It becomes a reference value for transactions, while each transaction sets the asset's trading price, its market value. Assets in Meta-Markets are traded in exchange with virtual currency, Buraks.

Meta-Markets puts a premium on user labor, people's immaterial labor [3] of creating content and meta-content as users in social web services. Assuming the roles of investors, brokers, buyers and sellers in Meta-Markets, people continuously speculate on the value of user labor through transactions and discussions. Many web services today leverage the creative capacity and labor of their users as their core content and capitalize on it through sophisticated advertising networks. While service providers may understand, formulate, and leverage user labor to determine business plans and solicit advertisers, the value of each user's contribution often remains opaque to the users of the respective services. As a result, users never get rewarded for what they create, what is supposed to sustain the service, because they are not aware of the value they generate. Meta-Markets addresses this lack of awareness with an economy of user labor and keeps the stream of this consciousness alive through community participation.


Keywords

social web valuation, immaterial labor, user labor, online stock market, collectivity


Objectives

Meta-Markets emphasizes that a community needs an economy rewarding all participants in order to sustain itself and provokes users to think and act on the value they create as unrewarded content generators. By placing web analytics in stock exchange context, Meta-Markets enables its members to evaluate the usage statistics for social web assets and to qualify their relationship with the sites, feeds and profiles that are being traded. Meta-Markets operates through three core themes:

Understanding User Labor
When people sign up to Meta-Markets, they face with one simple question: What is the value of my work? They browse through other members' assets, trade shares, participate in the discussions, watch the fluctuating prices, learn from others' buying and selling actions, and ultimately construct an opinion around comparative valuation of user labor. When members issue their own assets to public (IPO), they find the opportunity to experience the reaction of other members and to raise capital for re-investing in the market. These interactions together raise awareness around user labor.

Evaluation and Speculation
In Meta-Markets, the work done by the information brokers of a diverse range of social media finds an exchange value. [4] People own shares of social web assets to manifest interest and appreciate production value. Through stock transactions, they evaluate and manipulate the trading value of assets, which results in speculation on the prices. They buy from one market, sell in another. Transactions generate an exchange value not only for the stocks but also for the markets (e.g., exchange value between Flickr and Facebook). Through stock comments, market wide conversations develop a collective point of view on the asset and the market as a whole. This mix of economic and social interactions enable Meta-Market members to collectively evaluate and speculate on the user labor.

Techno-Cultural Sustainability
Meta-Markets addresses the exploitation of users' immaterial labor on the Internet, which is practically invisible, inherent in the everyday activities, and embedded in the social relationships. Recently, user labor has become particularly relevant on the Internet since user participation became a marketable product for "web 2.0" services. However, users are neither aware of the value they create nor rewarded for their work. Meta-Markets is a critique of this trend, involving more than a statement of purpose. It invites people to participate in the critique. Our approach involves a stock market model because users are complex individuals moving through an equally complex, technologically mediated consumer landscape. Traditional forms of communication and critique are not impactful enough to deal with this complexity and to engage people. Therefore, we set up Meta-Markets to enable direct interaction with the value of labor and contribute to the idea of sustainability in user-service ecosystems.


History

Our research in online economies and sustainable life forms for creative people started at the Physical Language Workshop [5] at the MIT Media Laboratory [6]. The precursor to Meta-Markets was the project A Stock Market in Life (2006) [7], a two week stock market performance where shares of certain places (e.g., coffee house, gallery, night club) were traded and stock values equaled to the number of people in these place at a given time. Meta-Markets adopted the mechanics of this project and applied to a larger scale, addressing the labor of users in social web. After three months of development the first version of Meta-Markets went live in the beginning of June 2007.

Jun 2007: First version of Meta-Markets was released.
Sep 2007: Second version with better performance. Database optimized and moved to a private server.
Oct 2007: Third version released with new market graphs, search, and better commenting features.
Feb 2008: Fourth version released with renewed layout and interface, added recommendations, changed the fair value formula, and added market specific fair value discussion sections.
Mar 2008: Initiated the User Labor Markup Language (ULML) and UserLabor.org [8] as a result of our discussions around fair value calculations.


Authors

Core
Burak Arikan, New York, USA
Engin Erdogan, San Francisco, USA
Cenk Dolek, Ashgabat, Turkmenistan

Participants
Meta-Markets community consists of individuals who are active users of social web services. People participate not only as users but also as contributors to the improvement of the system through recommendations and demonstrations in the system itself. Most recently, we have been evaluating the fair value formulations as a community and discussing the relevancy of potential revisions.

Access
Currently, Meta-Markets is in alpha version. Participation is open to invited users only since we have limited resources to handle the site traffic. As of March 7, 2008, there are 255 members.


Members

Meta-Markets operates on the World Wide Web and is not limited to any particular geography or region. People participate from all over the world.

Meta-Markets is intended for anyone who has a presence in social web and who put their creative capacity into work for producing content and meta-data in web services. By offering their social web assets, people assume the role of information brokers and their labor in content domain translates to exchange value in Meta-Markets.


Technology

Meta-Markets leverages the affordances of community participation with stock exchange dynamics in order to reevaluate individual units of social web content as commodities; and to create a forum for their exchange. In other words, it is a stock market for social web content where content owners can introduce units of their content into the market for trade in exchange with virtual currency.

Infrastructure: Ruby, Ruby on Rails framework, MySQL database. Running on an Apache and Linux operated private server.
Interface: XHTML, XML, CSS, Javascript, Flash.

Meta-Markets is an always open stock market infrastructure that runs 24/7. Unlike other stock markets, transactions can be done at any time. Its features are outlined in 4 categories: aggregation, analysis, transaction, and communication.

Aggregation

Initial Public Offering (IPO): Enables members to issue their social web assets in the stock market for public trading.
Fair Value Aggregator: Gathers analytics data of assets from their domains through APIs.
Real time activity monitor: Scans the market events and displays market activities that are relevant to each member.
Market search: Searches and displays assets and asset owners.

Analysis

Fair Value Formulas & Calculator: Fair values are formulated differently in each market based on the type of data aggregated from content domains.
Market Indexes: Each market's index is computed as-it-happens to be visualized in the interactive graphs.
Interactive Graphs: Each stock has an interactive graph displaying the market price fluctuation and transaction volume in the last 30 days.
Recommendation Engine: Surfaces member's profitable stocks and good deals in the market.

Trading

Dutch Auction: A three day Dutch Auction system for setting the initial trading price of a new asset.
Trading Interface: Members buy stock shares from the buyer who is offering the lowest sale price or set prices to put their shares for sale.
Market Value Calculator: The trading price of each asset is set based on the last transaction.
Buraks: The virtual currency of Meta-Markets.

Communication

Notifications: Members get notifications based on market events such as new bids in an auction, shareholder comments, transactions etc.
Asset Discussions: Comments in asset pages enable members to share their thoughts and to show reactions about the asset.
Market Comments: Members participate in discussions of the fair value calculations for each market.


References

[1] Wikipedia contributors. "Dutch Auction". Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction (accessed January 15, 2008)

[2] Wikipedia contributors. "Fair Value". Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_value (accessed January 15, 2008)

[3] Lazzarato, Maurizio (1997). "Immaterial Labor"
http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.htm (accessed March 15, 2008)

[4] Smith, Greg (2007). "Meta-Markets: Speculating on Social Media"
http://serialconsign.com/node/119 (accessed October 09, 2007)

[5] The Physical Language Workshop (PLW) at the MIT Media Laboratory
http://plw.media.mit.edu

[6] MIT Media Laboratory
http://www.media.mit.edu

[7] A Stock Market in Life (2006)
http://market.openio.org

[8] User Labor (2008). "User Labor Markup Language"
http://userlabor.org (accessed March 25, 2008)

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