At First Light

The Industry Standard magazine is back as an online only, oh-so-social-media-infused news site implemented with Drupal.

For those of you who were around for the first dotcom era, you may remember the Industry Standard as the “the newsmagazine of the Internet Economy” and head cheerleader for Bubble 1.0. And like most of the companies it covered, the magazine hit the wall and died. Read the Wikipedia entry for more background.

But now IDG has decided to bring back the brand, with a few very interesting twists. Here’s a screen shot taken from the new site.

Note that they’ve embedded a prediction market throughout the site. When you register you get $100,000 in virtual “Standard Dollars” that you can bet on various stories, and exchange for real world prizes. You also get the prestige of appearing on the leader board if you bet well.

These prediction markets are something I studied back in economics school, and I’ve remained interested in them ever since. There are markets for all kinds of things, but here are a few markets of my favorites:

• Iowa Electronic Markets for the US Democratic Primaryand Republican elections and the General Election
• Yahoo! Buzz Gamefor various technologies.
• Popular Science Magazine PPX Predictions Exchange is another Drupal-powered site.

Using a prediction market to get readers engaged with the content seems like a great move. If they can generate enough traffic to maintain market liquidity, it could be a great way to dramatically increase user engagement and loyalty. I for one feel more committed to site now that I’ve placed a few bets.

They’ve also added social network integration features to the site, allowing you to invite people from your social networks to participate in the market. That allows them to go viral.

Given its history, the Industry Standard has some less than optimal karma to overcome, but CMP seems to be making all the right moves this time around. I’m not much of a gambler, but I think these guys are onto something. And of course it’s great to see that they chose Drupal to implement their innovations.

If the creators of the new Industry Standard are out there reading this, please contact me or comment on this post. It would be great to learn more about what you are doing.