Yahoo and Tim O’Reilly have come up with this fantasy stock market called Buzz Game. You buy and sell shares of technologies based on whether you think they are hot or not, using monopoly play-dough.

They give their reasons:

• To see if search buzz (including spikes and trends) can indeed be predicted by the collective wisdom of crowds in a market
• To provide an index of “what’s next” for technology enthusiasts
• To separate the wheat from the chaff among the various technologies that O’Reilly is constantly watching and tracking; to measure which forces in the technology industry are truly disruptive and which are mere flashes in the pan
• To discover how Yahoo! Research’s dynamic pari-mutuel market mechanism behaves in the “wild”
• To investigate opportunities around predicting trends in search engine behavior, and how they relate to events in the real world
• Last but not least, to entertain and engage participants in the game

I guess after fantasy fly fishing, this is the next big thing.