It's an interesting thought, though I'm not sure it's the most efficient way to get at the data for which he is looking.

For instance, you could just look at price history of TVs and you'd find that prices are generally increased in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl and then discounted heavily in the following weeks. Therefore, if you want a good deal on a TV, buy it a week or so after the Super Bowl.

I understand what your saying, however I had the extra constraint of I was getting this TV definitely before Jan 1, so I wasn't going to wait for the Super Bowl. And so I honestly have no idea how TV prices change historically just before Xmas, and especially with the doom and gloom of the economy how prices were going to play this holiday.

Also, this does save me some work be really getting other people like yourself who have insight to look at historical prices to go ahead and do that and share their opinion. And if your right, your right, the better you do in Inkling. Put your virtual money where your mouth is kinda thing, right? :)

Sure - there are obvious patterns but I don't always know what those patterns are and other smart people do, so aggregating them using a market is pretty convenient for me to let others tell me what I should do.

Great story, Nate. Though I hope Inkling's main market doesn't get too crowded with too many people trying to do the same thing!

Thanks :) We could always introduce some better filtering if that ever happened.

And incenting more with Tipjoy might help some overlook the "shopping questions are unfun", if they decided they liked getting tipped for the help.

I'm really interested to see how users will use Tipjoy on Inkling. It should make for (at a minimum) an interesting social experiment.