Some great reading to help in your choices on whether or not Steve Ballmer will be leaving our favorite technology monopoly: Does Ballmer Need To Go?

Market Question: Will Steve Ballmer Stay At Microsoft As CEO Through The End Of The Year?

Our market here, Will Hilary Clinton Drop Out Before The Democratic National Convention?, looks pretty convinced that Hilary won't be dropping out before the convention but here are a couple blog postings as food for thought on her dropping out:

Should Hillary Clinton Drop Out? Maybe She Should ... Maybe She Shouldn't.
Howard Dean Watch: Either Hillary or Obama MUST Drop Out After June Primaries

As you can already tell, there's been some visual site updates to the site but I've also added some behind the scenes changes.

A recap of the changes.

1. New homepage graphics and modified layout.

2. Broke up the comment and stock summaries on the homepage into tabs accessible via the "View: Market Activity | Comments & Site News" links below the main graphic.

3. Improved side navigation. Clicking on the word in the navigation menu will take you to a page showing all the index questions related to that category. If you liked the old way with the drop down menus, just click the plus sign at the end of each category and you will get the original drop down menu.

4. Improved the input fields for stock comments and trader comments.

5. Comment email notifications. When someone responds to a comment you left on a stock or trader profile you will receive an email telling you so. You can turn this feature off in your account info page.

6. Payout email notifications. When a stock you own pays out you will receive an email notification highlighting what you made or lost similar to the trading messages you already receive. You can turn this feature off in your account info page as well.

It seems RealityMarkets traders aren't the only ones predicting David Archuleta will win American Idol 7. Here's an excerpt from the American Idle blog:

Trade publications are beginning to admit that David Archuleta has Idol 7 in the bag. While I wouldn't go that far in proclaiming him the winner, I will say he has a good chance. Just look at his target audience and the sheer numbers below. This is a really flippin' long story but I'll give you the highlights. The story makes sense.

Read the rest here.

Some of you may have noticed a change this week to the account portfolio page that added a short position category to your portfolio and were wondering how to actually short a stock. Starting today you will be able to enter short orders on the trade screens where all your other orders are entered. Just select it from the drop down menu where you normally select buy or sell. A Short is how you open a short position and a Cover is how you close out a short position. Beware, if you Cover a short position and the price is higher than when you opened the short position, you will owe money to close it out.

The Industry Standard has written up an overview on the prediction markets Google runs internally to improve their business decisions as well as learn how employees exchange information. A little tidbit caught my eye:

With about 1,500 employees making 80,000 "trades" over the past two and a half years, Google officials say it's the largest corporate experiment with prediction markets they are aware of.

The reason this caught my eye was because we have about a third of the users but have done about 180,000 trades in a year and a half. It's interesting to see the differences in trade volume between our groups of people.

Normally I don't like to discuss new features until I'm ready to launch them but I've been pretty excited about this as I've been working on it so I figured I would give a heads up to everyone. By far the most requested feature to RealityMarkets.com has been short sales, but unfortunately I wasn't able to introduce it before now due to limitations in the previous pricing system. Now that the new system is up I've been revisiting Short Sales and after some work I'm happy to report the addition is nearly finished. I'm hoping to roll it out in the next few days after I wrap up the testing.

In the interest of market research, I found a couple blogs that are running their own lists on who the 2008 NBA MVP will be:
Str8Hoops
NBA DAILYTAKE

There seems to be a lot of talk in the blogosphere in the last couple days about Apple's iTunes becoming the number 2 U.S. retailer of music and the subsequent prediction by the NPD Group that iTunes would over take Wal-Mart as the number one U.S. retailer sometime in 2008. Well we heard prediction so we thought we would start our own market index on it and see what you all think. Trade away: Will iTunes Pass WalMart as the leading U.S. retailer of music in 2008?!

ZDNet.com has an article up about 12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008 that features prediction markets or as they are calling them "Collective intelligence platforms and enterprise decision management support applications":

8. Collective intelligence platforms and enterprise decision management support applications will see significant early adoption this year. Prediction markets, such as those from Inkling Markets and Consensus Point, began to get on business leader’s radar in 2007 and are poised for early growth this year and are ostensibly the end game of “real” Web 2.0 applications: harnessing the intelligence on the edge of our networks. Predictions from companies like Gartner are also putting a lot of stock in enterprise decision management (EDM) this year but both will see only early adoption this year with 2009 being the primary growth year.

I highlight this here because we've been watching this space of the market and haven't been sitting idly by while it happens. Hopefully we'll have more to report shortly.

Check out the rest of the article, it's an interesting read.