The Geek Index
I’ve spent some time looking at the economy and determined that while I know very little about the auto industry, the financial industry, and pretty much all of business world as a whole, but I have a pretty good sense of Geekdom. I’ve taken this keen insight and started building what I called a Geek Index. It isn’t fine tuned by any means as there are many more variables I need to bring into the formula.
As it stands now, the Geek Index is a number based off of twenty publicly traded companies which are then weighted and normalized. The twenty companies aren’t that surprising.
Entertainment/Games
Marvel
Time-Warner
Lionsgate Films
Sony
IMAX
Activision-Blizzard
Hasbro
GE
Vivendi
Technology/Gadgets/Games
Sony
Microsoft
Apple
Research in Motion
IRobot
Optimal Group
Verizon
AT&T
Adobe
Google
Yahoo
Intel
Some of these companies are ‘geekier’ than others so they are weighted differently. Activision-Blizzard is geekier than GE. AT&T’s geek credentials come from gadgets other companies make that AT&T utilizes, so it actually gets weighted with a partial value.
These numbers were then normalized to equal 1,000 on 1/30/2009 as a baseline value. I’ve been bad at running the formula daily but from 2/2/2009 to today, the index value has increased 75 points to 1078.35. This is better than my 401k!
I want to include a few other elements beyond stocks though. I tried tapping into the Hollywood Stock Exchange to get movie values but it doesn’t come through conveniently and it doesn’t track all the celebrities and personalities that I believe truly make up Geek Culture.
The only other mechanism to determine level of fame/notoriety is the number of hits Google brings up for each person. This is acceptable but not an easy thing to automate… I think. Also, what twenty people are best representatives of Geek Culture. For movies I can do ticket sales. Not sure what I can do with TV series – perhaps ratings.
So if you have suggestions of things to measure to determine the health of Geekdom, I’d love to hear about it.
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About Sean
Sean D. Francis is a technologist, writer, and geek. He podcasts, makes video, and dabbles in all the geeky genres including horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. View all posts by Sean → This entry was posted in Thoughts and tagged Geek Index. Bookmark the permalink.← Sean's Tips for Saving the Economy | The Art of Worldly Wisdom: The First Maxim →
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