David Pennock criticizes the Time Magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year issue.

Chris F. Masse January 16th, 2007

As I wrote here, Time magazine was well inspired in its pick, but its coverage of user-created content sites was crappy. And many political commentators have yet to understand the profound societal impact of user-created content.

Yahoo!’s research scientist David Pennock complains that Time magazine completely forgot to cite Yahoo! as one of the great company in the user-created content category. He is absolutely right. Few people know that Yahoo! owns Delicious and Flicks, for instance.

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Post Scriptum: David Pennock’s blog, Odd Head, is becoming a great reading. Twice a month, or once a week sometimes, the guy publishes a major posting, with sharp insight and plenty of tremendously good links. I highly recommend that you bookmark it and subscribe to it. His blog is much better than Overcoming Errors dot com —Pennock is more pragmatic, more focused on prediction markets, and the outbound links are top notch.

Odd Head URL: http://blog.oddhead.com/

Site Feed: http://blog.oddhead.com/feed/

Subscribe to David Pennock’s blog (Odd Head) with Google Reader. [Sorry, mister Yahoo!, but My Yahoo! is crappy.]

If you are in position to link to Odd Head from your own blog or website, please consider doing it. There aren’t many good blogs on prediction markets out there, and it’s in our common interest to encourage good writers.

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Now, to balance the first part of this blog post (which might look like butt-licking), some criticism of David Pennock:

#1. David Pennock should add an ARCHIVES and SITE MAP sections to his blog. I would have loved to link to it, so as to tell the readers to browse his listing of past blog posts.

#2. I am sorry to end on a sour note but I don’t like his Yahoo! Buzz Game. There’s not much traction to it, maybe because other people feel like me about it. One thing I don’t like is that the prices are not expressed in a 0–100 scale —which we can easily interpret as outcome probability expressed in percent (%). The second thing I don’t like is the lack of traffic and transactions. The Yahoo! Buzz Game has been designed as a research experiment (so as to test the DPMM design), and thus has not been marketed widely. In my view, if you start a prediction exchange, you should pour everything into it to make it a success because it’s liquidity that will draw the new speculators. Thirdly, the idea to have expiry based on Yahoo! search results is the biggest blunder since the New Coke. Show me someone who cares about Yahoo! search results and I’ll show you an idiot.

The unpopularity of Yahoo! Buzz Game is a pity, since we really need all these technology business prediction markets —even if it’s with play money. I hope that Yootopia will be better.