Daily Archives: December 21, 2007

Bet2Give on CNBC: High impacting media infiltration

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No GravatarCNBC – The Closing Bell – Maria Bartiromo interviewed NewsFutures&#8217- Norris Clark about Bet2Give and about NewsFutures&#8217- enterprise prediction markets. It was great. Great.

The Video – The Video

If Emile Servan-Schreiber or Norris Clark put the video on YouTube, I will embed it in a blog post on Midas Oracle. And if they send me the transcript, I will publish it. It was great. The visuals were great &#8212-like slides. Very good. We&#8217-re making progress, folks.

Some remarks: I didn&#8217-t like that Norris Clark defined Bet2Give as a &#8220-prediction market&#8220-, as opposed to a prediction exchange. And I object about talking about a &#8220-stock market of future events&#8221-. It&#8217-s a derivative exchange for future events, rather.

Bet2Give on CNBC

UPDATE: NewsFutures CEO Emile Servan-Schreiber comments&#8230-

This &#8220-Sinning &amp- Winning&#8221- tag line below the screen is very strange, since Bet2Give is explicitly about neither. It goes to show how deeply the association between betting and sinning is rooted in the American psyche. By that measure, we&#8217-ve got a looooong way to go still before widespread acceptance of PMs [= prediction markets], not to mention legalization.

Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Michael Gerber – The E-Myth Revisited
  • Changes to TradeFair prediction markets
  • Eric Zitzewitz, laughing all the way to the bank
  • Michael Bloomberg: I’m not running… but, beware, I am a King maker.
  • Meet the 3 Iowa Electronic Markets co-founders: George Neumann, Forrest Nelson and Robert Forsythe.
  • When Markets Beat The Polls – Scientific American Magazine
  • GLOBAL COOLING

Please, make WordPress a bit like Wikipedia.

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Folks, here is my proposal to the WordPress developers:

Assign a great number of editors to some specific pages

Right now, if you are an editor in WordPress, you can edit any posts and pages. Hence, the administrator of a big group blog would not have many editors &#8212-because the blog posters would not like the idea that their colleagues can edit their posts.

But it would be great to be able to have a great number of editors for some specific pages. That way, any group blog powered by WordPress would be able to tap in the &#8220-wisdom of crowds&#8221- (see James Surowiecki book by the same name) &#8212-the same way Wikipedia does. For more on Wikipedia, see these two posts.

Collective intelligence (a.k.a. wisdom of crowds) is a mechanism at the heart of Google PageRank, Wikipedia, open-source software, prediction markets, etc. It is very powerful. WordPress could tap into that very easily, by allowing a page-by-page editing role.

The WP admin would set who are the editor(s) of a particular page &#8212-one registered person, two, a bunch of blog authors&#8230- or any internet citizens like in Wikipedia.

Thanks a lot for your attention. Contact me for more info, or leave a comment below.

NEXT: WordPress is a bit like WikiMedia (the software powering Wikipedia), now.

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • The definitive proof that FOR-PROFIT prediction exchanges (like BetFair and InTrade) are the best organizers of socially valuable prediction markets (like those on global warming and climate change).
  • Fairness Doctrine prediction markets
  • 2 MILLION TRADES LATER: Inkling’s play-money prediction markets are accurate —too.
  • Web Forums on Prediction Markets
  • Jason Ruspini will answer SOME of these CFTC questions. — 12 days left, Jason.
  • QUIZZ OF THE DAY: Which blog is the most open minded?
  • Prediction Markets TV — Will the controversial but indispensable Max Keiser (ex-HSX) stay true to his purpose, or will he f*** it up?

Amateur Journalists (Bloggers) Vs. Professional Journalists (Media) Vs. Wisdom Of Crowds & Collective Intelligence (Wikipedia)

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And the wisdom of crowds won, of course. That&#8217-s the conclusion I draw from reading Rogers Cadenhead at WorkBench, who assessed what would be the settlement of the LongBets wager on:

In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times&#8217- Web site.

AGREE
Dave Winer

Stakes
$2,000
($1,000 each)

DISAGREE
Martin Nisenholtz

For Rogers Cadenhead, Dave Winer will win the bet. But he also says that the overall winner is&#8230- WIKIPEDIA.

[…] So Winer wins the bet 3-2, but his premise of blog triumphalism is challenged by the fact that on all five stories, a major U.S. media outlet ranks above the leading weblog in Google search. Also, the results for the top story of the year reflect poorly on both sides. In the five years since the bet was made, a clear winner did emerge, but it was neither blogs nor the Times. Wikipedia, which was only one year old in 2002, ranks higher today on four of the five news stories: 12th for Chinese exports, fifth for oil prices, first for the Iraq war, fourth for the mortgage crisis and first for the Virginia Tech killings. Winer predicted a news environment &#8220-changed so thoroughly that informed people will look to amateurs they trust for the information they want.&#8221- Nisenholtz expected the professional media to remain the authoritative source for &#8220-unbiased, accurate, and coherent&#8221- information. Instead, our most trusted source on the biggest news stories of 2007 is a horde of nameless, faceless amateurs who are not required to prove expertise in the subjects they cover.

So the real winner is Wikipedia &#8212-a news and knowledge aggregator&#8230- using anonymous volunteers. But Wikipedia is only an information aggregator&#8230- it feeds on both media and blogs to gather the facts. Wikipedia is the common denominator of knowledge &#8212-not the primary source of reporting. Just like prediction markets feed on polls and other advanced indicators.

External Link: See a previous assessment of the bet by Jason Kottke.

NEXT: Amateur Experts (Yahoo! Answers) Vs. Wisdom Of Crowds &amp- Collective Intelligence (Wikipedia)

UPDATE: An empty comment from Read &#038- Write Web.