I didn’t know that. When some commenters complained to me, I thought they were completely drunk. Sorry for that, folks.

Which is why the plugin “WP Spam Free” is out (until its author comes back to his sense), and “Bad Behavior” is in.

Commenters, let me know whether the problems you got while trying to comment on Midas Oracle have disappeared. Thanks. I promise I’ll trust you, this time.

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Our previous post on the topic of registration (which is recommended).

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UPDATE: Bad Behavior proved to be good for my blog users, but lately, I endured an attack of spam comments (60 last night). So, I did disable Bad Behavior and re-enable WP Spam Free for a while… I’ll see what to do next… If you encounter problems, e-mail me. I think you should accept cookies and have JavaScript enabled in your browser…

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Source: NewsFutures widget

Bet2Give Widget

Source: Bet2Give widget

[Technical Notes: The NewsFutures and Bet2Give widgets do not appear in the blog feed. For your information, my blog is powered by WordPress.org. I'm the administrator. The Exec-PHP plugin is installed.]

You can compare the NewsFutures probabilities with InTrade’s ones:

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Bet2Give Presidential Widget – You can customize it. Excellent. If you want to insert it in a WordPress.org-powered blog post (like Midas Oracle), you should disable the visual editor, during the insertion of the code lines. And I bet you should have the Exec PHP plugin, or be the administrator of the blog —or both.

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Like the Inkling Markets widget, the Bet2Give widget (based on JavaScript) does not appear in Web-based or PC-based feed readers, alas.

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Like the Inkling Markets widget, the Bet2Give widget (based on JavaScript) does not appear in Web-based or PC-based feed readers, alas.

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Let’s try it in avant-premiere… well, that is, before David Pennock installs it on his own blog. Let’s type some pointless sentences with plenty of keywords in them, to see how the plugin reacts:

• Google‘s Bo Cowgill’s one is longer than Yahoo!’s David Pennock’s one —I’m talking about their experience as administrator of enterprise prediction markets (what were you thinking of, this is a serious blog).
• One Google stock can buy ten Yahoo! stocks.
• Google’s street address in Mountain View, California, Vs. Yahoo!’s street address.

So as I typed the sentences above, the Yahoo! Shortcuts plugin has found 2 shortcuts. OK. I click on “Review this post”. It takes me painfully to another page, where I can accept or refuse the implements. The plugin did embed things under “Google” and “Yahoo! Shortcuts”. Problem: I have no idea what the hell they have embedded in my text. Let’s hit the “Publish” button to see what it looks like.

UPDATE: Does not work. Nothing appears on the published blog post.

APPENDIX: Screen shot #1. – Screen shot #2.

ABOUT A PREDICTION MARKET PLUGIN: It should be simpler than that. I vote against the automatic detection. And I vote against the machine dictating you what should be inserted. What about freedom of choice???? I will go for a manual selection of prediction market charts in a list, and the blogger would select the one(s) he/she wants to insert —and he/she would mark exactly where to insert it.

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 —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 “wisdom of crowds” (see James Surowiecki book by the same name) —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 —one registered person, two, a bunch of blog authors… 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.