New Yahoo! News election dashboard

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Cross-posted on Oddhead Blog.

The Yahoo! News Political Dashboard has re-launched for the general election stretch run of the 2008 US Presidential election.

Yahoo! News political dashboard for the 2008 US general Presidential election

From the main map you can see the status of the election in every state according to either polls or Intrade prediction market odds. Hover your mouse over a state to see current numbers or click on a state to see historical trends. On the side, you can see search trends, blogs, news, and demographic breakdowns at national and state levels.

You can also &#8220-create your own scenario&#8221- by picking who will win in every state. You can save and share your prediction and compare against markets, polls, history, or celebrities. More on ycorpblog.

Readers will be happy to see more thorough and prominent integration of prediction market prices compared to the primary election dashboard. Is that good enough to quiet Chris&#8217-s whining?

In the PM view, states are colored either bright red or bright blue, regardless of how close the race is in that state. To see a visualization that blends colors to reflect the tightness of the race, see electoralmarkets.com.

Yahoo! News also offers a candidate badge that you can display on your blog declaring your choice. The badge features national-level polls, prediction markets, search buzz, and money raised.

Why InTrade CEO John Delaney, TradeSports acting CEO John Delaney, BetFair CEO David Yu, HubDub CEO Nigel Eccles and NewsFutures CEO Emile Servan-Schreiber should supplicate me to develop my prediction market journalism project

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200 web visitors (coming from Google) reached my John Edwards post, published yesterday afternoon (ET).

10% of them followed my links to the 2 HubDub prediction markets on John Edwards.

Remember that those web stats count only the web visitors, not the feed subscribers &#8212-who are more numerous, and whom I focus more on.

TAKEAWAY: A popular PMJ website, which would associate fresh news and betting recommendations, would send many people to the prediction markets.

The mainstream media and the classic bloggers will never deal with real-money prediction markets the way they should be dealt with &#8212-for multiple reasons (moral, ethical, legal, etc.). And for other reasons, they will never link to the play-money prediction markets.

Look Justin Wolfers at the Wall Street Journal: He is the most excited about prediction markets. Yet, he does not link to InTrade directly. He does not link to the InTrade real-money prediction markets. Hence, his blah blah blah does not translate into more revenues for InTrade.

What it takes is a brand-new media organization, entirely devoted to prediction markets, and run by die-hard prediction market people.

Please, guys, help me.

  • cfm |-at-| midasoracle |.|-com-|
  • chrisfmasse |-at-| gmail |.|-com-|

TV News Shows = Entertainment

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The awful French TV program on sports betting (where BetFair&#8217-s Mark Davies croaked in French) reminded me of what Robert Scoble said about TV news shows.

They do not intend to educate you..

Robert Scoble:

Last week I was on CNBC twice. Once on “Fast Money” and once on Donny Deutsch’s “The Big Idea.”

The Fast Money segment has been torn apart on the Internet but Roger Ehrenberg of the Information Arbitrage blog had the most intelligent analysis of it.

Here’s the key piece of the Donny Deutsch show, where we had a bunch of bloggers on the Microsoft Blogger Bus asking questions of Bug Labs’ CEO Peter Semmelhack. Bug Labs went onto win CNET’s “Best of CES” award for the emerging tech category.

Some things that are worth underlying about the difference between my video show and CNBC.

1. Expense. CNBC had dozens of people involved in the show, a huge booth, really expensive cameras, satellite time, etc. My show? Get a Nokia phone and go for it.
2. Makeup. Yeah, I wore it. There’s a video out there on the Internet somewhere. I’m not sure why Valleywag hasn’t found it yet.
3. You don’t get to say whatever you want. Donny’s show was tape delayed. If you try doing something wacky, they’ll just cut you out. But even if they keep you on, they have a director who is telling you what they want. She preps you for each segment, giving you “talking points.” If you don’t agree with those talking points you have to negotiate to have them changed. But if they don’t like your talking points they just won’t go with you. Second, she has a big sign and if she thinks you should make a point she makes it clear.
4. These shows are NOT about getting deep, or really getting a good understanding of CES. They were ALL about being entertaining! Hey, who knew? (I tried to pull a bunch of gadgets out and they said “we don’t care about the gadgets.”)
5. They filmed Bug Labs’ CEO for 10 hours for a two-minute segment. Now do you understand why so many CEOs let me come over and film them? I never take more than an hour with an executive, so it’s always easy to get onto someone’s schedule.
6. My show has very little editing, so it’s pretty rare that the context gets lost on an answer. On TV, though, things get cut up, sliced and diced, all for entertainment effect, not necessarily to tell the best story.

Why Midas Oracle (and not TV news shows or print newspapers) will dominate the future.

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Henry Blodget:

We still occasionally encounter people who argue that physical newspapers and TV news shows have a vital roll to play in the dissemination of news. These folks usually work for physical newspapers and TV networks, of course. [&#8230-]

Ha! ha! ha! :-D

48% said their primary source of news is the Internet (up 20% from only a year ago).
86% of Americans regard web sites as an important source of news.
36% regard &#8220-blogs&#8221- as an important source of news.
87% of Americans think &#8220-professional journalism&#8221- will remain vitally important.
77% think &#8220-citizen journalism&#8221- will be important
59% think &#8220-blogs&#8221- will be important.

More at Zogby.

BetFair-TradeFair, Betdaq, TradeSports-InTrade, MatchBook, NewsFutures, HSX, et al., should begin to take prediction market blogs seriously.

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Red Herring’s list of the top 100 North-American high-tech startups includes Inkling Markets —but not NewsFutures, Consensus Point, or Xpree.
  • Professor Koleman Strumpf explains the prediction markets to the countryland people.
  • Professor Koleman Strumpf tells CNN that a prediction market, by essence, can’t predict an upset.
  • Time magazine interview the 2 BetFair-Tradefair co-founders, and not a single time do they pronounce the magic words, “prediction markets”.
  • One Deep Throat told me that this VC firm might have been connected with the Irish prediction exchange, at inception.
  • BetFair Rapid = BetFair’s standalone, local, PC-based, order-entry software for prediction markets
  • Michael Moore tells the Democratic people to go Barack Obama in Pennsylvania (a two-tier state), but the polls and the prediction markets tell us that that won’t do the trick.