Prediction market blogger quits InTrade.

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Ben Shannon:

New Year Update

Posted by Jesse Livermore on Sunday, January 3, 2010

I’-ve been gone for a while. There just hasn’-t been that much happening on Intrade, and I’-ve been focusing on neuroscience.

Intrade has definitely gotten tougher over the past year. I think the 2008 election drew in a lot of people who weren’-t very good at politics or gambling. By now those people have either lost their money or gotten better. Hopefully the 2010 elections will draw in a new crop.

In the mean time, Intrade’-s management has not done a great job in developing the brand. My impression is that volume is off by more than 50% compared to last year. Chief difficulties:
- Absolutely no advertising whatsoever.
- Diminished interest in politics in an off-year.
- Getting money onto the site requires a lot of determination and a visit to a gas station to buy a Netspend card.

Future updates on this blog will be less-than-daily, basically when I have an opinion about politics that I feel like sharing.

How to join Midas Oracle -and why.

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How To Become A Midas Oracle Author

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The Uniqueness Of Midas Oracle

  1. We publish the best mutant ideas.
  2. We link out a lot to external resources.

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How To Join Us

#1. We are interested in recruiting you as a volunteer, if you have an interest in prediction markets (and collective intelligence). Be sure to read and understand (:-D ) the ABOUT, MISSION, CODE OF CONDUCT, and TERMS OF USE webpages. Guest blogging on Midas Oracle can help you get traffic to your website and increase its PageRank.

#2. You may either register yourself as a comment author, disclosing your full name (or not), or send your application (as a comment author or as a post/page author) to Chris Masse —-see our CONTACT page. When you register, do create your account using your first name and last name, such as “-john-doe”-. The login is at the bottom of the sidebar.

#3. Registered members of Midas Oracle will receive an e-mail newsletter once in a while —-only when important circumstances warrant. (There are e-mail options on your profile page, inside the Midas Oracle system, which allows you to opt out of mass e-mails, if you really need to.)

#4. To have your status upgraded from comment author to post/page author, contact Chris Masse.

#5. To have your name removed from Midas Oracle, send your resignation to the blog administrator (Chris Masse), and he will delete your profile from the blog database.

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How To Publish Your Ideas On Midas Oracle

- How To Publish

- How To Comment

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World Blogging Month (WoBloMo)

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Our fearless conductor Chris Masse has mastered the art of blogging, including the key ingredient of consistent daily posts. He knows what Stephen King knows: quantity and quality can be friends.

For a pseudo-blogger like me intimidated by those seven letters “-P u b l i s h”-, I could use some prodding from ludicrous and arbitrary deadlines. Sixteen of them, in fact.

Enter World Blogging Month (WoBloMo), coming in March. The goal is simple: Blog every other day from March 1 to March 31 and you win.

I’-m in. So far as I can tell so are two other people.

One of them, Mark Reid, summed up his reason for joining nicely: “-By forcing regular posts I’m hoping to not indulge myself as much in my writing, find the main thing I want to say in each post and just say it.”-

March is a good month to write since it happens to be a popular month to surf.

So join us and “-just say it”- on every odd day of March. See you on the other side.

Full disclosure.

BuddyPress will power the communities of our prediction exchanges.

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BuddyPress, part of the WordPress eco-system.

More on BuddyPress.

Download this post to watch the video, if you read this in a feed reader (such as Google Reader).

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Possible users of BuddyPress:

- BetFair – TradeFair

- InTrade – TradeSports

- HedgeStreet

- Betdaq

- Hollywood Stock Exchange – Cantor Exchange

- HubDub

- NewsFutures

- Inkling Markets

- etc.

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The best way to raise awareness for your prediction market startup is to create a long-term relationship with the Midas Oracle blogger and other web acquaintances (a.k.a. online friends).

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Loic Le Meur:

[...]

#2 – Do not pick a PR person, be the spokesperson of the company.

The best person to represent the company is not a PR person and even less an external one. It is YOU. You, the founder, you the CEO. Look at Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, they are the PR machines. Does Michael Arrington himself need a PR person to represent himself get TechCrunch known? If you launch your startup, you need to be the one representing it because you have the vision and the passion. If you are shy, get over it. Get training. Try a daily video for example :)

#3 – Participation is NOT marketing.

The most important asset that a startup CEO has or should build is his community. It has nothing to do with marketing. [It] took me 8 years since I started blogging in 2003 to have a community and it is no marketing. It is about sharing every day thoughts, tips, advise, learnings with the community. It is about a continuous dialog with thousands of friends that will gladly help you building the company if you do not consider it as marketing. Of course, you can talk about your products and it may be good marketing at times but it should not be artificial. Marketing fails in communities.

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#6 – Do not see bloggers and journalists as target either, they will ignore you.

Make sure that the PR team DOES NOT RESEARCH individual preferences for contact before they reach out, they will tell you what everybody knows about them and you will contact them in the most boring way possible. Take bloggers. Everybody tries to pitch Scoble and Arrington. They are tired of the same formatted boring pitches that come to them exactly the same. They are my friends and if I had tried to pitch them like hell they would have never have. Relationships with journalists and bloggers are the same as real life. They take years. Approaching them artificially with a strong sales pitch is the best way to make sure these relationships will never happen.

#7 – Do not measure success and traffic from PR.

It’-s like if you tried to measure your relationships with your friends! Build strong links with your community, learn from them everyday, enhance your product. If you get coverage from the smallest blogger go and comment to thank him. Do not be obsessed by numbers and results, it is long term relationships that matter.

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Excellent.

When I read Loic Le Meurs post, I thought to myself, “-Nigel Eccles read that post months before I did.”- :-D

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