Midas Oracle .ORG » Blogosphere

Few people write up blog posts, but many read them (“scan-read” them, more exactly). That’s true for both Midas Oracle and the Blogosphere as a whole.

Chris F. Masse — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:21:46 +0000

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WORLD-WIDE WEB EXCLUSIVE (PLEASE, DO CREDIT “MIDAS ORACLE” FOR THE SCOOP): Here’s what Nigel Eccles drinks when he works on the HubDub mission statement.

Chris F. Masse — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 10:37:46 +0000

What's on Nigel Eccles' desk at HubDub.

Nigel Eccles:

Quoting HubDub forecasts in news stories about future events will be as common as quoting stock prices in financial stories is today or (in the UK) quoting betting odds for political elections.

In my view, the only way our good friend Nigel Eccles would succeed would be to get HubDub on television —like our good friend Max Keiser did with the Hollywood Stock Exchange in the end of the 90s.

Nigel Eccles’ flawed “vision” about HubDub shows that he hasn’t any.

Chris F. Masse — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:22:47 +0000

[IMPORTANT NOTE: This present post is critical of one point expressed by Nigel Eccles, but, overall, I like this Scottish guy, and I enjoy HubDub's prediction markets a lot.]

Nigel Eccles:

Quoting HubDub forecasts in news stories about future events will be as common as quoting stock prices in financial stories is today or (in the UK) quoting betting odds for political elections.

Nigel,

my good friend,

Quit drinking the Scotch whisky and listen up 2 minutes.

I appreciate the formidable effort you made to start up HubDub and I am delightful its prediction markets are now well traded. In that perspective, HubDub is already a success. And I agree that many HubDub prediction market prices are meaningful.

However, I strongly disagree with the idea that, at one point in the future, the free world’s journalists and bloggers will rush to quote HubDub’s market-generated probabilities. Here’s why.

See, my good Scottish friend, you’re not the first fellow to tackle this problem. A guy named Emile Servan-Schreiber, with another fellow named Maurice Balick, created NewsFutures (a play-money prediction exchange quite similar to HubDub, except that HubDub uses MSR whereas NewsFutures uses CDA) in the year 2000 —at the time most contemporary prediction market people were still drinking their mother’s milk.

For the Midas Oracle readers who are just surfacing from an Afghan cave, Emile Servan-Schreiber is:

a veteran of the prediction market industry;
a well educated (PhD) and smart man;
a gifted exchange executive, with a very good understanding of Internet usability;
a successful entrepreneur (NewsFutures has been profitable for years);
the only international prediction market expert (NewsFutures has clients in North-America, Europe, and Asia);
the author of 2 academic papers on prediction markets (one of them established the predictive power of the play-money prediction markets);
one of the most often interviewed prediction market people;
well connected in the Academia (2 prediction market luminaries are on the NewsFutures scientific advisory board);
the winner of a bet he made against Justin Wolfers;
etc.

In other words, Emile Servan-Schreiber is far from being a moron.

Still, in 8 years of existence, NewsFutures’s prediction market prices have NEVER been quoted (over than occasionally) in the Mediasphere or the Blogosphere.

What makes you think that a cocky Scottish guy will be able to achieve what a smart Frenchman has miserably failed to achieve?

The answer to Nigel Eccles’ mission statement resides in a collective effort from all prediction market people and organizations to favor the development of prediction market journalism.

How should prediction market firms (e.g., InTrade-TradeSports, BetFair-TradeFair) deal with Blogosphere’s criticism?

Chris F. Masse — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 21:40:08 +0000

I have just spent 20 minutes reading the comments on that post. (The post itself is to be forgotten; all the comments are outstanding, though.)

Insightful thoughts about Internet marketing. Required reading for Mark Davies, John Delaney, Emile Servan-Schreiber, and the rest of our little prediction market clique.

Great Links That Have Nothing To Do With Prediction Markets

Chris F. Masse — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:19:58 +0000

1. A critical roundup of the blogging right-wing nuts. HILARIOUS.

2. Spot the giant machinery in picture #1. IMPRESSIVE.

Google is THE problem, but BetFair should discover the solution.

Chris F. Masse — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 14:32:22 +0000

Here’s why. Take a look at the following Google search results:

PROBLEM #1: GOOGLE LINKS PROMINENTLY TO THE POST THAT PUBLICIZED THE RUMOR.

SOLUTION: Updating that post with the link to the post that debunks that rumor.
RISK: People won’t click on the debunking link.
UBBER SOLUTION: Replacing that rumor content with the debunking content??

PROBLEM #2: THE OFFICIAL BETFAIR SITE RANKS LOW.

SOLUTION: There isn’t any, for them, in this case. Any independent website discussing both the pro and the anti sides of any controversy will always be more linked to than the official document, and thus will be computed better by the Google PageRank system.
RISK: The BetFair P.R. department would plead that this is a technical issue. It’s not —and this problem is not going away thanks to the magic eraser of the BetFair SEO.
UBBER SOLUTION: It illustrates that BetFair should enter a new era: the era of the digital conversation with the rest of the Blogosphere. They can’t stay encapsulated in HammerSmith like mussels in their closed shell. Mark Davies’ little friends in The Guardian won’t be of any help, this time. The technologically retarded BetFair spin doctor, who doesn’t blog, who doesn’t understand blogging, who doesn’t mind blogs, who doesn’t acknowledge bloggers, will have to adapt to his time, very soon, I predict. Wanna bet?

73% of journalists [*] sometimes or always use blogs in their research.

Chris F. Masse — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:16:47 +0000

[*] = newspaper, magazine, TV, radio, and web journalists

Editors & Publishers

Via Henry Blodget (who is hilarious, as always)

Implications for the field of prediction markets (InTrade-TradeFair, BetFair-TradeFair, Betdaq, HSX, NewsFutures, Inkling Markets, etc.):

The P.R. arm of the prediction market firms should also reach the bloggers —not just the journalists.
Prediction market firms should monitor the Blogosphere for rumors, and deal with them in a subtitle way.
A long (“too long”, some will say), balanced, detailed blog post about your product is more useful to reach out than a media kit.
Our industry needs a blog network of reference, all focused on prediction markets.

Why the 3 Midas Oracle blogs, the InTrade-TradeSports blog, the BetFair-TradeFair blog, the Betdaq blog, the Iowa Electronic Markets blog, the Hollywood Stock Exchange blog, the NewsFutures blog, the Freakonomics blog, the Odd Head blog, the Alpha Thesis blog, the Caveat Bettor blog, etc., should all be part of a giant, inter-linked, meta conversation about prediction markets.

Chris F. Masse — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:12:40 +0000

[I]n the blogosphere, [] competition is a good thing, not a bad thing. I want other finance blogs to launch, the more the better. And I want them to be written by keener minds than mine. The more that happens, the more traffic I’ll get – that’s the way the conversation works. Other media don’t work like that: if I’m watching ABC, I’m not watching NBC. But blogs are different, and don’t operate according to that kind of zero-sum mathematics. [...]

Felix Salmon got it —once again.

David Perry, my good Lord, please take notes.