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’ 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… 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 “changed so thoroughly that informed people will look to amateurs they trust for the information they want.” Nisenholtz expected the professional media to remain the authoritative source for “unbiased, accurate, and coherent” 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 —a news and knowledge aggregator… using anonymous volunteers. But Wikipedia is only an information aggregator… it feeds on both media and blogs to gather the facts. Wikipedia is the common denominator of knowledge —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 & Collective Intelligence (Wikipedia)

UPDATE: An empty comment from Read & Write Web.

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’ Web site.

That is a bet recorded at the LongBets foundation. 2,000 bucks are at stake. But two things have happened recently that may impact the outcome of this bet:

1. The New York Times has just opened his archives, and all the old stories are now free to read. That will prompt the bloggers to link to some interesting NYT oldies (as Jason Kottke has done already), which in turn will help these NYT stories to rank higher in Google Search results. That will also prompt the bloggers to link more to current stories from the New York Times, knowing that the dollar wall has disappeared.
2. The New York Times has just opened plenty of blogs (powered by market leader WordPress.org) under his umbrella site (NYtimes.com). The Freakonomics blog and the Paul Krugman blog are two examples of “weblogs”, as defined in the LongBets contract statement, that are hosted as sub-websites of the New York Times.

The two points above illustrate, as you’ve understood, the upcoming “convergence” or “fusion” between the so-called “mainstream media” and the new “citizen media”. Now, will this new trend in web publishing help the New York Times backers to win the LongBets bet? Jason Kottke, last year, investigated and said that the blogs are going to win. We will see.

Psstt… I don’t like that the bet lays on 5 news stories, only. The sample should have been made longer than that.

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ADDENDUM: Type “eLab eXchange” in Google Search, and our group blog on prediction markets (Midas Oracle) ranks higher than the New York Times story entirely devoted to publicize the eLab eXchange. Upon discovering that, Donna Hoffman’s face turned yellow, as you’ll see below.

HERE IS THE GOOGLE SEARCH SCREEN SHOT:

AND HERE’S DONNA HOFFMAN’S YELLOW MUGSHOT:

Donna Hoffman of the eLab eXchange and marketing professor at the University of California at Riverside

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Here’s another example where our group blog (Midas Oracle) ranks higher than the New York Times (more exactly, higher than the Freakonomics blog webhosted by the New York Times site):

#2. Publish only one site feed for the main content of your site/blog. (((See Jason Kottke’s discovery that his secondary site feed, which he used to put most of his efforts in, was viewed by a minority of his total readership —I knew it from day one, because I’m used to monitor the BlogLines stats for all the blogs I like.)))

Psstt… I’m not pretending that I’m a superior intelligence form, so if you spot that the Internet presence of Midas Oracle has a deficiency, feel free to put a comment below —or contact me.

Psstt #2: And good luck to all the little prediction market bloggers out there!!! Best wishes to all you —young white males voting Republican (that’s what you are, right?). Let’s create a huge super-organism, the Prediction Market Blogosphere.

Just for your curiosity, see this Digg-equivalent FAQ, and make sure to give a look at this new site —via Jason Kottke. Compare it with Digg and Delicious —and maybe SlashDot. And, now, ask yourself: Which ranking methodology would you use to improve this prediction market home page?

#1. I sent the link to Odd Head (David Pennock’s excellent blog) to professor Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. (I also sent him the procrastination link, and the methods of visualization link.)

#2. He published it, and now David Pennock is “marginalized”.

#3. Jason Kottke, seeing the Marginal Revolution blog post, went reading David Pennock’s blog and spotted the iPhone story.

#4. He blogged it, and now David Pennock is “kottked”.

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Benefits:

a) 2,000 visitors to his blog, this week.

b) An agreeable injection of Google PageRank.

I know that from experience with CFM. Marginal Revolution linked dozens of time to CFM (most of the times, for link attribution), and Jason Kottke one time in January 2005.

(I don’t think that Jason Kottke received an iPhone for free.) [But I could well be wrong.]

Well, today, via Jason Kottke, we have some news from the scientific world that scratches this concept of “retrocausality” (which we should not confuse with “finality”, I was told), and which seems to comfort the Costa de Beauregard’s interpretation:

Quantum theory describes the behavior of matter and energy at the atomic and subatomic levels, a level of reality where most of the more familiar Newtonian laws of physics (why planets spin, airplanes fly and baseballs curve) no longer apply. The problem with quantum theory, put simply, is that it’s really weird. Findings at the quantum level don’t fit well with either Newton’s or Einstein’s view of reality at the macro level, and attempts to explain quantum behavior often appear inherently contradictory. “There’s a whole zoo of quantum paradoxes out there,” Cramer said. “That’s part of the reason Einstein hated quantum mechanics.” One of the paradoxes of interest to Cramer is known as “entanglement.” It’s also known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, named for the three scientists who described its apparent absurdity as an argument against quantum theory. Basically, the idea is that interacting, or entangled, subatomic particles such as two photons — the fundamental units of light — can affect each other no matter how far apart in time or space. “If you do a measurement on one, it has an immediate effect on the other even if they are separated by light years across the universe,” Cramer said. If one of the entangled photon’s trajectory tilts up, the other one, no matter how distant, will tilt down to compensate. Einstein ridiculed the idea as “spooky action at a distance.” Quantum mechanics must be wrong, the father of relativity contended, because that behavior requires some kind of “signal” passing between the two particles at a speed faster than light.

This is where going backward in time comes in. If the entanglement happens (and the experimental evidence, at this point, says it does), Cramer contends it implies retrocausality. Instead of cause and effect, the effect comes before the cause. The simplest, least paradoxical explanation for that, he says, is that some kind of signal or communication occurs between the two photons in reverse time. It’s all incredibly counterintuitive, Cramer acknowledged. But standard theoretical attempts to deal with entanglement have become a bit tortured, he said. As evidence supporting quantum theory has grown, theorists have tried to reconcile the paradox of entanglement by basically explaining away the possibility of the two particles somehow communicating. “The general conclusion has been that there isn’t really any signaling between the two locations,” he said. But Cramer said there is reason to question the common wisdom. Cramer’s approach to explaining entanglement is based on the proposition that particles at the quantum level can interact using signals that go both forward and backward in time. It has not been the most widely accepted idea. But new findings, especially a recent “entangled photon” experiment at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, testing conservation of momentum in photons, has provided Cramer with what he believes is reason for challenging what had been an untestable, standard assumption of quantum mechanics.

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Parting Shot: If “psychological retrocausality” (“precognition”, actually) could be engineered one day, then we could make a killing on prediction markets. I could have sold short the SENATE.GOP.2006 contract at TradeSports, and made as much money as scientist David Pennock did (or so he claims —and I saw that some vendor also made this self-interested and undocumented claim).