PREDICTION: “A very active hurricane season is looming.” — National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, May 22, 2006

THE REALITY: Of the up to six “major” hurricanes in the North Atlantic that were predicted by NOAA, only two materialized. Number that reached U.S. shores: zero.

For a scientific assessment of the 2006 political prediction markets, see David Pennock on Evaluating probabilistic predictions.

[*] HedgeStreet has deleted all pages referring to its “Forecasting Center” for hurricanes. Big mistake. Web content should live forever, in my view.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Okay, here it is: Person of the year.

Pat.

MR. BUCHANAN: Time magazine did a complete cop-out, making you and me and the digital revolution person of the year. The person of the year is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, who dominated the news in the Middle East and is the big winner as well.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: I couldn’t agree with you more on Time copping out with these collective wins. They should go back to their old formula.

Eleanor.

MS. CLIFT: As representative of Newsweek, I couldn’t agree with you more as well.

My candidate would be Virginia Senator-elect [Jim] Webb, former combat veteran, novelist, won the race and has the stamina and the imagination to help lead the campaign to get this country out of Iraq.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Tony.

MR. BLANKLEY: I agree with Pat; Ahmadinejad. He has confounded Europe and American diplomacy and is moving Iran quickly towards possession of nuclear weapons.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Lawrence.

MR. O’DONNELL: It was the year of collapse — collapse of the mythology that we could win in Iraq and collapse of Republican control of the Congress. And George Bush generated all of that.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: So he’s person of the year?

MR. O’DONNELL: George W. Bush.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Person of the year for distinguished statesmanship and brutal candor at a time of grave national peril, [James] A. Baker III, for his stewardship of the Iraq Study Group and the ISG’s effort to find a way out of the Iraq quagmire.

Next week, the McLaughlin Group 2006 awards, part two.

Merry Christmas. Bye-bye.

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I love the McLaughlin Group (PBS and CNBC Europe), but they have a screw loose on this one. User-created Internet content is a true revolution. Part one is Web-based conversations among people —which I don’t give the first fig about. Part two is a new medium for professional and amateur journalists, reporters and commentators —to which I am addicted. In my view, you can’t beat the Internet for vertical content —and this revolution started with empowerment. Four jewels I can think of: Crossing Wall Street (the best finance blog ever), Delicious (the simplest and messiest tool for storing and discovering social favorites/bookmarks), Wikipedia (the first reference that should not be your last), and the prediction markets (which are an instance of the Wisdom of Crowds).

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Via Insta Pundit, this other critique of Time magazine’s pick for the Person of the Year 2006. The point is that most Web content is light conversations, and only a handful of Internet citizens do contribute to quality content. Nothing Earth shattering —I made the same point in the paragraph above and 5 minutes ago (citing Jakob Nielsen). User-created Internet content suffers participation inequality, so what? Any group, online or offline, does suffer speech participation inequality; no need to jump off the bridge about that.

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Note: I’m filling this blog post in the “Wisdom of Crowds” category, but I’m aware that what really counts is (Confab moderator) James Surowiecki’s criterion #3.

Under what circumstances is the crowd smarter?

There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart. It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd’s answer. It needs a way of summarizing people’s opinions into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.

TIME is right on target, but their thematic articles are banal and not engaging. Complete crap.

Addendum (December 17): And I agree 100% with Mike Linksvayer’s conclusion.