My first prediction market plugin for WordPress

No GravatarI have created a lite plugin for WordPress. It displays the best one-line mottos and one-line quotes on prediction markets, in the top right corner of the admin panel. This plugin is based on a slight modification of the &#8220-Never Gonna Give You Up&#8221- plugin (based on the &#8220-Hello, Dolly&#8221- plugin).

Here&#8217-s a screen shot:

Prediction Markets Rock.

As of today, I have just put the BetFair slogan in the database. Overtime, I will add quotes from our prediction market luminaries (or so they think they are). I might e-mail them to ask them to provide quotes &#8212-or I might scout the Web for tidbits.

After my harvesting and implementing, I&#8217-ll put up this plugin in the WordPress directory of plugins, so everybody can download it for free and get illuminated by our prediction market wisdom. :-D

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • “Is Clinton’s Pennsylvania Lead Really 20 Points?”
  • The Most Surprising Piece Of News I’ve Heard Today
  • Self-Serving Prediction Market Of The Day — Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006
  • Prediction markets tend to be so illiquid, though, that mere activity looks like volatility.
  • Decision Markets and Futarchy are solutions in desperate search for a problem to solve and for their early adopters… and that may stay that way well after Robin Hanson’s head gets cryogenized.

Midas Oracle is now powered by WordPress 2.5 -and you should be too.

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  1. Just updated to WordPress 2.5. (See a screencast here.)
  2. I waited one week before upgrading, so as to take the time to monitor the WP 2.5 compatibility with our plugins.
  3. To upgrade, I used the &#8220-Wordpress Automatic Upgrade&#8221- plugin. The automatic process failed, but the step-by-step process worked fine. Overall, I&#8217-m happy. This plugin is a time saver.
  4. WordPress 2.5.1 is due for May 2008. In the meantime, if you spot some gremlins, let me know.
  5. Speaking of gremlins, WP 2.5 has now a better compatibility with Safari, so maybe Tom W. Bell will come down here to tell us what he thinks of the new US anti-gambling regulations.
  6. The Midas Oracle post/page authors will spot a totally reconfigured &#8220-Write Post / Page&#8221- area.
  7. They have added a bunch of &#8220-media buttons&#8221- (to insert pictures, sounds, videos, etc.) and an &#8220-embedded media&#8221- button (which you&#8217-ll find if you click first on the &#8220-Kitchen Sink&#8221-). I have yet to fully experiment all that.
  8. There is now a &#8220-full screen mode&#8221- for the writing area.
  9. They have hidden the 2 blockquotes button under the &#8220-Kitchen Sink&#8221- sub-menu.

UPDATE: Gartner is out today saying that open-source software will take over the free world, eventually &#8212-and that includes Chapman University and Tom W. Bell&#8230- :-D

Matt Mullenweg

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Problem 17: Prediction Markets — USMA D/Math Problem of the Week — Submission Deadline: April 3, 2008 at 1600
  • Would be fun to have the equivalent for event derivatives.
  • “We’ll be eight degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow.” “Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals,” said Turner, 69. “Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state —like Somalia or Sudan— and living conditions will be intolerable.”
  • QUESTION TO THE READERS: Could anyone guess what Nassim Nicholas Taleb would think of the prediction markets?
  • YouTube Videos on Prediction Markets

LinkedIn feed of your network updates

UPDATE: Following my protestation published in the post below, LinkedIn has just fixed the problem I described and its network update feeds do now output both a title and a body (a.k.a. description). The body contains information and links, as I asked in this post. 😀

So, kudos to the LinkedIn engineers for computing that, even lately. However, I remain adamant that the TechCrunch writer (Ducan Riley) is an incompetent bozo.

UPDATE #2: The feed that I’m receiving now beams only titles. So we’re back to square one. 🙁

The information comes as a set of feed item titles… as opposed to full feed items (with each a body and a title). … In that body (a.k.a. “description” in RSS lingo), I would have liked to have each people or organization’s name… with their LinkedIn link embodied into their name… as you’ve got on the LinkedIn website (see the second image, at the bottom of this post).

TAKEAWAY:

The LinkedIn engineers didn’t do their work correctly.
The TechCrunch writer rushed to publish his blog post and did not pause to experiment the damn thing —or if he did, that Australian bozo (blogging at night while his Silicon Valley boss sleeps) has nothing to do writing for a premier tech publication.
I would expect a tech blog to be more critical, and not to swallow any P.R. crap sent by corporations —even if that P.R. message is sent as a blog post. Just because a P.R. department is “cool” and uses a blog to communicate does not mean that the tech bloggers should swallow everything those “cool” spin doctors say.

[The feed on the right side of the image below is the one that I’m talking about —not the one on the left site.]

LinkedIn

Here are the updates from the Midas Oracle networks (the screen shot was taken 2 weeks ago). On the LinkedIn website, the names of people and organizations are clickable. That makes all the difference between an information that is useful and one that is not.

LinkedIn

To be part of the Midas Oracle Network, follow this LinkedIn link and send me an invite from there. [ cfm |-at-| midasoracle |.|-com-| ] I’ll accept it.

Here’s the FaceBook link. Send me an invite from there, if you wish. [ chrisfmasse +++at— gmail +dot— com ]

And if you wish, we may also become friends on Google, and share feed items within Google Reader. I found this to be usable and useful. Try it. (It’s Robert Scoble who showed me the way. I’m sharing feed items with him and two dozens of people.)

To share items with me (Chris Masse) within Google Reader, go to GMail, and under “Chat” (on the left pane), click on “Add Contact”. Paste my e-mail address there (chrisfmasse +++at— gmail +dot— com). Once I receive your invite, I’ll accept it. You will then see my shared items and I’ll see yours within Google Reader.

Could a statistical reputation system built on top of Amazons Mechanical Turk be of any help to the prediction market firms?

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Obama-Cinton 1

Obama-Cinton 2

I leave the mic to David Pennock so that he&#8217-ll explain to you what this is all about. (Be sure to check Panos Ipeirotis&#8216- comment on Lukas Biewald&#8216- blog post.) [UPDATE: Panos has just made it into Read &amp- Write Web!!!!!!]

Mechanical Turk

New York Times

I am more interested in what &#8220-Dolores Labs&#8221- does for a living. Here&#8217-s what Lukas Biewald has e-mailed me:

We collect large data sets for fun and profit using Mechanical Turk and a statistical reputation system that we&#8217-ve build on top of it. We&#8217-ve helped companies with tasks ranging from deciding if an analysts opinion about a stock is positive or negative to finding the best price for buying a hot tub online. (You can see other examples at http://doloreslabs.com/examples.html).

Recently we decided to take our small PR budget and instead of buying Google Ads, give our smart friends interesting data sets to play with in exchange for posting on our blog. So far, we&#8217-ve looked at race on Sports Illustrated covers over time (http://blog.doloreslabs.com/?p=10), compared Hillary vs Obama coverage in the media (http://blog.doloreslabs.com/?p=21) and collected subjective data on colors (http://blog.doloreslabs.com/?p=11). The beauty of these experiments is we can do them in just a day or two and they only cost us a few hundred dollars, so we can do lots of them.

We have lots of ideas of more stuff we want to do with our technology &#8212- if you have any thoughts I&#8217-d love to hear them.

Fascinating.

Any applications for the field of prediction markets (InTrade-TradeSports, BetFair-TradeFair, etc.)??

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • IIF’s SIG on Prediction Markets
  • Science
  • Why did prediction markets do well in the pre-polling era, professor Strumpf?
  • Mozilla FireFox users, do you have trouble downloading academic papers (as PDF files) from SSRN?
  • “Impact Matrix. Used to collect and gauge the likelihood and business impact of various events in the very long term.”
  • Ends and Means of Prediction Markets — Tom W. Bell Edition
  • How to run enterprise prediction markets… legally

Why the BetFair blog shoud move from MovableType to WordPress – Edition #3,961

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Matt Mullenweg has a post out comparing the 2 platforms and touting WordPress.

[&#8230-] WordPress is 100% open source, GPL. All plugins in the official directory are GPL or compatible, 100% open source. [&#8230-] WordPress MU is 100% open source, GPL, and if you wanted you could take it and build your own hosted platform like WordPress.com, like edublogs.org has with over 100,000 blogs. [&#8230-]

I have read with fascination all the comments there, on the original MT blog post, and else. I have spotted many webmasters explaining why and how they moved from MovableType to WordPress &#8212-but I have spotted none explaining why and how they moved from WordPress to MovableType.

Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Jason Ruspini was an imprudent and cocky predictor, but, in the end, he is a honest man.
  • Polls Vs. Prediction Markets
  • Prediction exchanges let traders buy and sell contracts on the likelihood of future events. Contracts are structured so the prices can be read as a percent likelihood of an event occurring.
  • What Jed Christiansen did say about Predictify
  • Russell Andersson, Chief Operating Officer: Third Ave Beach
  • Based on the analysis of some 600,000 official Iraqi documents seized by US forces after the invasion and thousands of hours of interrogations of former officials in Saddam’s government now in US custody, there is no evidence Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda.
  • Robin Hanson is breaking the Internet.

Why the BetFair blog should move from MovableType to WordPress

No GravatarEvery reason in the world is listed here: Notes on a Massive WordPress Migration.

And take a look at the comments on this post, they almost all defend WordPress.

Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Bzzzzzzzzz…
  • Bzzzzzzzzz…
  • “No offense, but I think Radley Balko is the most valuable blogger in America right now.”
  • Are you a better predictor than John McCain?
  • What does climate scientist James Annan think of InTrade’s global warming prediction markets?
  • Inkling Markets, one year later
  • One trader’s view on BetFair’s new bet-matching logic

Comments are now completely open on Midas Oracle.

No GravatarI have been fighting comment spammers for weeks, and I think I&#8217-ve finally found the right combo:

  1. I don&#8217-t use &#8220-Askimet&#8221- anymore (it constantly sent my own comments in the spam area!!!)-
  2. I use &#8220-Bad Behavior&#8221- (it protects this blog from naughty spambots)-
  3. I use &#8220-Peter&#8217-s Math Anti-Spam Image&#8221- (it makes sure the commenter is a human being and not a spambot)-
  4. I use &#8220-WP AJAX Edit Comments&#8221- (it allows commenters to edit their comments, post publication)-
  5. I use &#8220-Subscribe To Comments&#8221- (it allows commenters to receive e-mail notifications of new comments to a post)-
  6. I use &#8220-NoFollow Free&#8221- (it allows the commenters&#8217- links to be computed by the Google PageRank system)-
  7. I use &#8220-TinyMCEComments&#8221- (it puts a visual editor in the comment area)-
  8. I use &#8220-WordPress Gravatars&#8221- (it shows off the face pictures of our blog users).

TWO CASES:

CASE #1: You are logged in.


Comment Registered

CASE #2: You are not logged in. &#8212- a) You are not a registered user. b) You&#8217-re a registered user but haven&#8217-t logged in.

Comment Unregistered

The comment will appear immediately if the commenter has one previously approved comment.

Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • GLOBAL COOLING
  • Sikorsky X2 = coaxial main rotors + rear-facing tail rotor
  • Linear Programming – Combined Value Trading – Parimutuel Call Market – Combinatorial Call Markets
  • Cash Rewards for Innovations
  • Let’s blog and dig about the Future.
  • OSCARS 2008: The Hollywood Stock Exchange has been more accurate than InTrade.
  • Right-click on the image below, open the link in another browser tab, and click on “OK”… to subscribe to InTrade’s iGoogle widget.

Google Profiles

No GravatarGoogle Profiles

Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Eliot Spitzer has simply demonstrated once again that those who rise to the top of organizations are very often the most demented, conflicted individuals in any group.
  • Business Risks & Prediction Markets
  • Brand-new BetFair bet-matching logic proves to be very controversial with some event derivative traders.
  • Jimmy Wales accused of editing Wikipedia for donations.
  • What the prediction market experts said on Predictify
  • Are you a MSR addict like Mike Giberson? Have nothing to do this week-end? Wanna trade on a play-money prediction exchange instead of watching cable TV? Wanna win an i-Phone?
  • The secret Google document that Bo Cowgill doesn’t want you to see

WordPress, youre simply the best.

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Simply The Best - Tina Turner

The IT guy in charge of one of the General Motors sites:

I’m the lead developer for the blog.gmnext.com. When we looked to select the best blogging system out there we went through several both closed-source (cheap to fairly expensive) blogging tools to all the open source variety. We ended up choosing WordPress not because of the cost but simply because it was the best tool for blogging out on the market. The project is just the beginning, we’re in the process now of localizing the blog into a variety of languages. Well done on one of the best designed systems I’ve seen in a long time.

By the way, thanks to David Perry of Consensus Point for directing me to WordPress, two years ago. And also thanks to David Pennock of Yahoo! Research for some IT tips.

Daves ( :-D ), you&#8217-re simply the best. :-D

BitGravity = video distribution network

No GravatarBitGravity is the IT provider for the official Apple video feed of MacWorld 2008.

Go to its frontpage, and stick there for 3 minutes to watch the awesome animals-in-the-wild video.

Let&#8217-s hope that the videos on prediction markets will reach this high level of quality, one day.

Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Prediction Market Journalism
  • TechCrunch is 221 times bigger than Midas Oracle.
  • Earthquake measuring 9.0 or more on Richter scale to occur anywhere on or before December 31, 2008
  • Why Midas Oracle (and not TV news shows or print newspapers) will dominate the future.
  • The Six Degrees Of Separation
  • Alpha Thesis
  • Meet Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.