New York Times:

[&#8230-] Among the 4.6 million registered English-language users are about 1,200 administrators, whose “admin” status carries a few extra technical powers, most notably the power to block other users from the site, either temporarily or permanently. Those nominated for adminship must answer an initial series of five questions, after which other users have seven days to register their approval or disapproval. Above the admin level are the cheekily named “bureaucrats,” who are empowered to appoint the admins and will do so if they deem a user consensus has been reached (the magic number is somewhere around 70 percent approval). There is also a level above the bureaucrats, called stewards, of whom there are only about 30, appointed by the seven-person Wikimedia Foundation board of directors. [&#8230-]

But there is also something uniquely empowering — for better or for worse — about Wikipedia, in that there is no real organizational ladder to climb: since everyone contributes behind screen names (which may or may not match their real ones), questions of age, appearance, experience and so forth don’t color the discussion. The only way to achieve a degree of authority in the world of Wikipedia is to show sufficient devotion to it, and that can happen in relatively short order. [&#8230-]

The presentational difference is that Wikipedia’s version of events comes in the form of one constantly rewritten, constantly updated, summary article, rather than a chronological series of articles, each reflecting new developments, as newspapers and even most news sites do. But much more significant than that, no Wikipedia article contains any attempt at actual reporting — in fact, original research is forbidden. [&#8230-] &#8220-[] An encyclopedia is the condensation of received wisdom.&#8221- [&#8230-] On a big news day, Wikipedia functions like a massive, cooperative blog — except that where most blogs’ function is to sieve news accounts through the filter of strong opinion, Wikipedia’s goal is the opposite: it strives to filter all the opinion out of it. [&#8230-]

Great article on Wikipedia.

I have developed Midas Oracle .ORG as a group blog (&#8221-a chronological series of articles, each reflecting new developments&#8221-), and I&#8217-m going to develop Midas Oracle .NET as a wiki blog (a set of &#8220-constantly rewritten, constantly updated, summary&#8221- articles).

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

• Red Herring’s list of the top 100 North-American high-tech startups includes Inkling Markets —but not NewsFutures, Consensus Point, or Xpree.
• Professor Koleman Strumpf explains the prediction markets to the countryland people.
• Professor Koleman Strumpf tells CNN that a prediction market, by essence, can’t predict an upset.
• Time magazine interview the 2 BetFair-Tradefair co-founders, and not a single time do they pronounce the magic words, “prediction markets”.
• One Deep Throat told me that this VC firm might have been connected with the Irish prediction exchange, at inception.
• BetFair Rapid = BetFair’s standalone, local, PC-based, order-entry software for prediction markets
• Michael Moore tells the Democratic people to go Barack Obama in Pennsylvania (a two-tier state), but the polls and the prediction markets tell us that that won’t do the trick.

Tech Crunch&#8217-s Mike Arrington (who is furious at a CNET writer):

Most of the popular blogs, all of which started out as one-person shops, have now hired separate sales staff to handle sales. We have, Om has, etc. Hell, that’s the main reason we are working with FM Publishing, so that we don’t have to talk to advertisers directly. They turned out to be the wrong choice – throwing us under a bus as soon as the found it convenient, but it doesn’t change our position on the matter. We’re a small operation, we work 24 hours a day to break stories and write interesting content, and we’re trying to earn enough money to keep these things growing. Something Cooper would never understand. [CNET’s Charles Cooper is] a paid journalist who has the luxury of sitting back and opining on others, even when he has no idea what he’s talking about. It’s what too many mainstream media journalists do – write about things they don’t know and don’t care about. And that’s why blogs are stealing their page views at an alarming rate. Based on my estimates, the average A-List blogger generates 10x the page views that the average journalist does. Why? Because we’re running our own businesses, because we support each other with linking, and because we care, deeply, about what we are writing about.

Mike Arrington says, in another paragraph, that he doesn&#8217-t care about being linked to by CNET News (a news website devoted to the business of the information technology) because it generates small traffic compared to what some IT bloggers (like Om) can deliver. Entirely true. Midas Oracle was linked to by CNET News in May 2007, and we received a fistful of visitors only, compared to thousands of people coming from the economics blog Marginal Revolution.

NEXT: Google Search, the New York Times, and the blogs