On other blogs than Midas Oracle, the Askimet anti-spam technology actually blocks legitimate comments from honorable people, and, hence, blocks free speech on the Internet.

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I am one of those &#8220-honorable people&#8221- who get caught in Askimet&#8217-s net. Any blog running Askimet will refuse any of my comments. I have never submitted any illegitimate comment, though.

It&#8217-s a big scandal.

Askimet = Shit.

Predictify gets the X Groups concept right.

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#1. X Groups

Predictify is unveiling a two-way interaction between their prediction platform and the blogs out there.

  1. FROM THE BLOGS TO PREDICTIFY: Number one, there is now a customized prediction widget that bloggers can embed in their blog posts so that their readers can vote within each blog post &#8212-without leaving the blog.
  2. FROM PREDICTIFY TO THE BLOGS: Number two, there is now a trackback widget that bloggers can embed in their blog posts so that the blog readers can click and be connected to relevant questions on Predictify, based on the content in that particular post. As soon as one of the blog readers clicks a highlighted question, that question will have (on the Predicitif webpage) a trackback to the blog post &#8212-theoretically pulling traffic from Predictify to that blog. The first problem with this second feature is that only the most popular trackback will be published on the particular Predictify webpage, as I understand it. I don&#8217-t see how bloggers could be interested if there is no guarantee that their trackback will actually appear. The second problem is that we don&#8217-t know whether Predictify abides by the &#8220-do follow&#8221- policy, which is a way for a website to injects Google PageRank juice to the website it links to. (The opposite policy is called &#8220-no follow&#8221-.) Only the &#8220-do follow&#8221- approach would get bloggers interested in that scheme. Predictify should clarify that.
  3. UPDATE: All the trackbacks will appear. They will be sorted by popularity. And, yes, Predictify has a &#8220-do follow&#8221- policy. :-D

#2: Social Networking

I&#8217-m told that Predictify will soon unveil a FaceBook application. We will see whether it&#8217-s Predictify working on FaceBook or Predictify woking with FaceBook. See the difference? (YooPick works on FaceBook, not with FaceBook.)

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Why InTrade CEO John Delaney, TradeSports acting CEO John Delaney, BetFair CEO David Yu, HubDub CEO Nigel Eccles and NewsFutures CEO Emile Servan-Schreiber should supplicate me to develop my prediction market journalism project

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200 web visitors (coming from Google) reached my John Edwards post, published yesterday afternoon (ET).

10% of them followed my links to the 2 HubDub prediction markets on John Edwards.

Remember that those web stats count only the web visitors, not the feed subscribers &#8212-who are more numerous, and whom I focus more on.

TAKEAWAY: A popular PMJ website, which would associate fresh news and betting recommendations, would send many people to the prediction markets.

The mainstream media and the classic bloggers will never deal with real-money prediction markets the way they should be dealt with &#8212-for multiple reasons (moral, ethical, legal, etc.). And for other reasons, they will never link to the play-money prediction markets.

Look Justin Wolfers at the Wall Street Journal: He is the most excited about prediction markets. Yet, he does not link to InTrade directly. He does not link to the InTrade real-money prediction markets. Hence, his blah blah blah does not translate into more revenues for InTrade.

What it takes is a brand-new media organization, entirely devoted to prediction markets, and run by die-hard prediction market people.

Please, guys, help me.

  • cfm |-at-| midasoracle |.|-com-|
  • chrisfmasse |-at-| gmail |.|-com-|

Marginal Revolution vs. Freakonomics vs. Overcoming Bias vs. Midas Oracle

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Here are the stats about the feed subscribers to these blogs who use either Google Reader or iGoogle.

To interpret these data, you should know that:

  • The web visitors are not counted.
  • The PC-based feed subscribers are not counted.
  • The Web-based feed subscribers who use other feed readers than Google are not counted.
  • In the case of Marginal Revolution, which was one of the defaults proposed by Google Reader until recently, many feed subscribers do not actually read this blog.
  • A vertical blog like Midas Oracle, which deals only with prediction markets, is necessary far less popular than more horizontal blogs, which can publish about everything (including sex, as it has been the case in the past with those 3 economics blogs).

GOOD NEWS: Ron Paul is now blogging. – THE CHERRY ON TOP OF THE CAKE: Ron Paul is using WordPress.org… just like Midas Oracle does.

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Campaign For Liberty

Campaign For Liberty – Blog

WordPress.org

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • You, the Midas Oracle readers, are a bunch of lazy bastards…!!!… — Take that, loafers…!!!…
  • Prediction Markets within the Forecasting Community
  • Devoting the whole NBC Nightly News bulletin to Tim Russert’s passing was worst than beaming out porn.
  • COLD FUSION: The purpose of this post is to give you the scientific explainer link I forgot to publish (at inception) in my previous post.
  • Forecasting Election Outcomes
  • InTrade’s sudden and puzzled interest in… alchemy…!!!
  • Psstt… Spot that comment, on Google News, about… “bellwethers”… from a political scientist.

BEWARE THE BLOGGING ACADEMICS: They are not blogging to inform us -they are blogging to promote themselves.

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The New York Times on the brand-new SSRN ranking functionality:

Bloggers like Mr. Reynolds [a university professor] tend to do well on the site, since they can promote their work and offer links to their articles.

Social Science Research Network – (SSRN)

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • The best research papers on prediction markets
  • 2008 Electoral Map
  • American Enterprise Institute’s Center For Regulatory And Market Studies (Policy Markets)
  • 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?