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.

Googles Bo Cowgill takes a swipe at the prediction market software vendors.

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Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence from Google – (PDF file – PDF file) – by Bo Cowgill, Justin Wolfers, and Eric Zitwewitz – 2008-01-06

Bo Cowgill:

[&#8230-] Trade-by-trade data can reveal characteristics of specific working groups: What they know, how they feel, how they process and share information and how all of that changes over time. I didn&#8217-t try to put any of this in the paper because the conclusions would be sensitive, and I thought this application was pretty obvious to anybody who understood our methodology. [&#8230-]

Bo Cowgill:

I&#8217-ve also heard that other companies would find it impossible to analyze the interaction between their market and the organization. Why? Lack of data. [&#8230-]

Bo Cowgill:

Some more remarks about applications that combine prediction markets and organizational data (org charts, social networks, seating locations). The obstacle to these applications is not a lack of data. Jed mentions privacy concerns &#8212- and if he thinks this is a big obstacle then I&#8217-d be interested in discussing his thoughts.

A bigger problem is that that current prediction market vendors and consultants cannot support these applications. At heart, these vendors are software engineers and salespeople at heart, not statisticians or data miners. They want to write one system that can support lots of clients. At conferences, one hears PM vendors complain about having to do &#8220-customization&#8221- work for clients.

This approach would not work for the applications I describe for two reasons:

  1. The inputs for different clients won&#8217-t be the same. Each client&#8217-s organizational data will likely take a different structure. This makes it difficult for prediction market vendors to architect a single system that can served many clients (yet another challenge with integrating markets with other corporate IT services).
  2. The outputs for different clients won&#8217-t be the same. The business relevance and statistical power of each analysis will differ with each client&#8217-s data.

Prediction market vendors may also need to familiarize themselves with the statistical learning methods necessary to fully utilize these rich datasets. So what&#8217-s the solution? First, move to a software-and-consulting model. By &#8216-consulting,&#8217- I don&#8217-t mean &#8216-consulting on how to implement the market.&#8217- I&#8217-m talking about helping the client solve its problem using a variety of data, including prediction market data.

Second, the vendors also need to pitch prediction markets as more than a forecasting tool. People in the business world commonly identify as data junkies &#8212- probably more so than they identify with the &#8216-wisdom of crowds&#8217- ethos. It is unclear how much companies really care about accurate forecasting anyway.

On a related note, there is something that only the prediction market software vendors could do, at this time, for those who are in capacity to do so: setting up inter-industry prediction markets &#8212-or at least, handing over (with everybody&#8217-s agreement) anonymized prediction market data on industry topics to anyone else in the industry who is a client of that PM firm. I don&#8217-t know about NewsFutures or Inkling Markets, but if you look at Consensus Point&#8217-s list of clients, you&#8217-ll see that David Perry&#8217-s firm is strong in the (consumer) electronic industry &#8212-Motorola, Qualcomm, Siemens, Nokia. Use your imagination, or ask David Perry directly, for more&#8230- (I can&#8217-t talk- otherwise, next thing, I&#8217-m a dead blogger.)&#8230-

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Last year’s best April Fool’s Day Joke had something to do with the Wisdom Of Crowds.
  • Will HedgeStreet USA, the hypothetical InTrade USA, and the hypothetical TradeFair USA, be regulated in the future by a merged SEC+CFTC regulatory structure?
  • WORST THAN ELIOT SPITZER (if it were possible): Formula One boss, Max Mosley, had sado-masochist sex with 5 prostitutes, for 5 hours (!!), reenacting a concentration camp scene (!!) in which he played the role of both Nazi guard and inmate.
  • Is BetFair Poker a booby trap for the gullible novices? Does The Sporting Exchange (the operator of the BetFair brands) help gangs plucking down innocent recreational poker players?? To get an inkling, don’t read The Guardian, seeded by the BetFair spin doctor- read Midas Oracle.
  • The video that the technologically retarded BetFair spin doctor should watch.

Googles Bo Cowgill @ 2008 DIG Conference

No Gravatar2008 DIG Conference: Leveraging Information for Breakthrough Business Performance – (featuring Google&#8217-s Bo &#8220-Grandizer&#8221- Cowgill) – @ Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A. – 2008-05-13~15

Google

RELATED NOTE: I&#8217-m preparing a long post about the Cowgill/Wolfers/Zitzewitz paper&#8230- If you have positive or negative tips, contact me today&#8230-

Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence from Google – (PDF file – PDF file) – by Bo Cowgill, Justin Wolfers, and Eric Zitwewitz – 2008-01-06

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • How Decision Markets Work (with emphasis on InTrade) – by Robin Hanson
  • MIDAS ORACLE POWER: People googling about BetFair’s new bet-matching logic are automatically directed to our group blog. BetFair’s SEO can return to the locker room.
  • David Pennock, a respected expert in prediction markets and market design, discusses some aspects of BetFair’s new bet-matching logic.
  • Inkling Markets has automated the making of the contractual agreement with its prospects. So, now, if you don’t want to, you can avoid talking to Adam “The Shark” Siegel.
  • Topic: “prediction markets” – MyBlogLog

Enterprise Prediction Markets … Without Office Politics

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Google&#8217-s Bo Cowgill, as reported by IT Business:

[&#8230-] If you let people bet on things anonymously, they will tell you what they really believe because they have money at stake. This is a conversation that&#8217-s happening without politics. Nobody knows who each other is, and nobody has any incentive to kiss up. [&#8230-]

[In one example,] the market was predicting that [a project] was behind. A manager says what&#8217-s going on here, &#8230-starts investigating and finds some glitches. [&#8230-]

Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Ratted by his bank, sex-addict New York governor Eliot Spitzer (alias “Client 9”) resigns.
  • BBC’s coverage of politics is dull like taxes, death and German sausages.
  • Never talk when you can nod, and never nod when you can wink, and never write an e-mail because it’s death. You’re giving prosecutors all the evidence we need.
  • Is Justin Wolfers a libertarian? Probably not.
  • The information technology that caught Eliot Spitzer
  • Eric Zitzewitz’s 10 minutes of fame
  • Fun with conditional probabilities

FREE BO COWGILL. CALL IN JOHN RAMBO.

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Our testosteroned Grandizer [JOKE] is trapped in communist China:

Sadly, I&#8217-m not able to read the announcement on the Google Analytics blog thanks to the Great Firewall. I&#8217-m in Shanghai until the end of the month with Google.

Great Wall

Shangai

Google Analytics blog post:

Benchmarking now available plus additional opt-in settings
Wednesday, March 05, 2008

We&#8217-re happy to announce the launch of two related new Google Analytics features: a beta version of industry benchmarking and a data-sharing settings page. Both are designed to give our customers more choice and better control over their data. We are also launching an integration with Audio Ads today, which we&#8217-ll discuss in more detail in tomorrow&#8217-s post. All of these features will begin appearing in customer accounts today, though benchmarking reports may take up to a couple weeks to show data.

Industry benchmarking is a commonly requested new service that enables customers to see how their site data compares to sites in any available industry vertical. We believe this data will provide actionable insights by providing context for users to understand how their site is doing. For example, if you have a travel website and you get a spike in traffic on Mondays, you may want to know whether other travel sites get that same spike on Mondays.

You can also compare your site against an industry vertical different than your own. For example, you might see that your industry&#8217-s traffic dips at certain times of the year while another industry&#8217-s traffic increases. Based on that information, you may wish to explore cross promotional opportunities to drive traffic back and forth.

[Link to their screen shot.]

For more information, take a look at the benchmarking FAQs in the Google Analytics help center.

Of course, benchmarking only works if people can opt to share their data into the system, so we&#8217-re also introducing a new data-sharing settings page. On this page, customers can choose whether to opt in or opt out of sharing their Analytics data. To be clear, we are not sharing individual data with competitors- we bucket data into industry verticals and then anonymize and aggregate the data. Once you opt in, it may take a couple weeks for the reports to populate.

You can also elect to share your data with other Google services. This setting will allow us to provide you with additional advanced new features. For example, many of you have asked us to integrate Conversion Optimizer (which is currently only available to AdWords Conversion Tracking users) into Google Analytics. By opting to share your data with Google, you&#8217-ll be able to take advantage of these related new features as they become available. For more information, take a look at the data-sharing options FAQs in the help center.

Look for tomorrow&#8217-s post on the Audio Ads integration.

Posted by Brett Crosby, Group Manager, Google Analytics

Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Is Justin Wolfers a libertarian? Probably not.
  • The information technology that caught Eliot Spitzer
  • Eric Zitzewitz’s 10 minutes of fame
  • Fun with conditional probabilities
  • Wrongly Crafted Headlines Of The Day
  • an American, petite, very pretty brunette, 5 feet 5 inches, and 105 pounds
  • Mississippi: Is it a primary or a caucus?

Freakonomics did not quiz Bo Cowgills boss, Hal Varian, on prediction markets -triple alas.

No GravatarHal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist

Freakonomics interview. (I did ask, but they didn&#8217-t listen.)

Hal Varian&#8217-s post.

Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • OutReach
  • If Warren Buffett can’t figure out derivatives, can anybody?
  • Many people twitter on prediction markets.
  • Folks, when you have something important to say, write up a full post, not a comment.
  • 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

Search engine futures!

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Cross posted from Oddhead Blog.

I am happy to report that on my suggestion intrade has listed futures contracts for 2008 search engine market share.

Here is how they work:

A contract will expire according to the percentage share of internet searches conducted in the United States in 2008. For example, if 53.5% of searches conducted in the United States in 2008 are made using Google then the contract listed for Google will expire at 53.5&#8230-

&#8230-Expiry will be based on the United States search share rankings published by Nielson Online.

I think this could be a fascinating market because:

  • Search engine market share is very important to these major companies, with dramatic effects on their share prices.
  • Search engine market share is fluid, so far with Google growing inexorably. However, Microsoft has cash, determination, Internet Explorer, and the willingness to experiment. Ask.com has erasers, 3D, ad budgets, and The Algorithm. Yahoo!, second in market share, often tests equal or better than Google, and new features like Search Assist are impressive.
  • The media loves to write about it.
  • A major search company might use the market to hedge. Well, this seems far-fetched but you never know. Certainly, from an economic risk management standpoint it would seem to make a great deal of sense. (Here, as always on this blog, I speak on behalf of myself and not my company.)

Finally, I have to comment on how refreshingly easy the process was in working with intrade. They went from suggestion to implementation in a matter of days. It&#8217-s a shame that US-based companies are in contrast stuck in stultifying legal and regulatory mud.

Business Overconfidence as seen thru Googles Enterprise Prediction Markets

Bo Cowgill:

At OVERCOMING BIAS, Robin Hanson blogs about the overconfidence of CEOs, CFOs and software managers. Our paper also measured overconfidence in the workplace. We found that our marketplace was overconfident as a whole, although the market&#8217-s optimistic bias subsided as time passed. We also pointed out the particular overconfidence exhibited by new employees &#8212- but prediction markets can be used to measure overconfidence and other biases for any part of an organization. Note that our study was about overconfidence regarding their employers&#8217- prospects on a variety of fronts. In a future draft, we hope to measure overconfidence for by looking at how people bet in markets related to their day-to-day jobs. In Table 9 of our paper, you can see some other information about what parts of the company produced the biases (although admittedly not in the most readable format).

Here&#8217-s the table 9. Right-click on the thumbnail to open it in another of your browser tabs.

Table9

&#8212-

Related Links:

Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence From Google – (PDF file – PDF file) – by Bo Cowgill (Google economic analyst), Justin Wolfers (University of Pennsylvania) and Eric Zitzewitz (Dartmouth College)

Read the previous blog posts by Chris. F. Masse:

  • Why you should launch your brand-new prediction exchange at a conference
  • Why Indian Software Outsourcing Companies are Outsourcing to China
  • Midas Oracle is the only popular, independent, exhaustive, multi-author, multi-exchange, Web-based resource on prediction markets.
  • Here’s an example of the total crap that the BetFair blog is publishing.
  • P(election) = P(nomination) * P(election conditional on nomination)
  • Journalism Failures — Big Time
  • South Carolina showdown: Barack Obama vs. Hillary Clinton

Prediction market sessions of the OReilly Money-Tech Conference suffer fatally from the absence of the worlds most knowledgeable, most innovative and most trustworthy prediction market expert.

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O&#8217-Reilly Money-Tech Conference – 2008-02-06~07

Predicting the Future of Prediction Markets + Google as Prediction Market

Wharton&#8217-s Justin Wolfers, Google&#8217-s Bo Cowgill, Inkling&#8217-s Adam Siegel, and Sean Park (representing Himself).

No more Robin Hanson. :(

Better to stay home watching a re-play of the December 2006&#8217-s Yahoo! Confab, where Robin Hanson does appear.

Confab Yahoo! on prediction markets – Streaming Video: 100k300k – 2006-12-13

&#8212-

UPDATE: Robin Hanson comments&#8230-

I was invited, but the date conflicted with a SETI conference I&#8217-ll be speaking at.

Organizational Sociology & Googles Enterprise Prediction Markets

Graduate student Ben Spigel&#8217-s comment on Richard Florida&#8217-s blog:

About a decade ago, a group of cognitive scientists looking at Bell Labs found that all things being equal, the chances of two scientists collaborating was 4 times higher if they had offices in the same hallway, than if there was a turn in the hall between them. Basically, people are lazy about talking to other people. There&#8217-s a noticeable drop in communication when you have to turn your neck to see someone.

Reminder:

Robin Hanson in a comment on Marginal Revolution:

This is important work for organizational sociology, but not for prediction markets, as this does little to help us find and field high value markets.

Reminder:

Robin Hanson:

Info Value = the added accuracy the markets provide relative to other mechanisms, times the value that accuracy can give in improved decisions, minus the cost of maintaining the markets, relative to the cost of other mechanisms.

A highly accurate market has little value if other mechanisms can provide similar accuracy at a lower cost, or if few substantial decisions are influenced by accurate forecasts on its topic.

Related Links:

Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence From Google – (PDF file – PDF file) – by Bo Cowgill (Google economic analyst), Justin Wolfers (University of Pennsylvania) and Eric Zitzewitz (Dartmouth College)


Author Profile&nbsp-Editor and Publisher of Midas Oracle .ORG .NET .COM &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s mugshot &#8212- Contact Chris Masse &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s LinkedIn profile &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s FaceBook profile &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s Google profile &#8212- Sophia-Antipolis, France, E.U. Read more from this author&#8230-


Read the previous blog posts by Chris. F. Masse:

  • Are David Pennock’s search engine prediction markets the worst marketing disaster since the New Coke?
  • Midas Oracle is incontestably [*] the best vertical portal to prediction markets.
  • Comment spam paid by Emile Servan-Schreiber of NewsFutures-Bet2Give
  • BetFair Games needs a Swedish provider to develop its gambling offerings.
  • When Markets Beat the Polls – Scientific American Magazine
  • Robin Hanson has some fanboy in India. Great. Tiny caveat: The parroting Indian writer does not acknowledge Robin Hanson by name.
  • Molecular Nanotechnology