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Blogging Software = Freedom to write in any form and shape you want

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Harvard University professor Edward Glaeser:

[…] Blogs and columns are quite different, and The Marginal Revolution illustrates what can make blogs exciting. Mr. Cowen and his collaborators post to the website with astonishing regularity. Their blog posts are often brief introductions to some external source of information. The best bloggers use an informal style that make the readers feel as if they are old friends. If you read the Freakonomics blog, you will be let into the private life of one of this age&#8217-s great economists. The chatty conversational style of blogs works well with the discussions that they facilitate among readers who react to an initial blog post and then to each other.

By contrast, an op-ed column is a somewhat formal 750 word art form that usually contains some sort of clear policy punch line. I am thinking of imitating Cato&#8217-s constant repetition of Delenda Est Carthago by ending each column with the mantra &#8220-Manhattan needs more construction and rent control must end.&#8221- Good columns are self-contained, since they should be accessible to readers who have never previously heard of the author. […]

Absurd:

  1. A blog post can be structured like a formal Op-Ed column &#8212-among other possibilities.
  2. It&#8217-s untrue to say that Marginal Revolution does only news aggregation. As Felix Salmon noted, their coverage of the 2007 Nobel Prize in economics was outstanding. It&#8217-s also untrue to say that Freakonomics only publishes about &#8220-the private life&#8221- of today&#8217-s economists.
  3. As newspaper and magazine readers move to the Internet, there will be a convergence between old media and new media.
  4. Don&#8217-t be obsessed by defining what a blog is &#8212-it can be so many things (modern writings, or formal writings). Instead, focus your attention on the blogging software, which is more and more the premier kind of web publishing tools &#8212-as opposed to the old-fashioned HTML editors, which produce classic websites. The New York Times uses WordPress to power its blogs, and so do plenty of other mainstream media companies. The reason for that is that the blogging software packages are the most advanced web publishing tools and fit very smoothly within the Web&#8217-s architecture.

I won&#8217-t read the column of mister Edward Glaeser in the New York Sun. He looks like an old schmuck to me.

Previously: Another way to measure the popularity of blogs: their number of feed subscribers

Google downgrades the PageRanks of almost all the prediction market websites.

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We have seen two PageRank updates this month (October 2007), and the effect of the second wave is just taking effect this morning.

  • BetFair from 7 to 6
  • InTrade from 6 to 5
  • TradeSports from 6 to 5
  • IEM from 7 to 6
  • SpreadFair from 5 to 4
  • Betdaq is 5
  • MatchBook is 3
  • HSX from 7 to 6
  • NewsFutures from 7 to 6
  • Inkling is 6
  • HedgeStreet is 6
  • PopSci PPX is 7 – [!!???]
  • The Sim Exchange is 5
  • CFM and MO from 6 to 5 – :( – [*]
  • Marginal Revolution from 7 to 6
  • WashPost and Forbes from 7 to 5

PageRank scale: 0&#8211-10

[*] As plenty of SEO experts have commented this week on web forums, this decrease in PageRank has been accompanied by an increase in traffic from Google Search visitors. Go figure. :-D

See in this list if you need some PageRank checkers.

&#8212-

APPENDIX: The Sentence Of The Day&#8230- :-D

Ironically, in the ultimate democracy that is the Internet, Google reigns as virtual dictator.

UPDATE: An explanation that makes sense to me&#8230-

Also another really interesting and also expected outcome was that due to the progressive expanding of the web, all page rank values require more and more links to be achieved. Now for pr 3 you need more than 2.5k link popularity, pr 4 more than 5 to 20k links and pr 6 &gt- 150k. Note that this is LINK POPULARITY not links only which is relatively the number of actual links since most search engines don’t show the real value.

UPDATE: A third update?

More.

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:

  • Comments are now completely open on Midas Oracle.
  • Albert Einstein, Chairman of the Midas Oracle Advisory Board
  • Erratic –but not Stochastic– Charts
  • Barack Obama is the 44th US president.
  • We already have prediction markets in future tax rates. It’s called the municipal bond yield curve.
  • DELEGATES AND SUPERDELEGATES ACCOUNTANCY
  • O’Reilly – Money-Tech Conference

Reminder: Corporate Applications of Prediction Markets Conference (1 November)

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The conference will be held next Thursday (1 November) at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City. All of the details are available on the conference webpage (http://people.ku.edu/~cigar/PMConf_2007) and the schedule is listed below.

I am pleased to note that Mat Fogarty (Founder and CEO, Xpree) and Alexander Costakis (Managing Director, HSX) have been added to the program.

Please get in touch with me ([email protected]) if you are interested in attending or have any questions.

&nbsp-

Schedule

8:30 Registration, Coffee, Opening Remarks

9:00 Lessons from Corporate Applications of Prediction Markets

Henry Berg, Microsoft

Discussant: Robin Hanson (George Mason Department of Economics)

Christina Ann LaComb, GE (The Imagination Market- abstract is free, text is gated)

Discussant: Marco Ottaviani (Kellogg School of Management, Management and Strategy)

10:45 Coffee Break

11:00 Lessons from Corporate Applications of Prediction Markets (cont)

Dawn Keller, Best Buy (Best Buy’s TAGTRADE Market)

Discussant: Paul Rhode (Department of Economics. Eller College of Management, University of Arizona)

Bo Cowgill, Google (Putting Crowd Wisdom to Work)

Discussant: Eric Zitzewitz (Dartmouth Department of Economics)

12:45 Lunch

Keynote address: Jim Lavoie, Co-Founder and CEO, Rite-Solutions

1:45 Lessons from Prediction Market Organizers and Operators

John Delaney, Founder and CEO, Intrade

David Perry, Co-Founder and President, Consensus Point

Mat Fogarty, Founder and CEO, Xpree Inc

3:15 Break (refreshments)

3:30 The Legal Playing Field

Tom W. Bell, Chapman University School of Law

Discussant: Robert E. Litan (VP Research and Policy at the Kauffman Foundation, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Director of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center on Regulatory Studies)

4:15 General Discussion

Alexander Costakis (Managing Director, Hollywood Stock Exchange) will also be available to answer questions and may make a short presentation.

Previous blog posts by Koleman Strumpf:

  • Prediction Markets in the Classroom: Inkling Markets
  • Slides of presentations from Conference on Corporate Applications of Prediction/Information Markets (1 November), Kansas City
  • Summary of Conference on Corporate Applications of Prediction/Information Markets (1 November), Kansas City
  • Conference: Corporate Applications of Prediction/Information Markets (Thursday, 1 November 2007)
  • Copernican Principle: How To Predict the End of the World
  • Win Justin’s Money? (re: Is there manipulation in the Hillary Clinton Intrade market? Redux.)
  • Is there manipulation in the Hillary Clinton Intrade market?

SophistPundit – Finite Mathematics

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SophistPundit:

Set Theory

  1. Introduction
  2. The Inclusion-Exclusion Principle
  3. TI-83 Calculator Trick: Set Unions/Incercepts
  4. Permutations and Combinations
  5. The Binomial Theorem
  6. The Story Thusfar: A Cram Session Special
  7. Partitions and Multinomial Coefficients

Probability

  1. Introduction
  2. Experiment Probability vs. Probability of Outcome
  3. Calculating Probability for specific Events
  4. Conditional Probability and Related Lessons
  5. Bayes&#8217- Theorum

Statistics

  1. Introduction
  2. Binomial Trials
  3. Mean, Variance, and Standard Deviation
  4. The Normal Distribution

In the blogosphere, everything is immediate. The deadline is now.

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No GravatarWith all due respect, I totally disagree with Tyler Cowen (of Marginal Revolution fame). Here are some outstanding blogs and sites that are seldom prompted by immediacy:

  1. Alea – (finance)
  2. Endless Innovation –
  3. Read &amp- Write Web – (information technology)
  4. Guy Kawasaki – (marketing)
  5. Technology Review –
  6. Tierney Lab – (applied science)
  7. The Numbers Guy –
  8. Add your suggestion(s) in the comment area, just below. :-D

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

Who wrote the broadest definition of prediction markets?

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Certainly not Chris Masse, says Emile Servan-Schreiber of NewsFutures:

[…] No, HSX box-office predictions are forecasts, not event probabilities, so if you restrict the definition to event probabilities, you exclude most of HSX. Same for “vote-share” markets at IEM. […]

Read the whole conversation (including the last Jason Ruspini comment) and decide for yourself. Now that Robin Hanson left us high and dry, who will write the broadest definition of prediction markets?

Network Effects = Network Externalities

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Network Effects = Network Externalities

Wikipedia:

A network effect is a characteristic that causes a good or service to have a value to a potential customer which depends on the number of other customers who own the good or are users of the service. In other words, the number of prior adopters is a term in the value available to the next adopter.

One consequence of a network effect is that the purchase of a good by one individual indirectly benefits others who own the good — for example by purchasing a telephone a person makes other telephones more useful. This type of side-effect in a transaction is known as an externality in economics, and externalities arising from network effects are known as network externalities. The resulting bandwagon effect is an example of a positive feedback loop. […]

Network effect business examples

Financial exchanges

Stock exchanges and derivatives exchanges feature a network effect. Market liquidity is a major determinant of transaction cost in the sale or purchase of a security, as a bid-ask spread exists between the price at which a purchase can be done versus the price at which the sale of the same security can be done. [*] As the number of buyers and sellers on an exchange increases, liquidity increases, and transaction costs decrease. This then attracts a larger number of buyers and sellers to the exchange.

The network advantage of financial exchanges is apparent in the difficulty that startup exchanges have in dislodging a dominant exchange. For example, the Chicago Board of Trade has retained overwhelming dominance of trading in US Treasury Bond futures despite the startup of Eurex US trading of identical futures contracts. Similarly, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange has maintained a dominance in trading of Eurobond interest rate futures despite a challenge from Euronext.Liffe. […]

[*] Niall O&#8217-Connor should report on bid-ask spreads, not just on dollar value of matched bets, when comparing BetFair with its competitors.

Are Prediction Markets Constitutional?

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I think so*, although it could be a matter for states to decide, and not so much the federal government. In that scenario, my thought is that some liberal (in the classic sense) states will allow experimentation with prediction markets, and the informational value (at least over surveys and polls) will eventually sweep the nation. But that could take decades.

I was thinking about the constitutionality of prediction markets when reading Gary McDowell&#8217-s &#8220-The War For the Constitution&#8221-:

Warren Burger summed it up for many when he described Mr. Bork as simply the best qualified nominee in the former chief justice&#8217-s own professional lifetime &#8212- a span of years that included the appointments of such judicial luminaries as Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter. Such praise was no empty exaggeration.

A former Yale law professor and U.S. Solicitor General, Mr. Bork was, at the time of his nomination, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. When he was a circuit court judge, Mr. Bork&#8217-s opinions not only were never overruled on appeal, but on several occasions his dissents were adopted by the Supreme Court as its majority view.

In an earlier day such an appointment would have been celebrated as adding breadth, depth and luster to the highest bench. Instead, the nominee faced a mauling by those who set out not only to destroy him personally but to discredit all that he stood for as a jurist.

It was immediately clear that the unprecedented vote of 58-42 against his confirmation reflected something far more historic and fundamental than an ordinary partisan standoff. The confrontation in fact had been one of the most cataclysmic and divisive events in American domestic politics during the second half of the 20th century. The reason was that Mr. Bork&#8217-s opponents succeeded in making the fight over his nomination into a contest over the future of the Constitution.

* * *

Time has shown that Mr. Bork&#8217-s theory of constitutional interpretation remains very much alive- he was defeated but his central idea was never discredited. That theory of interpretation and its implicit belief in restrained judging should continue to guide anyone who believes that the inherent arbitrariness of government by judiciary is not the same thing as the rule of law.

One thing that is more scary than irrational voters is whimsical judges. And I know a few, personally.

*Off the top of my head, free speech and peaceful assembly seem to enable our rights to prediction markets.

UPDATE: Chris Masse linked prediction markets to the right to privacy here last year. I&#8217-m not sure that is as relevant as speech and assembly&#8211-the whole point being prices from prediction markets is a public good (even as I concede that the anonymity of traders improves prices). But what do I know&#8211-I&#8217-m not an attorney or judge, just someone who knows a lot of them.

UPDATE: Tom Bell, on the Constitution&#8217-s call for progress in science and arts.

UPDATE: Alvin Roth, on the repugnance of markets (including prediction markets in terror). This reframes my point&#8211-constitutional repugnance is good, fleeting cultural repugnance is irrelevant. Just as slavery markets were not repugnant yesterday (but unconstitutional), so prediction markets are repugnant today (but constitutional)!

Cross posted from Caveat Bettor.

Read the previous blog posts by Caveat Bettor:

  • The Democrat SC Showdown: Intrade v. Zogby
  • Zogby beats Intrade in predicting Nevada caucus winner Clinton.
  • The GOP SC and Dem NV Showdown: Intrade v. Zogby
  • Latest Intrade v. Zogby contest is up.
  • Who said prediction markets were perfect?
  • Intrade markets and Zogby polls agree in New Hampshire
  • The Iowa Showdown: Zogby v. Intrade

ZDNET rides the prediction markets hype.

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Dion Hinchcliffe on applying the concept of &#8220-Enterprise 2&#8243-:

I’ve witnessed prediction markets in particular become enormously popular in the last year or so as enterprises seek to better tap into the cumulative wisdom of their workers.

If only 5% of the Fortune-500 firms are currently experimenting with an internal prediction exchange (betting exchange), then you shouldn&#8217-t use the words&#8230- &#8220-enormously popular&#8221-&#8230- yet.