Are good blogs driven by author personalities or by well drilled topics?

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Justin Wolfers has escaped the Overcoming Bias purge, it seems. Justin Wolfers&#8217-s 4 posts (published in 2007) remain archived on what is now Robin Hanson&#8217-s QUOTE personal blog UNQUOTE. By contrast, Eliezer Yudkowsky&#8217-s posts written for Overcoming Bias now redirect to locations at Less Wrong.

Justin Wolfers now blogs at Freakonomics (which is under the New York Times umbrella). By comparison to Overcoming His Bias, Freakonomics is a real group blog success. Years later after his creation, Freaknomics has a high degree of participation by his co-bloggers, and some brand-new guest bloggers were recently invited. Freakonomics is a sustainable group blog which develops one unique thematic &#8212-economics. Sorry to burst our Master Of All Universes&#8217-s bubble, but Freakonomics is the case-in-point that debunks the hypothesis that says that &#8220-blogs are best defined not by topic but by lead author personalities&#8221-.

As for Midas Oracle, who cares about Chris Masse&#8217-s personality, as long as one gets his/her prediction market dope on a daily basis?

UPDATE:

Robin Hanson:

Chris, Eliezer was not “purged.” He requested to have his old posts moved to Less Wrong. No one else has made any similar request.

Eliezer was not “expelled”– he choose to move in order to build a community at Less Wrong using fancy comment karma software. The folks who wrote software for his new site also wrote the code at my new site.

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They love coding too much.

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– The people that Robin Hanson expelled from his blog are coding their own blogging software.

– As for Our Master Of All Universes, he codes his own WordPress theme (overcomingbias.com/wp-content/themes/overcoming-bias/) and inserts his own hacks into it.

UPDATE:

Robin Hanson:

Chris, Eliezer was not “purged.” He requested to have his old posts moved to Less Wrong. No one else has made any similar request.

Eliezer was not “expelled”– he choose to move in order to build a community at Less Wrong using fancy comment karma software. The folks who wrote software for his new site also wrote the code at my new site.

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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).

Super Tuesday = Free money, if you are smarter than the crowd

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At Overcoming Bias, Eliezer Yudkowsky invites pundits, partisans, and anyone else with a nascent opinion about the limits of prediction markets to, in effect, put up or shut up. (Though he puts it in somewhat nicer words). Here is a selection, but read the whole thing:

If you think that Hillary is going to do better than the polls on Super Tuesday, and you&#8217-re going to sneer afterward and say that Intrade was &#8220-just tracking the polls&#8221-, buy Hillary now.

If you think that Obama is going to do better than the polls on Super Tuesday, and you&#8217-re going to gloat about how prediction markets didn&#8217-t call this surprise in advance, buy Obama now.

&#8230-

The point is not that prediction markets are a good predictor but that they are the best predictor. &#8230- If prediction markets react to polls, they&#8217-re getting new information, that they didn&#8217-t predict in advance, which happens. Being the best predictor doesn&#8217-t make you omniscient.

Everyone&#8217-s going to find it real easy to make a better prediction afterward, but if you think you can call it in advance, there&#8217-s FREE MONEY GOING NOW.

Buy now, or forever hold your peace.