Flipping through the March 24 issue of the New Yorker, I found the ever-smart James Surowiecki’s article about web sites like TradeSports and Newsfutures.com, which allow people to bet on the resolution of current events. He notes that markets do a better job of predicting the future than mechanisms like forecasting and polling. The “Hewlett-Packard has used artificial markets for sales forecats. Essentially, H.-P. employees bought and sold shares depending on what they thought sales in a particular month would be. The number of people participating was small — never more than twenty-six — and each market ran for only a week, but in the course of three years the markets outperformed the company’s official forecasts seventy-five per cent of the time.”

With this in mind, it will be fun to see what Blogshares.com turns up. Lots of people have been trying to figure out how blogs power opinion building, and this market-based approach may make an important addition to the science of knowledge blogging. It’s new “[url=]pop index[/url]” shows which are the most “widely blogs.” Expect lots more slicing and dicing of that database.

E&P reports: “After seeing a spike in audience the week the Iraq war started (March 19), many news sites saw steep declines in the week ending March 30. USAToday.com was down 17% among users at home and 16% among users at work, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Washingtonpost.com lost 11% of its audience at home and 5% of its audience at work from the previous week. NYTimes.com held on to its users at home, more or less, but slipped 2% among those at work.” Meanwhile, Command-Post and Glenn Reynolds are steaming to new highes. In its first week, CP’s daily high was 140,000 page views. Last week, the high was 160,000. And it looks like that high will get beaten today by 10 or 20%.

I’ve started trading on Blogshares. Bought blocks of Ken Layneand Nick Denton, sold some Layne at a profit and bought some of Seyed Razavi‘s blog. Amazingly addictive stuff. The other blogs I wanted to buy weren’t trading yet.

Until I can figure out how to embed this logo permanently, here’s the code that allows me to claim shares in my own blog.

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Soviet propaganda posters. (Via BoingBoing.) (more…)

More evidence of the way LA bends men’s souls.

Michael Kelly, the guy who revitalized the Atlantic magazine, died today in a Humvee accident in Iraq. Bad.

“The blast, when it came, was met with rousing cheers. The horse and its rider were sent hurtling off the pedestal, crashing to the base.” This tale of the felling of a Saddam statue recalls October ’56, when Hungarians ripped down a giant Stalin statue.

Ken Layne fights the digital devil and wins. He celebrates in the kitchen.

Jonathan Rauch writes: “Americans of Asian descent face racial discrimination when they apply to almost any selective university in the country. So do most whites. Asians and whites who wish to avoid being penalized for their color can apply to public universities in a handful of states that have banned or curtailed overt racial preferences. (The states are California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Washington.) Or they can choose a nonselective university. Or they can skip college. Or they can go abroad. Or else’tough.”

Josh Marshall worries we will win the war but lose the peace.