Bet your mind: predict the future

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.