Is your boss a visionary? Or is he/she among the laggards?

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

• If Midas Oracle were to meet, would we use Huddle, and why?
• WORLD’S SUCH A SMALL PLACE: Smarkets meet HubDub.
• 50% of our prediction market luminaries have a MacBook.
• STRAIGHT FROM OUR TRUISM DEPARTMENT: Money buys happiness.
• Ron Paul (R) and Barney Frank (D) ally together to attack “the practical hurdles of the federal law, known as the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, rather than its legitimacy”.
• Clicking on the “SPHERE: RELATED CONTENT” button, at the bottom of each Midas Oracle post, will bring you a list of external webspots.
• FRIGHTENING: Jed Christiansen’s prediction market blog was briefly overtaken by web spammers, who inserted invisible links to their commercial sites so as to game the Google PageRank system.

At Google, of course. As &#8220-Director of Commerce and Analytics&#8221-.

– Flutter was bought out by BetFair in December 2001 &#8212-a &#8220-merger&#8221-, they said.

– Justin Wolfers knows Vince Monical too well. PDF

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

• Pervez Musharraf prediction markets –Eric Zitzewitz Edition
• The Over-Round Explained
• WHY THE PREDICTION MARKETS WILL LIKELY F**K UP SUPER TUESDAY 2008.
• Still unconvinced by prediction market journalist Justin Wolfers
• Oprah Winfrey
• RIGHT-CLICK THIS IMAGE, AND FILL IN THIS SURVEY, PLEASE.
• Papers on Prediction Markets

Via the Mises Economics blog, Carleen Hawn.

Commenter Francis Wu:

I’d rather be known as an innovator. Anybody can come up with an idea, but an idea is worthless unless it’s acted upon and properly executed (innovation). Sometimes the idea and the innovation can come from the same person. Other times, the idea people get drunk on their own big ideas and fail to execute.

For more on the &#8220-Invention vs. Innovation&#8221- debate, see this April 2007 blog post from Mike Linksvayer, with plenty of good comments.

One way of putting it is that six billion people generate a huge number of ideas, some number of which could be called inventions. Most are hopeless (the inventions- the people at least manage to survive for a time). Most of the rest are not actively pursued. The only way to test whether an invention is hopeless or useful is to attempt to deliver it at scale. So innovators (think of them as idea entrepreneurs, or whatever) both figure out which inventions are not hopeless and deliver the useful ones at scale. Innovators create all of the surplus, inventors do little more than breathe.

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Via Greg Mankiw (whom you will have to read between the lines), this New York Times piece:

The View column will now be written by a rotating panel of outside economists. Besides Mr. Mankiw, it will include Alan Blinder, Judith Chevalier, Robert Shiller and Lester Thurow, as well as three of the economists who have been writing the Economic Scene column on Thursdays: Austan Goolsbee, Tyler Cowen and Robert Frank. (The fourth member of the Scene rotation, Hal R. Varian, is leaving to concentrate on his new role as Google’s chief economist.)

The Midas Oracle readers will remember that professor Hal Varian is the economics authority (revered by the Google executives) who consulted with Bo Cowgill&#8217-s 20% team on designing and pitching an internal prediction markets pilot. Professor Hal Varian commands respect and has made important contributions to Google&#8217-s core business.

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Hal R. Varian interviewed by the Wall Street Journal on his new position at Google.

WSJ: What does the job entail?

Varian: During my time at Google we have built up a world-class group of quantitative analysts, and the economics team will complement these existing resources. Google has a great infrastructure for data analysis, and a management team that is very receptive to quantitative methods and willing to invest in this area. So what more could you ask for? In addition to working on analytics, I’ve also worked on various business strategy and public policy issues, and will continue to do so as the occasion arises. This set of issues will only get more important to Google as time goes on, so I expect that this will also involve a fair amount of my time.

Note: Bo Cowgill&#8217-s official business title at Google is &#8220-Technical Data Analyst&#8220-.

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Previous: Meet Hal Varian, Google&#8217-s Chief Economist.

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

• If I had to guess, I would say about 50 percent of the “name pros” you see on television on a regular basis have a negative net worth. Frightening, I know.
• You can’t measure the usefulness of a system by how many resources it consumes.
• STRAIGHT FROM THE DOUBLESPEAK DEPARTMENT: NewsFutures CEO Emile Servan-Schreiber, well known to chase tirelessly the Infidels who dare calling “prediction markets” their damn polling system, is eager to sell the confusion to his clients and whomever would listen.
• John Delaney is such a poor marketer that he is willing to outsource the making of InTrade’s next logo (a company’s most important visual message) to the first moron met over the Internet who is stupid enough to work for a bunch of figs.
• ProKons strongly believe that (play-money) prediction markets are bozo immune.
• REBUTTAL: SalesForce, StarBucks and Dell demonstrate that enterprise prediction markets as intra-corporation communication tools (as opposed to forecasting tools) are overhyped by the prediction market software vendors and a little clique of uncritical courtisans.
• Comments are often more interesting than the post that ignited them.

New York Times:

[&#8230-] Among the 4.6 million registered English-language users are about 1,200 administrators, whose “admin” status carries a few extra technical powers, most notably the power to block other users from the site, either temporarily or permanently. Those nominated for adminship must answer an initial series of five questions, after which other users have seven days to register their approval or disapproval. Above the admin level are the cheekily named “bureaucrats,” who are empowered to appoint the admins and will do so if they deem a user consensus has been reached (the magic number is somewhere around 70 percent approval). There is also a level above the bureaucrats, called stewards, of whom there are only about 30, appointed by the seven-person Wikimedia Foundation board of directors. [&#8230-]

But there is also something uniquely empowering — for better or for worse — about Wikipedia, in that there is no real organizational ladder to climb: since everyone contributes behind screen names (which may or may not match their real ones), questions of age, appearance, experience and so forth don’t color the discussion. The only way to achieve a degree of authority in the world of Wikipedia is to show sufficient devotion to it, and that can happen in relatively short order. [&#8230-]

The presentational difference is that Wikipedia’s version of events comes in the form of one constantly rewritten, constantly updated, summary article, rather than a chronological series of articles, each reflecting new developments, as newspapers and even most news sites do. But much more significant than that, no Wikipedia article contains any attempt at actual reporting — in fact, original research is forbidden. [&#8230-] &#8220-[] An encyclopedia is the condensation of received wisdom.&#8221- [&#8230-] On a big news day, Wikipedia functions like a massive, cooperative blog — except that where most blogs’ function is to sieve news accounts through the filter of strong opinion, Wikipedia’s goal is the opposite: it strives to filter all the opinion out of it. [&#8230-]

Great article on Wikipedia.

I have developed Midas Oracle .ORG as a group blog (&#8221-a chronological series of articles, each reflecting new developments&#8221-), and I&#8217-m going to develop Midas Oracle .NET as a wiki blog (a set of &#8220-constantly rewritten, constantly updated, summary&#8221- articles).

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

• Red Herring’s list of the top 100 North-American high-tech startups includes Inkling Markets —but not NewsFutures, Consensus Point, or Xpree.
• Professor Koleman Strumpf explains the prediction markets to the countryland people.
• Professor Koleman Strumpf tells CNN that a prediction market, by essence, can’t predict an upset.
• Time magazine interview the 2 BetFair-Tradefair co-founders, and not a single time do they pronounce the magic words, “prediction markets”.
• One Deep Throat told me that this VC firm might have been connected with the Irish prediction exchange, at inception.
• BetFair Rapid = BetFair’s standalone, local, PC-based, order-entry software for prediction markets
• Michael Moore tells the Democratic people to go Barack Obama in Pennsylvania (a two-tier state), but the polls and the prediction markets tell us that that won’t do the trick.

Tech Crunch&#8217-s Mike Arrington (who is furious at a CNET writer):

Most of the popular blogs, all of which started out as one-person shops, have now hired separate sales staff to handle sales. We have, Om has, etc. Hell, that’s the main reason we are working with FM Publishing, so that we don’t have to talk to advertisers directly. They turned out to be the wrong choice – throwing us under a bus as soon as the found it convenient, but it doesn’t change our position on the matter. We’re a small operation, we work 24 hours a day to break stories and write interesting content, and we’re trying to earn enough money to keep these things growing. Something Cooper would never understand. [CNET’s Charles Cooper is] a paid journalist who has the luxury of sitting back and opining on others, even when he has no idea what he’s talking about. It’s what too many mainstream media journalists do – write about things they don’t know and don’t care about. And that’s why blogs are stealing their page views at an alarming rate. Based on my estimates, the average A-List blogger generates 10x the page views that the average journalist does. Why? Because we’re running our own businesses, because we support each other with linking, and because we care, deeply, about what we are writing about.

Mike Arrington says, in another paragraph, that he doesn&#8217-t care about being linked to by CNET News (a news website devoted to the business of the information technology) because it generates small traffic compared to what some IT bloggers (like Om) can deliver. Entirely true. Midas Oracle was linked to by CNET News in May 2007, and we received a fistful of visitors only, compared to thousands of people coming from the economics blog Marginal Revolution.

NEXT: Google Search, the New York Times, and the blogs

XM-Sirius merger contract at TradeSports-Intrade – One single trade, only, so far.

Via the intrepid Fabian John of the 1st Tick forum, the New York Times:

Still, it seems as if Mr. Karmazin may be paying a premium to do the deal now so that it can be rushed through the regulatory maze while the Bush administration is still in power. Many partners in mergers of equals wait around — often for years — until their stocks align. Mr. Karmazin disputes that view, contending that he wants a deal as soon as possible so that the savings can start. His view is that there “is no regulatory window.” In fact, he believes that the longer the companies, both now money losers, wait to merge, the better their chances would be in Washington. That’s because new technologies will continue to emerge that may prove to be competitive with satellite radio.

Previous: XM-Sirius merger + Sirius &amp- XM prediction markets

Related: Satellite Radio prediction market at Yahoo! Buzz Game