Musings of a computer scientist on predictions, odds, and markets
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- Why Mitt Romney Won’t Pick Chris Christie as His Running Mate - Yahoo! News February 2, 2012Professor John A. Tures, LaGrange College (via Yahoo! Contributor Network) reacts to my analysis of the most likely Republican vice presidential pairings, arguing (well) against Chris Christie. Nice article. […]
- Jacob Abernethy - Google+ - Following up on the previous post, I've had something on my… February 1, 2012nice summary of piracy issue by Jake Abernethy […]
- Romney-Christie, Gingrich-Rubio are most likely ticket pairings January 31, 2012I'm block quoted here […]
- Ingraham: Maybe the Tea Party isn’t as strong as the media thinks « Hot Air January 31, 2012I'm block quoted in this article […]
- Yahoo data scientist: It’s Romney-Christie or Gingrich-Rubio — Cloud Computing News January 31, 2012I'm quoted/cited in this (not particularly good) gigaom article: "According to a predictive analysis experiment by a Yahoo data scientist, U.S. voters can expect to see either a Mitt Romney-Chris Christie or a Newt Gingrich-Marco Rubio ticket to face off against Obama-Biden in this year’s presidential election. The experiment, which author David Pe […]
Explainers
The wisdom of the ProbabilitySports crowd
One of the purest and most fascinating examples of the “wisdom of crowds” in action comes courtesy of a unique online contest called ProbabilitySports run by mathematician Brian Galebach. In the contest, each participant states how likely she thinks it is that a team will win a particular sporting event. For example, one contestant may [...]
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Famous for 15 tweets
TV era: $quote = “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”;
Search era: $quote =~ s/minutes/links/;
Social era: $quote =~ s/links/tweets/;
This month I’ve had five times more traffic than in any other month since I began blogging in Oct 2006, even during woblomo.
Why? I paid Paul Graham a compliment that struck a minor viral nerve, spreading through twitter, facebook, and blogs and sending over six thousand people my way on July 16 alone according to quantcast. Of course most have since dispersed.
Power on the web flows backward through referrals to the sites that people begin their day with, the sources of traffic. Referrals from social media, unpredictable and bursty though they may be, are inexorably on the rise. As they grow, power will shift away from search engines, today’s referral kings. Who knows, this may embolden publishers to take previously unthinkable steps like voluntary delisting, further eroding the value of search. This has all been said before, perhaps best by Mark Cuban starting in 2008. It would be a blow to openness and hurt users, but would spark a fascinating battle.
Another meta note: I installed a new WordPress theme: Suffusion. It’s fantastic: endlessly configurable, bug free, fast, and well designed. I happened upon it by accident when WP 3.0 broke my old theme and I couldn’t be happier. Apparently written by a teenager, I donated to his beer, er, coffee fund.