The Holistic Web

“Experts” are notoriously bad are predicting happenings in their own fields. Newspapers are full of predictions of election outcomes, yet while the winning party may not be a surprise, the margins normally are. The last Australian federal election was predicted to be a close call with Liberal scraping in, but it turned out to be a landslide. That’s the best the experts can do?

Last year I read “The Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki. A fascinating book which talks about how the collective wisdom of groups of people can, if harnassed, often be more accurate than experts in that field. The book certainly presents a compelling case, and lists many examples of seemingly miraculous predictions.

Prediction markets are a way of harnessing that collective knowledge. Prediction markets are, in short, a “stock exchange” of sorts where you buy shares in the future - who will win the election, what the release date of longhorn will be, who will win best actor at the Oscars, or anything else you care to name. Yahoo have an interesting prediction market called where you “bet” on what the next hot technology will be. Bullish on Pocasting? Bet on it. The “results” are determined by how many people search for the term. The Hollywood Stock Exchange has been running for quite a few years on how

There must be thousands of applications for this - not necessarily predicting huge things like elections but just (relatively) small things such as:

• Will we win the X account? Allows senior account managers in a large company to dedicate an appropriate amount of sales resources and funding to a particular account. Similarly, will account Y renew next year?
• What will the market penetration of product Z be in 6 months time? If proved successful, could help with distribution planning, etc.
• What will be the most popular TV show next season? Fun for punters & could help with sponsorship deals for the networks
• Is Project X a deathmarch? (e.g. a project doomed to failure). Great for large corporate projects with dozens or hundreds working on them where the little guys rarely are heard but often know what’s going on. Alternately: When will Project X ship, one option being never?

There’s gotta be hundreds of areas I haven’t even dreamed of. Suggestions anyone?

I’m off to sign up for the Tech Buzz Game. I predict a big future for prediction markets

More or less continuing with my previous post, Robert Scoble has blogged about how few people commented on the RSS video. Robert, I was one of the 33,000 who watched the video and didn’t comment. It takes more than one warm fuzzy to make a relationship. It takes more than one change to one feature of one product before people will bother giving feedback.

There have been decades of Microsoft the Ivory Tower where you send your suggestions to some email address only for them to be lost in the void. Yeah, there’s been a bunch of people blogging for a while, but that’s a start. Here’s what it will take to get me to make a suggestion:

1. Show me 20 times in the last 6 months that a customer comment has been incorporated. And I don’t mean some corporate managed account. I mean joe average submitting a suggestion.
2. When I submit a suggestion, show me what happens to it. I want a reply, from a human.
3. If I make a suggestion that makes it into a product, give me some credit for it - even if it’s just my name on a blog posting or on a web page.

Do those three things, and I guarantee you, you’ll have all the suggestions you want.

So, after lunch with the ever insightful Alex Barnett today, he persuaded me to start blogging again (it’s his second attempt to persuade me - this time apparently more successful!)

There were a few things that tipped the balance, but one in particular made me think. We were (inevitably) discussing the recent IE7/RSS news, which for those of you who haven’t heard, is about some specific features in the new forthcoming version of Internet Explorer (note: this blog aims to be friendly to non-techies).

Of particular excitement was the news the Microsoft was responding to feedback quickly - blogged by Dave Winer via Scoble.

I agree, this is exciting stuff. However, you need to view it in context. Windows has, let’s say a 3 or 4 year cycle. There is a very small window (no pun intended) in which Microsoft can listen to you. It’s exciting that they are, but soon that window will be shut and not open again for several years. Why? Windows is, by necessity, a slow moving beast. Millions will buy it, and tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, both inside and outside Microsoft, will need to support it, deploy it to enterprises, build applications on top of it, and so forth. It’s just simply impossible to be agile like with a smaller application due to the huge ramifications of every move.

Now, something like RSS & IE does need to move more often than the full windows cycle, and the combined encouragement of the community and threat of firefox has made Microsoft realise this, better late than never, but there’s still a limit at the speed it can move. Enjoy the window - it’ll close again soon.

I should do an “introduction” post later. Just needed to get that off my chest. Thanks for lunch Alex! And by the way, you really shouldn’t put tabasco on your caesar salad. It’s just wrong.