I am stumbled this evening upon a blog entry from Prof. Dr. Andrea Back in her blog BackonTheFuture. I stick on this topic for quite a time now, since a good friend of mine has begun to write his master thesis about prediction markets.
But recently the topic became more relevant, since it has been discussed in the light of the american presidential elections and the forecasts. This has been an interesting topic not only because of the accuracy of prediction markets, but also since the two most known candidates have used the web completely different. You will find a few more posts about this special aspect of prediction markets or collective intelligence in the blog mentioned above.
What fascinated me today was the fact, that there are several tools out there in the web now, which we can use as private users and benefit from the huge pool of knowledge in the internet. So this is one of the more fascinating aspects of the so called "Web 2.0".
First I would like to tell you about Google Trends, which is a tool from Google, where you can get historical data about the searches over the search engine of the company and about the homepages that have been indexed in this time. So I have done this here with the term of the Swiss politicians "Christoph Blocher" and "Samuel Schmid", which have been discussed controversially in the past 12 months. You can see the results in the picture below.
You can clearly see the peaks of the public interest in the both politicians. That is really interesting.
Second I have read in the blogpost about another tool, from which I was really fascinated. The site is called Intrade Prediction Markets and offers a trading platform for bets on future events. There you can really make money, if you have a good instinct or you are good in calculating.
Intrade operates also another site, which is more community driven and where no money is involved. You find the site under intrade.net. You see a screenshot of a part of the platform above.
Now have fun and some insights with this tools...
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