Open Source Homeland

This model could easily be applied to predicting the news, rather than assembling it.

Knewsroom: A Look at the Latest Social News Site – ReadWriteWeb
What I find really interesting about Knewsroom is that the more you participate and the more the community appreciates and respects your participation, the more power you have to shape the Knews. This is a good way to incentivize regular participation and is the exact opposite of the way Digg treats its most passionate users. As you get more involved, you accumulate watts, a form of currency on Knewsroom, that you can ‘invest’ in proposed topics or created stories to show how much importance you attribute to them and how important you think it is to cover them in the next day’s paper.

Online Poll in High-Info Crowds = Prediction Market

Over at Second City Cop, they’ve posted a poll with options for the next police chief. Since (I assume, though SCC always notes he has readership all over the world) he probably has a pretty high cop readership, I wonder how accurate this poll will end up being. In effect, this free poll can act as a prediction market when exposed to the right readership.

Interesting activities on Amazon Turk, as seen in this email I got from Amazon. It’s easy to image the utility of Amazon Turk in the analysis of satellite imagery of possible terrorist hideouts (“review these images and indicate if there is a truck in the picture”). Adding a prediction market element, you can show photos of houses and ask “does a terrorist live here?”.

A number of you have asked us to make it easier for you to be kept up to date on Amazon Mechanical Turk. This email is a way for us to share with you what’s happening.Currently, there is a large selection of HITs available on the site, and the mix of tasks changes frequently. Here is a small sample, but we encourage you to visit the site and see what else is available.

Information Locators — Identify and transcribe information from digital documents for Information Locators. To complete these HITs, find and transcribe the requested data from online digital documents.

Dimensional Analytics — Describe the contents of a website for Dimensional Analytics. These HITs ask you to provide the top 3 phrases that best describe a website.

Geospatial Vision — Identify and mark items in photographs such as road signs, lamp posts, storm drains and other features for Geospatial Vision using their custom Flash application.

Collectorz.com — Write a short plot description for movies you have watched. Collectorz.com offers several movie titles that you can choose from to write your own plot description.

Trivia Research Department — Create and edit trivia questions for Trivia Research. To complete these HITs, reseach, write and edit trivia questions in different categories using your own knowledge and other resources.

Amazon UnSpun — Express your opinion by ranking your top three choices in various list categories. This information is used by Amazon’s UnSpun website to populate its community opinion lists on a wide variety of topics.

CastingWords — Transcribe audio content and edit transcripts . CastingWords’ HITs ask you to complete such diverse tasks as transcribing audio content into text, editing transcripts for accuracy and verifying transcription quality.

There’s a lot of activity on Mechanical Turk, so the list of available HITs changes frequently. The best way to stay up to date is to check the site when you have a free minute.

Marketwatch.com has just come out with prediction markets for stocks. Another commercial usage for something that has tremendous utility for terrorism prevention.

MarketWatch MarketPerception Prediction Market Google