Spot.Us Would Love Your Input

[Digidave]

Hello all. I thought I'd open the floor to any input anyone might have on a venture I'm starting up called Spot Us. The site right now (at www.spot.us) should explain the idea.

It's similar to Kiva.org or DonorsChoose - with a vertical on reporting.

The site won't be up and functional for several months. But I wanted to see if anyone had any initial feedback about the idea. My goal is to make a marketplace that serves three communities: Readers (who can also act as funders), reporters, news organizations.

Anything you think I should keep in mind?

[Brad King]

Have you looked into predictive markets at all? I know we shut ours down at TR because we didn't have the manpower or the model fleshed out -- but places such as Long Bets (Brand's idea) and Hubdub, which I just found out about, offer a wonderful opportunity as well.

We talked about gaming the system and such. The predictive market may be a good way to sift through ideas and thoughts that the community has -- without turning the ideas loose on them (so you don't get the Paris Hilton stories).

Interested in your thoughts on those markets and Spot.Us. I'm digging this idea more and more :)

[Digidave]

Interesting. Hadn't really thought of how predictive markets could come into play.

I think it might be tough to enact that on a local level.

In some ways - it is a predictive market automagically: Except instead of playing with toy-money on ideas, it's real money on what will be reported on.

[Brad King]

Ah, you miss the point. You can set it up with real money -- but the point of a predictive market, to make it work, you need incentive (there are actually 8 defined rules for building an online community, of which incentive is one) of some type.

At TR, we didn't use financial incentives, but there were prizes and other such things.

I don't think it would be difficult on a local level because you neither need 1) a large number of people (and if you can't get more people to voluntarily play than you can to actually pay, you have an issue, I think) and 2) you don't need that number to statistically parsed.

In fact, you don't want number two at all or else the predictive markets don't work.

Check out the University of Iowa's school of business predictive market. It has out-performed every national poll on guessing the president, using mostly a small section of Iowans, for the past 4 or 5 elections.

Their model may interest you a great deal.

[David]

Predictive news editorial. BK, now you are scaring me!

But, the point here is, if I can once again don my amateur econ hat, is this:

In a very abstracted sense, we pay newspapers to tell us stuff that surprises us, at least has the promise to. We never look a the paper to see what the weather is doing now, but what it might do in the future.

I talked to a guy who works for a company that runs a stock market game. You bet game dollars on the ral market and win prizes and rankings based on your performance. Their players' index of out performs just about any imaginable real world metric. And they are just playing. And there are not that many of them.

What I hear Brad suggesting is a similar model, channeled through a tool like Spot.us. Very cool. Very William Gibson. I like it!

The scary part is, if crowdsourcing news leads works, then what is the role of the journalist (something not talked about enough on this IMO)? Running down popular stories? Checking to see if politician X really is having an affair because lots of people think so? That the water downstream from the chemical plant really is tainted, just like everyone thinks?

Yeah, it's a great way to give the masses a voice. But it also could lead to a scary cultural hegemony. Just ask Frankenstein's monster, hounded by the horde who collectively did not understand him.

-- David

[Brad King]

The role of the journalist in my world is two-fold:

1) the gatekeeper (ack) of all of the information I've discussed here and on the blog; these folks will literally be at the center of the supernodes, the place where every journalist should WANT to be

and

2) the same role they've always had, that of the storyteller.

You know my feeling on stories on the Web, but the reality is people will always want summaries of what is happening. That is what we do.

The role doesn't change -- the tools and the way we get their changes.

[David]

OK, I know this is going a bit afield from the parent topic of this forum. But bare with me and I think I can tie it back.

(Also, this is a make up post for not finishing my late night post above).

The reason journalists are paid to be gatekeepers is because they filter out of all the possible news stories, the stories that need to be told. But what if you could automate the gatekeeping?

Think about it this way, they used to pay people to sit on potato chip manufacturing lines and flick the bad chips off the belt into the trash (true! I know a guy who used to do this). Now they have a machine that scans the chips and flicks them off.

If you could crowdsource news leads, in the same way you can crowdsource stock picks, then you, at the very least, minimize the gatekeeper role.

Spot.us is going in this direction, if I understand it. The idea is that a group of people are better at directing editorial through a sort of moving consensus represented as a financial investment. Good old free market economics applied to lead development.

Now I'm somewhat convinced that there's something to this crowdsourcing of leads--the Spot.us model. I don't see any particular mechanism that would allow you to crowdsource reporting or story writing. So, that's a leftover for the journalism profession to chew on.

I don't want to sound too scifi or even pessimistic. But I'm not sure all our bashing of "old media doesn't get it" if we are not aslo willing to reexamine the role of the journalist him or herself.

-- David