The blog, Midas Oracle, looks at prediction markets in the news and issues surrounding their value and usage and contains many current articles about different markets and their social utility.  The author examines the utility of prediction markets, and determines that it is in fact their ability to synthesize facts, expectations and beliefs gathered by a diverse audience of users much faster than traditional media outlets can that makes them a valuable means of forecasting events.  It is arguably this efficiency that should be focused on by developers and those looking to harness the collective intelligence of prediction markets in order to develop new ways of making prediction markets more effective.

    Putting Suroweicki's qualifications of a diverse, decentralized and independant crowd in the context of their ability to amass this information most efficienctly is a useful method of understanding their significance.  It seems to make sense why these characteristics would be useful for prediction markets.  Another interesting aspect of this blog is that it does not hold the crowds on a pedestal for their supreme intelligence, but rather values their speed and popularity as their defining characteristic.  This follows more in the line of conventional wisdom, and is an important concept when examining the role of these markets in the foreseeable future.

    Information systems like the internet provide a medium for enhancement of the group dynamics that have been present in complex and lossly organized groups for hundreds of years.  Over time the average "social group" size has increased dramatically, allowing for a higher level of diversity of opinion.  The internet allows for the integration of knowledge in many different forms, has remarkable capacity for storage and can transmit data with low data loss, if any.  These qualities improve upon the merely human knowledge exchange and aggregation systems formed organically through social groups.  This article also examines the possible damaging factors to large knowledge systems, citing that many individual "wrong" choices would not greatly affect the outcome, but a randomly selected "leader" would be incredibly detrimental to the collective result.

    This article examines the very relevant characteristics of the internet in enabling collective intelligence to grow and thrive.  This is important in putting the study as well as prediction markets themselves in context, since they do not arise simply on the internet, but are created when certain conditions are optimal.  In addition, this article looks at the important inhibiting factors to an accurate concensus like the presence of a leader and potential for the bandwagon problem.