Until recently at Hewlett-Packard, a group of managers would sit through unending meetings to predict future prices of key computer supplies – information the company would then use to plan its purchasing strategy. Today, a prediction market at HP accomplishes the same task, but with better accuracy in far less time.

A prediction market is a stock market for ideas, where people can buy and sell “stock” in different outcomes, which impacts their relative prices. Between 1868 and 1940, prediction markets forecasted elections before advanced polling. They made a comeback in 1988, when the University of Iowa started the first electronic prediction market focused on economic and political events, such as elections.

The idea behind prediction markets is that the aggregated knowledge of diverse individuals produces a prediction with greater accuracy than a small number of experts. Diversity is critical here – if everyone starts out with the same knowledge, predictions will be the same and betting will therefore be negligible.

Though they are not infallible, prediction markets are strikingly accurate. In the 2006 Senate elections, for example, no public opinion poll predicted all 33 races correctly, but bettors at Tradesports did. Today, people use prediction markets to forecast everything from the popularity of movies to influenza outbreaks. In the corporate world, ArcelorMittal, Best Buy, General Electric, HP, Nokia, and Samsung have been using prediction markets to divine public reaction to new products, next quarter’s sales revenues, whether products will be ready on time, and future commodity prices. A comprehensive study at Intel concluded that prediction markets are at least as accurate as forecasts by Intel’s management, and often as much as 20% better.

Small companies have been slower to embrace prediction markets, but Entrepreneur.com points out that there is no reason they should miss out on the benefits. Markets can work well with relatively small groups of traders, and a small employee base can be supplemented with suppliers, vendors, and other outsiders. Small companies often seek the same answers as big corporations and can save precious time and money by replacing complicated market research with prediction markets when appropriate.

Despite all their benefits, prediction markets are only appropriate in cases where predictions are separable into neat categories: Will Microsoft release its software before November, in November, in December, in January, in February, or later than February? Will Amazon.com sell more books, iPods, or 500-thread-count sheets next month? This condition limits the prediction market’s usefulness when companies want to aggregate opinions without influencing people with a preconceived framework of possible responses or when nuanced answers would be more appropriate.

MixedInk sees prediction market software as a kindred tool. MixedInk steps in where prediction markets leave off by allowing people to respond to open-ended questions and provide more complicated answers. In addition to asking which of five products will be most popular using a prediction market, a company could use MixedInk to ask its employees to help conceive of its next innovative product or design a marketing strategy.

Using democratic, meritocratic aggregation tools like prediction markets and MixedInk, companies can truly benefit from the vast knowledge base of their employees quickly and easily. Of course, deciding to use these tools requires leaders to recognize employees’ wisdom, which can mean a big shift for some companies…but that’s a subject for another post.

Thirty-one years ago this month, a U.S. Federal Court ordered George Harrison to give up the majority of royalties from his hit song “My Sweet Lord” because he had unintentionally, subconsciously copied a Chiffons’ melody as the basis for his own song. Harrison was never accused of plagiarism, he was instead found guilty of Cryptomnesia, otherwise known as unconscious plagiarism.

Cryptomnesia is not limited to the realm of music. Carl Jung noted in a speech in 1905 that Friedrich Nietzsche’s book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” includes an almost word for word account of an incident from a book published half a century before Nietzsche’s. This is neither considered purposeful plagiarism nor pure coincidence. Nietzsche’s sister confirmed that he had indeed read the original account when he was 11 years old. Similarly, in 1916, Heinz von Lichberg published a story called “Lolita”. Forty years later Vladimir Nabokov wrote a novel by the same name, with the same plot, but to quite a bit more acclaim.

However not all cases of cryptomnesia have been of such literary import. Who could forget the episode of Seinfeld in which Elaine is ecstatic to sell a cartoon to The New Yorker only to find out she has unconsciously penned a Ziggy. From Seinfeld episode “The Cartoon”:

Jerry: You ripped off a Ziggy?

Elaine: It must’ve seeped into my subconscious, Puddy has Ziggy bed sheets.

Modern examples of this phenomenon are too numerous to list although two of the more recent, blatant examples come from pop music. Avril Lavigne’s new album includes songs sounding similar to those of seventies bands the Rubinoos and Peaches. The Red Hot Chili Peppers recent hit “Dani California” is almost a direct musical copy of Tom Petty’s “Mary Jane’s Last Dance”.

But what is the world of art, literature, music and thought without unconscious plagiarism? Of course we are all influenced by what we have seen, read and heard throughout our lives. It would be a feat of either extreme insanity or intense isolation to create a piece of content without influence or reference. This very blog post is both an intentional plagiarism of the sources linked to herein and an unintentional plagiarism of sources too numerous to even imagine.

Now here of course it should be noted that this is not an endorsement of actual, illegal, plagiarism. Passing off someone else’s work as your own is as wrong now as it ever was or ever will be. This instead is an argument for systemic change in how we use creative content as a society, which may be achieved without breaking any laws.

The internet has both increased our exposure to content and made it easier to appropriate that content for our own purposes. Many blogs have made a name for themselves by simply linking to content elsewhere on the web. The original creator may only be revealed after following a seemingly endless chain of links, some of which may take you back to where you started.

The internet has begun to enable content sharing, mash-ups and collaboration. Similarly, artists, writers and thinkers have begun to realize this shift and even embrace it in some cases. Bestselling novelist Jonathan Lethem (author of “Motherless Brooklyn” and “Fortress of Solitude”, two of my favorite books, both of which I intend to unconsciously plagiarize at some point) has launched The Promiscuous Materials Project. On the website Lethem is giving away a number of his stories and songs for users to “adapt or mutate” as they please. He also lists thirty projects in which others have created songs, stories and movies by reshaping his work.

Sharing content inevitably leads to interesting – if not superior – versions, which can even open up the original work to a larger audience. The perfect example of this is the “Grey Album”. When hip hop mogul Jay-Z released the “Black Album,” he put out a lyrics-only version in order to encourage mixing and sampling. A little known producer named Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, fused the music from the Beatles “White Album” with lyrics from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” to create the groundbreaking “Grey Album”. Despite the fact that it was never marketed or released, Rolling Stone called it “the ultimate remix record” and Entertainment Weekly ranked it the best record of 2004. Beyond launching Danger Mouse’s career and giving Jay-Z’s album a second life, the Grey Album had the unexpected consequence of introducing a generation of hip hop fans to the Beatles.

So while it may live on in legal textbooks and high school classrooms, pseudo-plagiarism in the public realm is becoming increasingly acceptable in many circumstances. If all content is partially plagiarized then surely nothing is truly original. And if nothing is truly original then we might as well embrace sharing and collaboration as a means to a greater end. The notion that plagiarism, no matter how slight, is a crime to be prosecuted will live on through the efforts of overzealous companies and misguided artists, but hopefully, it will diminish in significance as online communities and technology work to shift the paradigm.

A number of startups are paving the way to collaborative content creation online. Jumpcut is a collaborative video production site where people can upload, remix and share their pictures and videos. MusicShake is a music mixing service that lets users create their own professional quality music using online tools. Kaltura enables users to do with video, audio, and animation what wikis have enabled them to do with text. Even the big guys are taking notice; AOL runs Ficlets, a story collaboration website and is launching a multimedia story telling service called Bluestring. And of course, our very own MixedInk intends to contribute to this space in the coming months.

The poet Audre Lorde once said, “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.” And that really encapsulates this movement. It is not about taking someone else’s work and calling it your own. It is about taking disparate works, and changing, adding, and re-mixing them to reflect your voice, then presenting it back to the community to continue on its promiscuous path, hopefully affecting people and making itself felt along the way. In this journey, MixedInk hopes to lead the way.

The author of this post is an advisor to MixedInk.

Just a quick post to draw your attention to a recent piece in The New Republic. It highlights the fact that for some topics, Wikipedia’s combination of a strict neutral point of view policy and its dependence on the wiki platform results in articles that leave something to be desired. (No, this is not about its occasional – way overblown – inaccuracies!) We were pleased to see the author, Douglas Wolk, practically arguing for the type of complementary writing tool we are developing.

Wolk explains why Wikipedia isn’t the perfect venue for reporting on politics and other potentially controversial topics. Here’s an excerpt:

Graceful writing takes a distant second place to neutrality. The language of the “Plame affair” article, like a lot of Wikipedia, is flatly declarative, not particularly quotable and occasionally afflicted with wobbly construction… And so the entry is an obstacle course of little infelicities and colorless clots of subclauses, from the first paragraph’s factual but pace-dragging citation of Joe Wilson’s memoir The Politics of Truth to the concluding section, headlined “Other perspectives on the CIA leak scandal,” which reads (following a link to “Alternate theories regarding the CIA leak scandal”) in its entirety: “Since the CIA leak scandal became public knowledge, commentators began presenting multiple and often highly-contested perspectives on it in various media.” You don’t say.

To make a case for how the parts of the Plame tzimmes fit together is, unavoidably, to make a political argument. That’s antithetical to the Wikipedia ethos, whose dedication to unvarnished facts is worthy of Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind. Without some kind of thesis behind it, “Plame affair” is a dehydrated feast, a 20,000-word catalogue of notes and quotations and factoids that all have some bearing on the case in question but aren’t weighted for significance, have no particular narrative thread, and don’t begin to explain the meaning of the whole thing. It’s hard to imagine a Wikipedia that could function any other way, but the Internet hive-mind, negotiating in good faith and carefully hammering out compromise language, has done exactly what it was supposed to do–and failed anyway. The article, for all its catholic precision, isn’t actually useful, because it’s almost impossible to read… Wikipedia, friends, is boring.

Wolk hits the nail on the head. Generally speaking, and especially when it comes to controversial subjects, writers must make value judgments – whether writing individually or collectively. They must convey the order, context, and relative importance of an article’s components in order to sculpt narrative, digestible prose. As a tool, the wiki simply lacks the capacity to aggregate value judgments from a large number of contributors.

As regular readers of this blog know, this capacity is one of the central distinctive features of the MixedInk platform. We will allow contributors to focus not only on content, but also on style – which can be just as important in getting a point across.

(For more on how we intend to improve on the wiki, see this earlier post.)

If Miles Davis were here today, we bet he’d be proud of the part he played in inspiring the current internet movement. From unconferences to open source software, musical tendencies have been interwoven in what has come to be called “web2.0.”

Jazz musicians are masters at improvisation to the point of seeming telepathic. Pre-written music and carefully crafted songs are catalysts for experimentation, not ends in themselves. Musicians also seek to blur the line between the audience and presenter and build a community around their concerts, with the belief that increased participation will enrich the experience as well as the music. And we cannot forget the open source movement pioneered by the Grateful Dead – the band encouraged taping of concerts, with the only rule being that tapers could not sell tapes for profit.

On the internet today, we similarly seek new avenues for collaboration that allow for cumulative creativity and the ability to use others’ ideas as springboards. Where jam sessions are an ‘aggregation tool’ for musicians, the web 2.0 movement seeks its own mechanisms with which to speak with one voice and capture collective wisdom. We see quintessential web 2.0 websites like Digg and Facebook dependent upon a symbiosis among community members not so different from the connection between musicians in a band. And at an “unconference,” blurred lines between the audience and presenter and a belief in improvisation allows anyone to present and the whole group to decide which subjects will be covered on the fly.

Such unstructured and decentralized solutions to otherwise complicated problems (such as planning a multi-day conference) has become the basis for the next step in the evolution of the internet. The MixedInk collaborative writing platform is inspired by the world of music. It allows people to come together spontaneously and fluidly to improvise and innovate, build on and improve upon what has already been started, and create a unified output that reflects the energy and nuanced views of each of its participants.

We’ve all watched with amazement as a flock of birds changes direction as if choreographed, a school of fish scatters on command, or a line of ants marches to some hidden destination. It seems there must be a leader, a queen bee or the king of the ant hill, coordinating not just when and where to move, but which members of the group should get food, protect the community, or help with construction. It appears some unheard chatter must be spreading the word from on high to the masses, and that everyone would then go about following orders.

National Geographic reports in “Swarm Theory” by Peter Miller that the success of swarms is not based on a master plan coming from the leader of the pack. Rather, these complex systems are solved in utterly decentralized ways:

“No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all.”

Swarm intelligence is based on each individual following relatively simple rules and taking action based on local information. In doing so, groups can accomplish infinitely complex tasks well beyond the ability of any given individual — without leadership or any individual seeing the complete picture.

Most amazing is the ways bees decide where to relocate their hive. First, scout bees set out in different directions to find the best site for their new home. The scouts then return to the swarm and perform a waggle dance, which communicates both the direction of the recommended site and the scout’s enthusiasm for it. Bees from the hive then congregate around the site they prefer after seeing the different scouts’ waggle dances. Once a site attracts 15 bees, it is deemed the winner, and the bees from the chosen site spread the news to the rest of the community. Cornell University biologists studying this behavior were not surprised to see this democratic system resulting in the bees choosing the best of five possible sites for their new hive.

“The bees rules for decision-making – seek a diversity of opinions, encourage a free competition among ideas, and use an effective mechanism to narrow choices” is a lesson MixedInk takes to heart. While most group decisions and documents emerge from a group’s leadership, MixedInk uses a decentralized system to encourage all members to play a part.  Acting on local information or using specific skills, each person can add a unique perspective. These opinions are then aggregated, with the most popular collective opinion emerging through a democratic process – just like the bees use to find the best site for their hive. Through decentralization, a trust in local knowledge, and faith in the democratic process, MixedInk gives voice to the masses and harnesses the power of the swarm to create an output better than what any individual could have accomplished alone.

As a collaborative writing platform, the wiki obviously has many strengths. I mean, Wikipedia is now the 9th most popular site on the entire internet. This simple cumulative editing system might conservatively be described as revolutionary. But let’s not dwell on the wiki’s impact, as it has been adequately explored (and then some) in many glowing reviews in the press, within the blogosphere, among the digerati, etc.

We believe that the wiki isn’t the endpoint in the evolution of mass collaboration. So, we’re trying to create a more perfect wiki by fixing some of its features which are…suboptimal, shall we say.

Here are a few areas in which wikis could be significantly improved (the first two are the most critical):

1. Wikis don’t allow multiple simultaneous editors. If two people edit at the same time, one of them either prevents the other from writing or overwrites what the other has submitted. Even if wikis did allow real time editing – and there is a least one wiki hosting company that now does – having multiple simultaneous editors would detract from the quality of writing and make for a discombobulating experience, as it’s impossible to anchor one’s edits in a static conception of page content if that content is constantly changing.

2. Wikis don’t allow for bottom-up expression of mass opinion. Wikipedia’s neutral point of view (NPOV) policy is necessary and appropriate for an encyclopedia, but what about cases where the community actually wants to express itself in a biased way? With wikis, disagreements on any significant point, or on the best way to structure an argument, frequently lead to back and forth edit wars. The only way to resolve these disputes is through the imposition of top down solutions – which are inherently undemocratic, inefficient, and generally antithetical to the principles of the user-generated content movement.

3. People are creatively bound by what’s on the page already. Whoever writes first in a wiki often sets the tone and framework for complex issues, making it more difficult for subsequent users to think about the topic in a different (perhaps better) way.

4. Recent users’ edits are more likely to remain in the wiki simply by virtue of not yet having been corrected. So instead of having the best (or most representative) piece showing, you just see the last person’s input at any given time.

5. Finally, many wikis lack what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing (this is true in particular of the Mediawiki platform used by Wikipedia).

Do you agree that these are issues? What else would you change with the wiki if you could? How could it be improved? What characteristics would the ideal collaborative writing tool have, in broad terms?

Your thoughts, please…