Journal Infonaut's Journal: We need a Pundit Tracking website 4

Today's Slashdot featured yet another John C. Dvorak story. In this particular case, he waxed stupid about Creative Commons licensing. Obviously he picked a topic he knew would generate a firestorm of angry rebuttals. Along the way, of course, PC Magazine gets a bit uptick in traffic as wild-eyed Slashdotters read the article and formulate ways of slowly dismembering Dvorak piece by piece.

Dvorak has made a lot of stupid pronouncements over the years, but he's stayed in the public eye because he generates controversy. In 21st Century America, it's not about whether you're right or wrong, but whether you make noise. But what if there were a way we could track pundits like Dvorak? Maybe comments like these choice quotes from a May 24, 2004 Mercury News article (about rumors of an Apple switch to Intel) would come back to bite them in the ass:

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"I believe this is a purely negotiating move by Apple to grab some attention and headlines and to point out that they're feeling underappreciated by IBM" - Evin Krewell, editor in chief of the Microprocessor Report

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"They lost half of their customers, and if they did it again, I suspect they'd lose half again'' - Nathan Brookwood, analyst with Insight64, referring to Apple's move to the PowerPC in the 1990s.

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"You just wouldn't do that. You wouldn't do something that disruptive.'' - analyst Tim Bajarin, who seems to always pop up in speculative articles about Apple

Imagine if the collaborative wiki approach used by Wikipedia could be harnessed to track the prognostications made by industry analysts. I'm thinking of the computer industry, but of course this could work equally well for the energy industry, NASCAR racing, or just about any other environment where the pundits roam freely.

Participants in the wiki could snip or summarize predictions as they pop up on the Web, then as events unfold a month or a year or five years later, the accuracy of these predictions could be revealed. Obviously this couldn't be a purely binary assessment, as predictions are often purposely fuzzy, and the topics being discussed are usually broad and ill-defined (ex: what defines "success" for a video iPod, if one is released?).

Still, I think it would be cool as hell if people who make their living making predictions could have their accuracy tracked in a public forum. It might even *shocker* make the media more accountable.