Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Freakonomized!

Just came back from a short trip in England and I realized that the number of visitors to the blog has gone up tremendously. After looking at the referrals, I spotted the website that sent the traffic:

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/13/the-freak-est-links-78/

Apparently Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, the authors of the well-known Freakonomics book and of the homonymous blog at The New York Times, considered interesting the posting about the efficiency of the prediction markets.

Apparently having a link from a New York Times blog results in a couple of thousand visitors within a day. Given that I was just talking about some very preliminary results in that posting, reaching that level of readability so early on, is as close as it gets to "instant gratification" in terms of research :-)

Plus, I now feel the urge to write down all the results as soon as possible, following the "
authors should write to satisfy their readers"mode of doing research (via Daniel Lemire). Indeed a very good motivation!