Yesterdays New York Times had an article by David Leonhard (quoted above) entitled “Odds are they’ll know the ‘08 winner” that talks about prediction markets impact on the elections, the economy, and a host of other areas. The point is that markets are making things better. Better for business and better for people. It’s doing this because, as N. Gregory Mankiw is quoted saying

“Everybody has information from their own little corner of the universe, and they’d like to know the information from every other corner of the universe. What these markets do is provide a vehicle that reflects all that information.”

What is missing from this article, is nothing more that the fact that predicition markets are part of a broader movement towards using tools to capture distributed information, enable coordination, and enable collaboration. Examples? Wiki’s are markets. It is a location where participants buy and sell words and ideas that best capture knowledge, information, and opinions. Blogs? Same thing really. I write something, someone else reads it and they create a comment. That comment begets other comments internal and external to my blog that inserts all participants into a virtual conversation that has no border. Another example? What about open source development of software. Software developed by anyone and anywhere. Much of My-Currency is built upon open source software.

So My-Currency is just joining a broad movement to empower people and to use tools that don’t presume to know where information resides or who has that information. Markets and social media tools (blogs, wiki’s, answers, etc) enable solutions in a way that is cheaper and better.