Predicting the World Cup 2010 Winner

Today I was giving a presentation about Coolhunting through Swarm Creativity at the CRM Forum in Zurich. As there is currently Soccer World Championship time in South Africa, at the end, the moderator Susanne Wille asked me to make my predictions about which team would win the World Cup. Unfortunately, reading the collective mind on the Web does not predict the outcome of 22 soccer players fighting each other particularly well, not to speak about inexplicable decisions of the referee. I therefore refused to make a prediction. Nevertheless, of course we have our prediction system running on our new CoolTrend 2.0 for the last few weeks, because the wisdom of the crowd is still better than chance, although not on the level of accuracy we can reach when predicting political elections or movie box office returns.
So here are our trend curves about which team will win the World Cup, as of June 24, 2010, first the trends on the Web, then on the Blogs


The first thing to note are the huge oscillations among the leaders. Even Italy, out by now, has been traded once (around May 18) as a leader. Currently (June 23rd), the crowd both on the Web and Blogs thinks that Argentina and Brazil have the best chances to be the 2010 Soccer World Champion. Well, there are still many - unpredictable - things that can happen until we will know at the final, July 11, in Johannesburg.

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