In media there’s always been a handy fallback. If a summer blockbuster flops or a hyped series fails, then there’s always the reassurance that, hell, media is crap shoot anyway. As the saying goes, “Nobody knows anything.” We see it regularly in the press – and so often in Variety that attribution isn’t even required.

“Nobody knows anything,” William Goldman originally wrote in Adventures in the Screen Trade. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess.”

Case in point: every studio turned down “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” “Why did Paramount say yes?” writes Goldman. “Because nobody knows anything. And why did all the other studios say no? Because nobody knows anything . . . [N]obody, nobody – not now, not ever – knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.”

Do you really buy it? Well, the media decision-makers have certainly made some monster mistakes:
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At Media Predict, we always provide a forum for undiscovered material, such as unsigned bands and undiscovered writers.

But we know our users love media of all kinds. Now we’re going to give you a chance to speculate on some of the biggest events in media this summer. How much will Pirates of the Caribbean or Ocean’s Thirteen gross in their opening weekends?

Will Paul McCartney’s new record debut in the top five? Or will we ever see a fourth episode of ABC’s “Who Is the Greatest Celebrity Impersonator?”

We hope you’ll get involved. The more good predictions we generate, the more we’ll prove that markets can make media better.

Well … we’ve certainly got people talking. Media Predict has provoked some strong reactions in the past few days.

As many of you know, we launched with a fine piece of coverage from The New York Times (which also got picked up in the International Herald Tribune). Mega-blog Mashable weighed in last night.

But the knives were out elsewhere. First the New York publishing blog GalleyCat speculated we were inspired by a “high-quality crack pipe.” Then Gawker weighed in with its own attack. (As someone told us, “Negative coverage from Gawker is positive coverage overall.” We’ll take it.)

So apparently some elements of the publishing world feel threatened by the idea of you – the reader – actually being involved in their decisions. Obviously we don’t agree. For book-lovers still trying to make up their minds, check out our e-mail interview appearing in Crimespace (and reproduced in In For Questioning and Sandra Ruttan’s blog).

In music, StereoGum gave us a great review. And we were very pleased to appear in a blog we love, PaidContent.org.

Love us or hate us, we’re here …

From Olympic gold-medalist Dorothy Hamill and former Miss America Kate Shindle, to best-selling UK author Jasper Cooper, Media Predict is delighted to offer a remarkable group of writers for our launch:

• Dorothy Hamill and Ellen Levy Sarnoff (producer of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers) bring you Skatey Katey, the first in a projected series of children’s books.
• Jasper Cooper’s self-published Candara’s Gift shot to the top of the Amazon.co.uk charts. He’s looking to bring his magical story to America.
• From former Miss America and Broadway star Kate Shindle, we have Crown Chasers, a hilarious inside account of the pageant world.
• B. Brandon Barker’s NASA conspiracy novel, Operation EMU, created hilarious buzz when theorists and UFO magazines believed it wholesale.
• Brenna Hajek ’s Characters In Search Of An Actress explores what happens when an Academy Award® winning actress comes face-to-face with her own fictional characters.
• Greg Olear’s uS and TheM is a romantic comedy with a mischievous twist. (S&M anyone?)
• Catherine Raffaele’s The Thirteen Virtues is the first focused look at Benjamin Franklin’s Thirteen Virtues as a map for personal growth.
• Jason Clampet’s Dirty Cookbook is an outrageously funny tale of sexual misadventures in which a group of bachelor friends discover one of the best-kept secrets of dating: food.
• Penelope Estrada’s One True Love is an international tale of lovers forced to keep their relationship secret from both family and friends in the fast-changing 1960s.
• Certified Military Physical Training Specialist Mark Lauren brings us You Are Your Own Gym, with innovative bodyweight-only exercises that require no special equipment and can be performed anywhere.
• Alison Oliver writes and illustrates the children’s book Yoo-Hoo, Bunnie McFoo!, in which Bunnie learns that what counts the most is how she feels on the inside, not what she looks like on the outside
• Dan Markowitz’s Coming Up Short takes a candid and often heartbreaking look at sports greats who never won a championship.
• Lastly, Vicki Nicholson’s I Don’t Know Jack portrays a loveable, scruffy Jack who is plagued by a phony marriage, a new lawyer girlfriend, and (among other things) the Law of Karma.

We’re proud to have them all on Media Predict. Will they get a book deal? Make your predictions in our markets. See our full listing of books.

Every month, Media Predict creates prediction markets for top-ranking unsigned bands on MySpace. You can predict whether these acts will get an independent or major-label record deal within the next four months. When we visited the MySpace charts shortly before our launch on May 21, 2007, some top artists were:

• Ingrid Michaelson
• Hollywood Undead
• Jon Young
• Hawthorne Heights
• Jeffree Star
• The Medic Droid
• The Scene Aesthetic

Unfortunately we couldn’t create a market for internet superstar Tila Tequila because she claims on her MySpace page not to want a traditional record deal. We didn’t include other high-ranking artists on the MySpace charts such as OneRepublic and Colbie Caillat, since they have recently signed record deals.

What happens if your favorite band isn’t on Media Predict? You can always make suggestions regarding whom you’d like to see on Media Predict via our submission system. If enough Media Predict users agree and vote your submission to the top, we’ll give the band a market test.