The new fall season is slowly getting underway with the CW’s second season of Gossip Girl and their 90210 remake debuting earlier this week. NBC will be premiering many of their shows early on Hulu, prior to their showing on regular broadcast TV later this month (this doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of them are quite bad).

One of my least favorite aspects of the fall season is the high mortality rate of new shows. As soon as I get interested in a show, its gets cancelled (see Firefly, Journeyman and Moonlight). This year, I thought it might be smart to be proactive and figure out which shows are going to be cut first so I don’t waste my time with them.  I figured it was time to make the wisdom of the crowds work for me, so I asked my Hubdub friends what they thought of most of the new fall line up.  So far, of my early favorites, Fringe seems to be doing well while Ex-List is languishing in 2nd for most likely to be cancelled first (I will likely ignore my good advice and watch it anyway. I can’t pass up a good Romantic Comedy so even a mediocre one will likely be entertaining to me).

Fall TV Death Watch: Which of these shows will be cancelled first?

Check out your favorites and see which ones are keepers, which ones to let the DVR hold on to for a while and which ones you can safely ignore.

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Image via Wikipedia The brand new Hubdub Dashboard is now live. It’s intended to make it easier to see your and your friends’ predictions, activity and performance on Hubdub at a glance. It replaces the old My Hubdub area, and your predictions can now be found on the new My Predictions tab.

The Dashboard shows your latest activity on the site (with links to e.g. manage your recent predictions), as well as replies to your comments and comments on your questions to make discussions around questions easier to follow. It also shows your friends’ activity (predictions, comments) to help you find interesting questions and comment on your friends’ wagers.

In the top right there are tasks to complete (so new users can begin to understand how to play Hubdub), and just below a zoom into your position on the leaderboard, with the people just ahead (so you can try and beat them) and just behind (so you can stay ahead of them!).

It also gives you some stats on your performance and activity.

Check out your dashboard here: http://www.hubdub.com/p/MyDashboard

Hopefully it’ll make it easier to keep up with the activity on Hubdub, and make things even more fun as we develop it over the coming months.

As always, any thoughts or feedback most welcome. Enjoy!

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Perspctv is a new election dashboard that tracks the web for sentiment favoring Obama and McCain. All the data is pulled together into a very attractive dashboard that lets to explore current sentiment and trends. Previously they tracked polls, news mentions, blogosphere mentions, Twitter mentions, Electoral-vote.com, candidate website daily reach and Google search volume. All those metrics are fairly unanimous in favoring Obama with him getting around 85% of Twitter, News and Blogosphere mentions.

Today Perspctv has now also added Hubdub forecasts to their dashboard. Currently Hubdub is forecasting Obama to pick up 298 electoral votes which is ahead of the Electoral-vote.com projection of 275. Check it out and let me know what you think. (Perspctv works of an API to our election data. If you are a developer and would like to use that data then get in touch.)

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The start of the Olympics is just around the corner and the world is holding its breath…or at least I am.  There are so many stories that come out of the Olympic games that sometimes it is hard to keep up with them all. I’ll be sending out a couple blogs over the next week in the hopes of getting you prepared (and excited!) for the Beijing Olympics. Prediction markets are a great way to feel involved in the games and I’ve included some relevant markets to get you started.

 This Olympics is all about the eights with the Opening Ceremonies at 8pm on 8/8/8, so it seems fitting that my first post be 8 days prior! Here are a couple of the stories I’ll be following this month:

The Medal Tally:  The US has won the most gold medals in the past 3 Olympics. They beat China by 4 gold medals in Athens (39 medals overall) but now China is on its home turf. China’s pride is heavily invested in these games and they have been working hard to stack the deck in their favor. Although the US will likely continue to dominate in Athletics and Swimming, China has a good chance to sweep Diving, Table Tennis, Rowing and Sailing. It should be a very close race although Hubdub is currently favoring China nearly 2:1.

Bet on it     Read more

Pollution:  Since the moment China was announced as the 2008 hosts,  there have been concerns about the effect of Beijing’s pollution on the games.  Beijing’s’ thick, dense smog does not sit well with thousands of premier athletes attempting amazing feats of strength and skill. Although Beijing has made some major inroads in their pollution by reducing vehicle traffic and shutting down coal plants, the city has been shrouded in gray for the past several days. Officials remain hopeful that shifting winds,  further reductions in emissions and new cloud seeding technology will clear the skies for the events, but it remains a major concern.  In fact, to lessen their exposure to the noxious air, many athletes are choosing to skip the Opening Ceremonies entirely and remain in nearby Japan and Korea until their events.

Bet on it     Read more

Human Rights: These games are China’s entry onto the world stage. More than anything, they want to be seen as civilized, powerful and a legitimate superpower.  However, the torch relay was marred this year by continued protests of China’s human right’s violations and another flare up in Tibet caused further bad press just when the Chinese wanted it least. It remains to be seen how prominently boycotts and protests will play in these games.

Bet on it     Read more

More Olympics questions

Next up: Track and Field!

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Hubdub is growing and we need your help! So we’re looking to hire a number of passionate Hubdubbers to join our Admin team. If you know anything about Hubdub, you’ll realise that we can’t offer you an earth-shatteringly good benefits package, but what we can offer is the opportunity to:

• Have fun working with a small committed team
• Learn first hand how a high-growth internet start-up is built (we’re still learning)
• Experience building an exciting web destination and passionate community
• Be paid (a little!) doing something you love in your own time

More details on our jobs page.

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We are really excited to announce that we have just integrated with Twitter. What that means is that when you make a prediction on Hubdub you can then immediately drop it into your Twitter stream. Additionally, you can opt to save your Twitter log in details and either tweet all your predictions or just selectively tweet them.

Here is the first ever Hubdub prediction tweet:

You can follow me on Twitter here. Get tweeting those predictions!

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Earlier this week we put the finishing touches to a great set of widgets. There are two types of widget:

Market widget

The first type of widget is a market widget which records the the changes in prices in that market over time. If you post this widget to your blog then Hubdub will automatically provide a trackback from the market page to your blog post. If, for example, you were writing about the twists and turns of the on-off Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo then you might want to embed this widget:

what is this?

Who will buy Yahoo?

% chance over time

    Microsoft

    News Corp

    Viacom

    Time Warner

    Other public company

    Private equity

    Still independent by end of ‘08

Get this widget

Hubdub - The News Prediction Game

Or maybe you wanted to show how Obama has consolidated his grip on the Democratic nomination:

what is this?

Who will the 2008 Democratic candidate for President be?

% chance over time

    Barack Obama

    Hillary Clinton

    John Edwards

    Someone else

Get this widget

Hubdub - The News Prediction Game

Or maybe you just wanted to show which of Howard Stern’s Bowling Beauties the market is currently in love with:

what is this?

Who will win Howard Stern’s ‘Bowling Beauties’ contest?

% chance over time

    Justine Joli

    Jackie

    Savanna

    Phyllicia

    Tracy

    Gina Lynn

    Leticia

    Kayla

Get this widget

Hubdub - The News Prediction Game

To access this type of widget click on the ‘Get widget’ link on the question page.

Prediction widget

Want to tell the world your prediction and record it for posterity? Then you need the prediction widget. This widget (which is a bit like a betting slip) shows what you predicted and when.

Maybe you predicted in mid-April when Obama was having priest issues and Mugabe had just lost an election, that Mugabe would still outlast Clinton:

Who’ll last longer, Robert Mugabe or Hillary Clinton?

I predicted Mugabe   on 13th Apr 08

what is this?

The News Prediction Game

Or maybe you predicted that the 3G iPhone will launch in the second half of June. Actually best not mention that one now everyone knows it will be the first half of June. Oh well, here it is:

When will Apple officially announce the 3G iPhone? [dates rumored]

I predicted June 15th to 30th   on 12th May 08

what is this?

The News Prediction Game

To access this widget click on the widget icon beside your prediction on your My Hubdub page.

Widget, widgets everywhere

The widgets come in both 250 pixel wide and 400 pixel wide versions and you can post them to your blog or to your favorite social networking profile. Have fun widgeting!

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Think you know your shouts from your voids. Then you might want to try out the Hubdub Quiz.  Worryingly I think I would only chalk up a 7…

(Created by Rohan)

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By Nigel (Chief News Junkie)

The United States Military Academy’s Department of Mathematical Science runs a weekly Problem of the Week. Last week was a really interesting problem involving making predictions on Hubdub! Unfortunately the deadline is now closed for entries however kudos to the first commentator who posts the correct answer below.

Hat tip to jenniandboys.

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By Nigel (Chief News Junkie)

On the day we launched our site, Hubdub, into public beta, I received the following email:

Nigel,

We have a problem. I have here a postmarked and sealed a 22 slide Power Point presentation regarding my concept, dated well before your launch today that I just heard about on the news, and I have been seeking legal representation since November 2007, so it is well documented this was mine before you even founded it in November 2007….Now I believe this concept has been stolen from me. I don’t know how you want to handle this, but I do expect a resolution. I will await your response.

Regards,

Cole Bartiromo

The email fell into my spam bin and I’ve only just found it. I thought “Who the hell is this guy? so I googled ‘Cole Bartiromo’ and came across some very interesting news clippings from 2004 about a Californian 19 year old of that name going to jail for 3 years for eBay fraud. Apparently, he’s got previous having as a 17 year old scammed $1 million off investors by selling “risk-free” investments. CBS have a nice picture of him (although he appears to be playing baseball with an invisible bat).

So Cole, you asked for a response and here it is: Give up your life of crime. You are young, obviously smart and clearly highly entrepreneurial. Take Jason Calacanas’s advice, “The life of crime is too much work for too little benefit; start a company!” (Twit 130, last 12 minutes). I’m not sure if you could raise outside money (well you probably could, but you might need to tell them where the money is going!) but a guy like you should easily be able to bootstrap yourself to profitability. At the end of the day, the company of hairy assed pizza eating developers is always going to be better than the company of hairy assed pretty-boy worrying cellmates!

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