Image via Wikipedia We are really excited to announce our first ever partnership, which is with the Huffington Post. According to Wikipedia The Huffington Post “…is ranked the most linked-to blog by Technorati, the most visited news weblog by Alexa Internet, and the most influential blog in the world by The Guardian.” So in short we are very excited to have partnered with them. Hubdub will be providing forecasts via our widget which is embedded in all of their tag pages (for example here is John McCain’s tag page). We are currently putting together a widget and API page which will allow other news publishers and blog use this data.

Our press release is below:

Hubdub Interactive News Forecasts Now Used By The Huffington Post

Hubdub allows HuffPost’s readers to see accurate and timely forecasts on all the top news stories.

Want to know how likely it is that Palin will pull out of the presidential ticket? Or perhaps, the chance that Obama is the next US president? Or how strong tropical storm Ike is likely to be? Hubdub has literally thousands of user-generated news questions, on which Hubdub users then buy and sell predictions, creating thousands of spookily accurate results.

This new partnership means that from each of The Huffington Post’s tag pages, readers can see a list of all the current forecasts on that particular topic. For example, Sarah Palin’s tag page includes Hubdub forecasts on whether she’ll pull out of the presidential ticket (16% chance) and whether she will mention Alaska’s proximity to Russia as evidence of her national security experience (38% chance). All these forecasts update automatically when the Hubdub market moves, and Huffington Post readers can easily click through to the question on Hubdub for more information and participate in predicting the news.

Hubdub’s CEO, Nigel Eccles says, “This is a really exciting partnership, from day one we’ve always wanted the Hubdub market information to sit beside high quality news content”.

“We think our news obsessed users will get a kick out of Hubdub’s fun forecasting feature,” said Mario Ruiz, VP, Media Relations, The Huffington Post.

Prediction markets are becoming increasingly popular, especially now in the run up to the November election. They have proven to be more agile than polls, responding in near real-time to developing stories, and indeed to be more accurate since participants actually have a stake in the game. The fact that it’s Hubdub dollars at stake is apparently irrelevant – Hubdub users are so competitive that the most important thing is that they prove they were right to the rest of the vibrant community.

This partnership marks a significant development in the growth and focus of prediction markets. Projecting market forecasts out to news sites means that prediction markets are becoming more mainstream and easier for casual browsers to appreciate.

About Hubdub

Founded in November 2007, Hubdub enables users to trade predictions across 2,000 news stories and future events. For more information, visit Hubdub

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Hubdub Provides News Predictions To the Huffington Post

News forecasting game Hubdub (DEMO 08) today announced its partnering with the popular news Web site The Huffington Post so its readers can predict what they believe will unfold during the U.S. presidential election campagins and the outcomes of other thousands of news events from hurricanes to business controversies.

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They say things come in threes - and we’ve picked up three websites who have made big changes to their websites in the past couple of days…

Propeller, Netscape’s social media site, has radically overhauled its interface … apparently, to catch the 3 to 5 demographic! They have enlarged their font size radically which reduces the amount of stories visible on the front page; changed the colours to bright primary ones; and added a big cartoon mascot! Some of the most user-unfriendly changes I’ve noticed are an increasing number of click-throughs on an already slow-loading site; ‘help’ links being far more prominent than the links you are actually trying to get ‘help’ for (eg multiple times when I was trying to view a specific group, my first view was the general help topic on ‘how to view’); and baffling help topics - for example, the site had an explanation of what a ‘url’ was on their submit page, just in case anybody finding themselves trying to submit a story on this social media site didn’t know!

Not surprisingly, the top propped articles for both days have been about how bad the changes are … the first one was removed, which has led to even more criticism of the site.

Another site close to Hubdub that has undergone some recent changes is Blubet. This site, which runs quizs and bets for virtual money, recently announced new items for sale at their BluBet Store - including real money tokens to buy their virtual currency. It seems there is some disgruntlement at the site selling out, and also not consulting with users before the changes were made, but I suppose the quiet ones are just continuing to play the site.

To round out the three, the Huffington Post has just launched its ‘Big News Pages‘ feature, where topics such as Obama, Amy Winehouse and Climate Change are given a unique page that aggregates all the blogs and stories specifically on that topic. We think we’ll be keeping an eye on the Technology one. This seems to have been the most popular change of the three - or perhaps the gushing comments are also attributable to giant crushes on Arianna herself.

Obviously, there is a fine line between refining a product for the better, and making radical changes without consulting the user base or at least explaining the rationale behind them. As always, we welcome comments on how you are finding Hubdub, and suggestions on changes you’d like to see!

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