Our partner, The Independent, has launched a new service called Independent Minds. As they put it:

Independent Minds brings The Independent’s journalists together with its readers. Here you can find original journals from Independent journalists, where they blog about their stories, highlight their pet projects and engage directly with Independent readers. You can also have your own original journal on Independent Minds. Post your thoughts, keep a blog, and air your opinions among likeminded users.

My account is here. I plan to write about news, markets and forecasts. I’ve justed posted an article about the big 3 bail-out and Formula 1.

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Part of the vision behind launching Hubdub was that prediction markets could offer news consumers (i.e. most of us) a better way to cut through the news media generated noise and find out what is really happening. For example, ‘Is Obama’s lead really strengthening?’, ‘Has Labour lost in Glenrothes?’ (last week the Sunday Times talked about the Labour bounce; this week how they have SNP cruising home) and ‘How big an opening will Quantum of Solace have?’.

Originally, I thought the best solution would be to ban journalists from using the phrases ‘increasingly’ or ‘more and more’ unless they have hard data to back it up. Being in no position to enforce such a ban I realized that better solution would be allow people to create prediction markets about the news stories they are following. Hubdub now tracks over 2,000 current news stories and we’ve been looking a ways to get that market data more widely distributed.

To achieve that, we’ve started working with MidasOracle.com. MidasOracle.com aims to become a hub for prediction market journalism on the web, using forecasts from all of the top prediction markets to explain current news stories. I will be posting regularly with on MidasOracle.com with my first post on the three closest states in the US election.

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Image via Wikipedia I’m currently in Washington, DC at the Online News Association annual conference. This evening the ONA will present their annual awards for excellence in online news. The finalists for each of the categories have been announced and winners will be presented this evening.

We are running markets on five of the biggest awards. In the running for the different awards are household names like the NYTimes.com, CNN, NPR, Huffington Post and Reuters. Make your predictions on who will take the top prizes here.

Popularity: 4% [?]