In readiness for tomorrow’s Jeecamp I took a quick look back at my notes from last year’s event to see what was hot back then.

It seems such a long time ago now when a fairly small group of us gathered in Birmingham – a scene set to be very different to the sold out event it’s now grown into (well done to Paul Bradshaw and his team for the organisation and enthusiasim which make it all happen).

My notes remind me that there was a lot of discussion during the panel debate about the wisdom (or otherwise) of The Guardian’s ‘guest’ travel blogger (remember him?) and, during the informal sessions, the ludicrously high number of clicks the average regional newspaper CMS required to publish a story figured highly.(No change there then!)

One of the initiatives which featured at the event and sparked my interest was www.hubdub.com, a site where users can set the odds on everything from politics to sporting events using virtual money.

I haven’t heard much about it since but it seems it’s still going strong and is the running for an AOP award next month .

Maybe there’s some solace to be found in the fact that the question, Will print newspapers cease by 2014? is running at 81% against!

Can’t wait to see what tomorrow flushes out – see you there!

I’ve been using Twitter for the guts of a hundred days now. In that time, I’ve added about 1 new connection per day and posted about 10 status updates a week. So I’m probably going to have to graduate from beginner to low intermediate status pretty soon, as far as Twitter is concerned. Before I do, though, I’ll write down some thoughts…

Recently, I accidentally convinced some people at work to join Twitter – no, honestly, I wasn’t trying to evangelise, it just came up in conversation and I mentioned that I found it really useful. The problem with that, though, is trying to tell someone all the interesting unexpected benefits you’ve got from it while keeping expectations in check. After all, twitter’s good but it’s not very likely change your life completely from day 1.

So, what can Twitter do? Here are my ten tips for new tweeters/twitterers/whatever you want to call yourself, from my own limited experience so far.

What and how to tweet

1. Do not use Twitter like a regular web page – it’d drive you mad having to keep a separate window open for it and pressing F5 to refresh all the time. Use something like twhirl, tweetdeck or – for Firefox fans such as myself – twitterfox. My anecdotal evidence suggests that a fair chunk of people not familiar with the web outside of Internet Explorer fall down at this hurdle. They set up an account, they follow a few people straight away, a couple of days later they realise they haven’t checked back in and they’re gone.

2. What should you tweet? My policy on tweeting is to mix it up. Sure, tweet your latest blog post if you want, but tweet interesting links you’ve found – on Twitter or more likely during your day-to-day work – or startling stats. Tweet what’s on your mind. For instance, one of my first tweets was “Is a Cadbury’s Twirl just a Flake covered a layer of chocolate? Or is it more?” – I stand by that. Also tweet questions if something’s bugging you or you want to find something out quickly.

3. Some twittiquette – retweet sparingly. Twitter’s form of the dreaded FWD:>>>> is RT (retweet). RT can be as annoying as FWD, so use sparingly. If you particularly like a link or point someone’s tweeted, you more than likely have your own point of view on it, so why not write that?

4. Don’t get into long conversations via Twitter. It’s like shouting to someone the other side of the room. A big warning sign is when 80% of your tweets look something like this – @tom Hilarious, @dick Cool! No way!, @harry really?, and so on. Although it’s unlikely that you’ll be doing that as a beginner – this is the sign of a “power Twitter user”, and unless they look really interesting, you probably won’t have cause to follow them.

To be in position to do most of the above, you’ll need an audience and to build an audience of followers, you’ll need to follow people yourself, which leads me to part deux…

Who to follow

5. Find your friends, naturally enough. You’d be surprised at what they actually get to up to, particularly the links they find during their work-day.

6. Get yourself some news. With something like Twitterfox, all the hassle of having to set up Google News alerts, only to delete most, or having to repeatedly visit your favourite news sites is gone. With something like twitterfox, it’ll never be more than 5 mins before the latest headlines (CNN, theeconomist, RTE, The Irish Times, whatever you’re having yourself) pop up in the bottom right of your screen. Major plus for Twitter.

7. Follow the leader. Find someone who’s further out than you on the bleeding edge of IT. Oh sure, you could be conventional and follow Google or IBM – I do. But try and find someone who just looks like they have their finger on the pulse. I follow for example Dexin (“Interested in Entrepreneurship, Crowdsourcing, Cloud Computing and Macro Economics”) because she seems to know what she’s on about. You can also try to find a topical non-person twitterer, like Socialmedianet (“News and views from the world of social media and social software on the Internet”).

8. Stalk a celebrity. When done well, it’s a great way of finding out a little more about the person behind the celebrity. Stephen Fry is a little passe at this point, being the world’s most popular twitterer, as far as I know – he’s also quite talkative, which is a factor to bear in mind if Twitter clutter (twutter?) is an issue. John Cleese is as mad as you might expect, so you won’t always get it. On the other hand, Britney Spears is too quiet and Jamie Oliver is still very much about the cooking.

Jonathan Ross is a happy medium, in my opinion, and comes across as very human. (Not that I thought he was an alien before, but you know what I mean…) MC Hammer is on twitter too and contrary to popular belief, his follow button can be touched. I haven’t gone there yet, though.

9. Inspire yourself – follow someone interesting, just for the sake of it. It could be, for example, @thebuddha, doling out words of wisdom twice daily, or it could be The Earth Institute at Columbia or whatever. But it’s never any harm broadening your mind.

10. Lastly, talk to companies. If you follow companies, whose services you use, and tweet at them (literally @ them), they will definitely hear you – no more interminable phone calls with automatons giving you menu options! For example, I follow MyHeritage and have been able to pass on feedback and suggestions, to which they duly responded. Ditto with Hubdub. Because it’s all done in an open forum, it’s a fantastic way of getting companies to notice a suggestion and even to shame a service provider into action, if you feel so inclined.

So there you have it, some tips from someone who doesn’t know too much, for what that’s worth!

Following on from my recent post about Web2.0, hubdub and guessing Irish unemployment, I think it’s only right that I turn this future prediction market technology on myself. Well, on the Daft Report at any rate.

At this link, you’ll find a market on how much lower rents in Ireland will be in January 2009, compared to a year earlier. All you have to do is place some of your hubdub dollars (don’t worry, the whole thing is free, it’s just to measure how sure of the outcome you are) on the year-on-year rate of change, as per Daft’s very own National Rent Index.

Those who get it right will get naught but some more Hubdub dollars, but hopefully that will suffice. Well, that and the knowledge of being right, and perhaps some real dollars, in the form of a cheaper rent, if you’re a tenant bargaining with your landlord – assuming of course rents fall. (As I write this, the Hubdub market currently gives a 5% chance to rents falling less than 6% or rising, so some of that 5% includes the theoretical, at this stage, outcome that rents will go up.)

There is of course a serious side to all this (careful, blogosphere, here comes the science bit). If the market matures enough, it will be interesting to see how correct it is, compared to the actual outcome. Consistently accurate markets, across a whole range of these hubdub thingies, would say something to economists and policymakers, for example in Ireland, in light of the social partnership talks about public sector pay cuts (e.g. have public sector workers already cut their expenditure in anticipation of a cut?)

Most importantly, though, have fun! We need all the fun from markets we can get these days.

I had the rather pleasant task today of going through a range of Web 2.0 / social networking tools and establishing the potential in their application to primary research. Some key things that the new generation of web tools can give include:

• Using something like digg or scribd to find key themes and recent developments in a topic, and – because you know who’s posted and who’s posted most – experts on a particular topic
• Using something like basecamp or dimdim to project manage flexibly, particularly when teams are non-traditional, i.e. they are globally dispersed, working from home, volunteer-based, etc.
• Using something like LinkedIn or indeed WordPress to access groups of experts on a particular topic and start a discussion
• Using something like Manyeyes (which I’ve done in a few posts) or wordle (which I may have done in one too many posts last year!) to come up with new visualizations and ways of thinking about data

Many or most of these I was already somewhat familiar with. Indeed, twitter is increasingly one of my main sources for accessing news, thanks to RTE’s twitter services, and accessing expertise, as a surprising number of economists are on it. (I may also use it to keep tabs on Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross, but that’s probably for another post!)

Anyway, what I was not aware of, or rather perhaps only vaguely aware of, was the plethora of wisdom-of-the-crowd prediction markets tools out there. By way of example, I’ve set up one at hubdub, that hopefully proves my point:

When will Ireland’s Live Register top 350,000? I hope the crowds will tell me…

Its been a while, but you lucky lot have 2 days for one! Enjoy the dose….

Articles:

MediaGuardian - Virgin Media viewers to get ITV shows including The X Factor on catch-up

Mashable - TwtApps Offers Beautiful Simplicity: Twtcard, Twtpoll, and Twtvite

eMarketer - Seven Predictions for 2009

Econsultancy - Silicon Valley’s irrational focus on ‘disruptive technologies’

Journalism.co.uk - Hubdub’s news pundit winners: who got it most right and most wrong?

Publishing 2.0 - The Problem of Media Economics: Value Equations Have Radically Changed

Gigaom - True Lies of Music Industry

Gigaom - Why the Consumer Electronics Show is Going Greener in 2009

BBC Click - Webcam brings users to life in 3D

BBCNews - Windows 7’s new features

BBCNews - Windows Live’s new features

BBCNews - Little Boots tops music tips list

MediaGuardian - Freesat now in 200,000 UK homes

MediaGuardian - BBC, ITV and BT plan broadband Freeview service

MediaGuardian - Turn on, tune in, and log on to MySpace

MediaGuardian - Skins series three: Meet the new characters

Mashable - Google Maps: 100+ Best Tools and Mashups

MediaGuardian - The death of the bonnet: BBC to overhaul costume dramas

Mashable - 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design

Blogs:

Guardian Technology Blog – Ballmer’s CES debut: the post-match report

PDA - Reviews site Yelp is coming to the UK – and bringing the parties

Buzzmachines - Inventions and opportunities lost

PDA - Social TV coming soon: iPlayer on boxee, MySpace on telly

Websites:

Hubdub – Predicting News

To be even more up to the minute, please check out my delicious page….

Non-retail/business sites on the internet find it difficult to make any money.

And news never makes any money. So combined, websites offering news content are usually loss makers.

Except for one:

Hubdub: the world's news forecaster

Well…OK it’s not a news website. Instead it asks its users to gamble play money on how actual news events will pan out.

And never mind play money, Hubdub is making some real money too. According to @jemimakiss at The Guardian:

“Hubdub has raised £810,000 in funding from a mix of angel investors, software venture firm Pentech and the Scottish Co-Investment Fund.

“This new round of funding will support more partnerships; at the moment those sites have a page on Hubdub, but the startup wants to extend that to other news sites to make a lightweight ‘powered by Hubdub’ feature available on external sites.”

Great news for startups. But what can journalists learn from this? Well if anything it’s that with sites like this community is king. It’s the ability to interact with other users which sees a quarter of a million people log on a month, not news.

And also the importance of having a good fundraiser on your team. I bet £800k from a mix of investors took a lot of slog on the ground.

Oh, and out of curiosity, I’m giving it a go – bet against me, I’m called NewsJedi.

Hubdub is a great new site that allows you to test your forecasting skills and gamble imaginary money by predicting the future of the news. This is the perfect site for people who think they know it all and a great test of the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ theory. You can predict the news covering everything from the price of oil to Heath Ledger being the next Oscar winner.

Hubdub is a great new site that allows you to test your forecasting skills and gamble imaginary money by predicting the future of the news. This is the perfect site for people who think they know it all and a great test of the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ theory. You can predict the news covering everything from the price of oil to Heath Ledger being the next Oscar winner.

Playing on hubdub.com is fun.

I’m playing on hubdub.com from time to time. It’s a funny online game of a prediction stock market. People creating questions for upcoming events and you can bet how this event will proceed in real.

For example: Who will be the new American president? Obama or McCain? Now it comes to all the news who’ve been floating around. Who will make it. That pushes the chances between Obama and McCain to various percentages. Say, for example, you start  at a 12% probability that Obama makes it, while everyone sets on McCain. The more likely Obama will win the race the more money you will make if you sell your stocks. If you wait until the end when the question is settled, you earn the most money.

But don’t forget: It’s all play money

I’ve previously mentioned my playing around with HubDub, “The News Prediction Game” where you place bets on random stuff and try to win big.  Well, I’ve been with it for about 6 months, so I felt compelled to post an update on my progress.

I’m ranked in the top 10% of users with a total net worth of $7,449 – they start you out with $100.  And going by what I can gather on the leaderboards, there are probably around 10,000 people playing, but that guess could be way off.  Anyway, here’s a graph of my worth.  The green shaded are represents my total worth, while the red line represents my “cash” and the blue line represents the value of any wagers I’ve made.  As you can see, I’ve lately put most of my money into betting.

Its been fun.  Pretty simple and straightforward, and with a little common sense, you can do real well.  It almost makes real gambling seem appealing.  Almost.

Hello Foot Clan,  Todd Awesome here.  Don’t let the name fool you.  I really am awesome.  Ask my wife….and her boyfriend.  I have recently found my self in the market for a new part time job, because my Trichomoniasis prevents me from doing my old part time job.  So I went about it the old fashioned way.

One of my new favorite websites, Hubdub.com, is hiring for category editors.  For those of you who are not aware of Hubdub, it is a website dedicated to betting on news stories and really just anything.  I mean someone put up a post so we could bet on when he is going to cut his hair for fuck sake.  So I sent them my resume and posted a question on Hubdub so anyone can bet on if I am going to get the job.  Now I know what your thinking.  Dr. Awesome your a God Damn Genius.  I know, I know.  What can I say.  I am kinda the best thing since Obama but without the hope.  I still haven’t heard anything back but I have a good feeling about it.  If you want to check it out the Hubdub post and even bet on me getting the job. Click Here to check it out.  You have to register to bet.   That is all for now….

                                             Awesome out.

Its been a prolific two days for me at the Hubdub Blog.

With two posts in two days, one arguing for the return of a baseball drug cheat and another deriding the likelihood of Englands golden boy winning his 100th cap, I may yet become a great sports controversialist!

On Tuesday last week, after an application and judging process lasting several weeks, where TechCrunch UK, Doug Richard (Dragon’s Den), UK Trade Invest, Oli Barrett and Polecat all put their heads together to work out which of the many applicants could most realistically do meaningful business in the US, TechCrunch announced the 20 companies selected for Web Mission 08, and GroupSpaces was on the list (at the top)!

The judges also assessed the companies based on their business viability and the strength of their management team, and it’s going to be fantastic for Andy and my credibility now that we’ve successfully run this gauntlet.

Sponsors Heller Ehrman issued a statement saying:

“The sheer volume of applicants provides convincing evidence of the depth and breadth of emerging growth technology companies in the UK. The shortlist of companies selected demonstrates that the UK is able to produce credible web businesses.”

As the mouthwatering agenda takes shape, this is building up to be one of the most exciting weeks of my life, and it all starts on April 19th.

We’ll be staying at the Clift Hotel in Union Square, San Francisco, and the hotel is home to the Redwood Rooms, a plush bar we first visited with Kirill Makharinsky last year.

The week kicks off with cocktails sponsored by TechCrunch on the evening of Saturday 19th, followed by a few days hardcore networking with Valley start-ups and VCs. On Wednesday we’ll have the chance to attend the Web 2.0 Expo, and that evening we’ll be having drinks with Michael Birch at Bebo (or should that be AOL?). Thursday contains some PR, accounting and legal masterclasses then we’ll be flying back home on Friday.

Picking up on Michael though – he’s a fantastic example of what British entrepreneurs can achieve. Having graduated from Imperial College London with a Physics degree in 1991, he’s now just sold a $850M company. And when you think that Bear Stearns is selling for $236M, that ain’t bad.

Hopefully Brent Hoberman and Michael will be just the first of a long line of highly successful British Internet entrepreneurs. Is the next one going on Web Mission?

The final list of 20 companies is (in the order TechCrunch listed them):

GroupSpaces – Web-based tools for groups

Tioti – A social network around TV

Exabre (TheFilter) – Advanced music recommendation

Coull – Interactive video platform

Zogix – Employee services platform

Byteplay (dotHomes) – Real estate search engine

Trampoline Systems – Enterprise software harnessing social behaviour

Hubdub – News prediction social network

WAYN – travel and lifestyle social networking community

TrustedPlaces – Venue recommendation network

Slicethepie – Enabling bands to raise money directly from their fans

Mydeo – Mainstream application for storing and sharing video

Skimbit – Research and share decisions

Huddle – Enterprise 2.0 collaboration

Rummble – Mobile social networking and recommendation

Zebtab – Desktop TV application

Silobreaker – Contextual and graphic search results

Kwiqq – Social Website builder

edocr – Making business documents interactive

ShortFuze – Online movie creation tools for social networks

We already know Douglas at Byteplay and we did some filming with Alicia from Skimbit at the BBC recently; however I’m really looking forward to meeting another 17 awesome companies next month.

Doug Richard said:

“some of these companies are as good as anything coming out of the Valley”

So as Mike Butcher entitled the post on TechCrunch.com – The British are Coming. America – watch out!

Q: How much will Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull gross its opening weekend?

A: Over $130 million.

Don’t let me down, Indy. 

Alas, while my sojourn amidst the summit of the Hubdub leaderboard towards the end of January was brief, it did result in this blog’s best days in terms of traffic (more than 10!).

Of course, the briefness of my time at the top has nothing to do with diminished or relatively inferior predictive capabilities on my part. It is entirely due to the embargo on me making predictions in the sports category which falls under my jurisdiction and the channeling of my efforts towards making this category the best one on Hubdub (colleagues – forgive my vanity).

I am after all quite the bright spark and my powers of prediction ought to be (instead of are) legendary.

Now that Hubdub has introduced friend leaderboards, I feel compelled to re-assert and demonstrate these mighty powers.

So if the cynical amongst you (reading via Facebook) want to challenge such assertions, or if you agree entirely with me and want to marvel at my (criswellian) ability to predict the future course of world events; then do add me as a friend on Hubdub (join if you haven’t already) and cower beneath me on your respective leaderboards!

I’ll try not to get a nose-bleed!

I’ve been a member of HubDub for 3 weeks as of today, and for someone who just sort of plays it very casually, I’m kicking some serious ass.  My overall rank, which is based on your quarterly gain, is 233.  And while I don’t know how many members there are overall, I’m certain its well over 5,000 by now.  That puts me in the top 5%.  They also break down your ranking by category, and when it comes to sports, I’m ranked in the top 3% at 138.  However, my sports ranking is really only that high on account of a few long shot wagers that really paid off for me.  And while its cool to be ranked high, I can’t see ever being ranked in the top 20 – their quarterly gains go from $30,000 on up to almost $300,000!  That’s incredible, but who has that kind of time?