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Simon Owens Interviews HubDub's Nigel Eccles

Submitted by greggles on Fri, 06/27/2008 - 10:31

I'm a big fan of HubDub. The user interface for events and trades is very easy to understand. And, lucky for me I'm in the top 10% of the leaderboard (my hubdub profile).

Recently, Simon Owens interviewed Nigel Eccles (who has no home page to link to...). The interview covered both HubDub and the sub-site PunditWatch which tracks pundits.

In some choice quotes Eccles provides the background on PunditWatch:

“So about three months ago we were thinking about all the journalists and pundits out there and saying to ourselves, ‘I wonder how they would perform if they were on the site?’” Eccles said. “So we decided that instead of inviting them on, let’s follow their predictions and record it on Pundit Watch. We did that through stealth for a month, and then at the end of the month we launched it and said, ‘Hey, we’ve been following your predictions, and here is your performance.’”

...and also some thoughts on whether being accurate is a prerequisite for being a good pundit...

“My biggest fear is that I force a lot of entertaining journalists to turn into dull caveat-driven detail-oriented journalists who wouldn’t be that interesting, would make fewer predictions, and would only make predictions if they were 100% sure [of their outcomes],” he replied. “I think that would be a really unwanted result…To some extent I think of it as an experiment. What will happen? Will the journalists themselves change how they perceive things, or will it change how the readers perceive them? I don’t know what the answer is.”

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