Disqus - Latest Comments for nigelecccles

Re: TweetLater.com Changing Its Name To SocialOomph.com

nigelecccles — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:35:44 -0000

SocialOomph? Cool, I like the name.

Re: What We Can Learn From Mess

nigelecccles — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:36:53 -0000

I thought the Craigslist article was one of the most wrong headed articles I've read in Wired for a very long time. The author seemed to equate developing lots of features or being cool with success (rather than happy users or amazing financials).

Jim Buckmaster came to Edinburgh to give a talk a couple of years ago. It was in the management school so there were lots of MBA students there. One of the questions was about what Craiglist's mobile strategy was. Jim's answer was "We get more companies offering there services to put us on a mobile platform than we get users asking for it."

Kudos to Craigslist for building what their users want not what the web 2.0 crowd think they should.

Re: Let's Get On With It

nigelecccles — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:47:58 -0000

You are like Nick Denton, cheering them on over the precipice! :-)

Re: Let's Get On With It

nigelecccles — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 09:51:38 -0000

My impression is why the are all talking about it and none of them are doing it is they are trying to get their nerve up. Also, it is clear that no one wants to go first on this one. In fact what they would really like is a cartel where everyone charged.

In the UK the big problem for them charging is that the BBC is the biggest online news site feeding out a massive amount of high quality news content. There is no way the BBC is going to charge (we already pay for it) so for if the Times goes paid then they are betting that enough people are willing to pay for something when they can get something for free only a mouse click away.

I think the only thing they will learn is just how fungible their news content is.

Re: My dissertation - Ycombinator & its spawn - How to do it right

nigelecccles — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:52:01 -0000

Great idea for a dissertation Jed. I'd love to see an analysis of the success rate of YC and other schemes like it. YC in particular seems to produce some really interesting companies.

Looking forwards to seeing the draft. Let me know if I can be of help.

Re: NY Times Last Man Standing Strategy Is Flawed

nigelecccles — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:31:12 -0000

I think there are many flaws in 'we can charge for online news' argument, nearly all of them because of wishful thinking. In the short term I do think the NYT could increase revenues by adopting a pay curtain like the WSJ but long term I think it would be a disaster. Is the NYT sufficiently unique that people will pay to read it when it is free elsewhere?

Even 'after the storm' quality news will continue to be free elsewhere. You want international news check out the BBC (paid by the UK taxpayer) or the Guardian (held in a very well financed private trust), want business news try Reuters (cross subsidized from other businesses), tech news (take your pick of blogs) etc.

I think NYT does have a future but it is probably a lot smaller than it is today.

Re: Reflections on my first year

nigelecccles — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:33:44 -0000

Great post. Here is one of the (many) really funny markets that were created in the last year: http://www.hubdub.com/e/Market/Will_Dick_Cheney...

Re: Disqus Adds FriendFeed Integration

nigelecccles — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:37:22 -0000

I guess we would just want to make our comments like blog comments. By default they would only be stored with us but there would be an option for them to be saved to the user's Disqus account. To be totally honest, it would be a nice to have and probably wouldn't the top of our dev list any time soon.

Re: Disqus Adds FriendFeed Integration

nigelecccles — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 17:34:48 -0000

This is great news. Any plans on releasing an API that third parties can link their commenting to Disqus? (We have our own commenting system but would like for our users to able to link them to their Disqus account)

Re: Despite Tough Economic Climate, Hubdub Raises Series A Funding

nigelecccles — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 11:22:36 -0000

We've got a market on that so unfortunately I can't comment: http://www.hubdub.com/m28368/In_which_quarter_w...

(I thought the starting odds were a good estimate though)

Re: 2008 New Year Pundit Award Winners - Wooden Spoon

nigelecccles — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:37:46 -0000

I assume that is a threat to sue me for libel. Bring it on Nostradameus.

In your world your 10 predictions may have happened but in the world the rest of us live in they either didn't occur or they were so obvious they were not worth mentioning. The only legal system where pointing that out is libelous is in the book 1984.

Re: If the New York Times dies, does the news die?

nigelecccles — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 18:29:01 -0000

The NYT is still very profitable but it is heavily in debt. That is the mistake of the management which (like many newspaper companies) thought that the good times wouldn't end.

Newspapers are a cross subsidy model that does work in print but doesn't in online. Additionally, online there is huge overcapacity in the the news industry. If the NYT didn't cover the election would any of their non-subscribers have noticed.

Don't equate the end of the NYT (even though that isn't happening) with the end of quality news.

Re: 2008 New Year Pundit Award Winners - Wooden Spoon

nigelecccles — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:14:22 -0000

2008 will be the year that LEDs become more common for lighting? So was 2007, 2006, 2005 etc etc. That is like predicting it will continue to get cold in the winter. Factually correct but of zero predictive value.

I find the concept that you stand by predictions that are manifestly incorrect highly novel. If you stand by the prediction that countries are behaving better and the fake internet has collapsed, where is the evidence?

If you claim a 93% success rate then it is fair for people to point out when your predictions are at variance with the observed data (or more commonly known as wrong).

Re: 2008 New Year Pundit Award Winners - Technology

nigelecccles — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:16:17 -0000

I think Twitter to be acquired is going to become a hardy perennial along with "Digg to be acquired" and my personal favorite "200x to be the year of mobile".

Re: Thanks Inquisitr Readers and better load times ahead

nigelecccles — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 07:15:03 -0000

Congrats - great to see you guys soar!

Re: Red Letter Day: Hundreds of Newspaper Jobs Cut

nigelecccles — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 07:16:20 -0000

In the UK we tend to consider a Red Letter Day a good day. There is even a company that sells paint balling, spa weekends and the like that is called Red Letter Days (although they nearly went bust a couple of years back).

Unfortunately, newspaper costs were out of line even before the financial crisis. We are going to see a lot more news like this over the next year.

Re: Society of Editors Conference 2008 in a nutshell: How the f*** do we make money from online?

nigelecccles — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 06:28:15 -0000

One thing I've always felt that newspapers under-utilised was their brand. People tend to trust newspapers, particularly local ones. Good journalism builds trust however publishers need to be much more savy about how to capitalise on that. Good examples of companies that has profitably extended their brands are Saga and the AA. I think most newspapers could do something similar.

Re: Reader poll: Who will win the presidential election?

nigelecccles — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 05:56:37 -0000

Interesting. I thought there would be a much stronger liberal bias on VentureBeat. Currently Obama is trading at 92% on the prediction markets and betting exchanges. He moved from up from 88% on Friday. I expect that it will tighten further as the markets are factoring in a small probability of a last minute surprise.

Here's our market: http://www.hubdub.com/m17795/Who_will_win_the_2...

Re: Can Hubdub Survive?

nigelecccles — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:24:08 -0000

You are right about the wording. It is something that we haven't worked on for a while and I know it is not user friendly. The question wizard approach you're describing is something we've been kicking around. It is a bit involved technically but it would make question creation much more accessible for new users.

Setting the question starting price is something we are hoping to resolve using a more advanced automated market maker we've been working on.

Don't worry about criticizing Hubdub. It is great to get feedback from someone who both uses the application and understands what we are trying to achieve with the community.

Re: Can Hubdub Survive?

nigelecccles — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:41:13 -0000

Sorry you had a really bad first experience and thanks for the detailed feedback. I'll not comment on the funding part suffice to say that building an active and engaged user base is core to what we are about.

I'll be totally honest and say question creation is still problematic for us. We made a deliberate decision when we launched that anyone could create a question, unedited and that it would be immediately published. We didn't want to have to put in an editorial review step as we wanted the platform to feel open to all users. However, there exists a problem that new markets can be poorly formed. For example in the house price question you created there was no option of less than 15%. Users who believe house prices would fall less than 15% would then have no way of placing their prediction. On these poorly formed questions we then unpublish them and send a note to the question creator with a suggestion on how to fix it.

One of the problems with the laissez faire model you suggest is that Hubdub is a highly competitive game. Without any rules a user could create a question "Will the sun rise tomorrow?" and set the starting odds at 5%. Then their friends could then make a lot of H$ in predicting yes.

Over the next month we plan to review this process to make it a bit more straightforward for new users. I am going to send this post around the team and feel free to send me any other feedback (nigel [at] hubdub [dot] com).

BTW I got kicked off Digg last week so even if Kevin Rose personally phoned me with an offer I wouldn't touch it (well maybe...)

Re: Intrade polictical prediction market manipulation

nigelecccles — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 06:39:23 -0000

Just a quick correction: The McCain contract has been consistently 10% higher on Intrade than on similar exchanges (like ours here: http://www.hubdub.com/m17795/Who_will_win_the_2...) not higher than the Obama contract.

Currently Obama is trading at about 85-88% across nearly all the exchanges. I'm not sure why Clinton is trading at 1.1%. I think it may be something to do with their commission structure.

Re: Now live: VentureBeat’s syndication deal with the New York Times

nigelecccles — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:10:23 -0000

Congratulations! The quality of VentureBeat always shines through. Great to see the new distribution.

Re: Who will win the second Presidential debate? Poll v Market

nigelecccles — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 04:14:40 -0000

Really it is more down to Hubdub users predicting who they expect to win rather than who they want to win. Obama has strong momentum which means he enters the contest as a strong favorite.

I would expect Hubdub and Sodahead both to have a similar liberal bias.

Re: A daily folds

nigelecccles — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:36:38 -0000

It is indeed a sorry day. Unfortunately, it is very likely to be the first of many with cyclical and structural advertising shifts conspiring to hammer the local newspaper business model. It is a great time for news but a terrible time for papers.

Re: NFL Prediction Season just beginning

nigelecccles — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 04:08:05 -0000

Check out: http://www.hubdub.com/nfl and http://www.hubdub.com/politics/US_Election_2008