A month and half after the launch of Hubdub, we spoke with CEO Nigel Eccles about Hubdub so far, where it's going from here, and how the Hubdub concept might be a ticket to improved editorial quality.

Hubdub is part news, part e-Bay, letting would be news experts make predictions and wager Hubdub dollars about topics ranging from politics and sports, to entertainment and international affairs (see here for a full synopsis of Hubdub). Although the Hubdub team is UK based, the site questions have tended to be U.S.-centric, with politics and sports receiving the most attention. According to Eccles, Hubdub initially peaked with 40,000 unique monthly users, and has now leveled out at 20,000. Around 400 new questions and 2200 predictions are made per week. Popular questions are often ones that will be settled in the short term, with a clear-cut outcome; naturally questions of Spitzer's resignation date flooded Hubdub after the scandal broke.

Overall "the U.S. election has been huge." Case in the point: the current top question is "Will Obama drop out of the race by April 30th?" The presidential race is also a "more liquid and active market," with people tending to make higher wagers on outcomes, because "there's such a big news flow about it."

So who's your typical Hubdub user? As you'd expect, "there's certainly a group of a couple 100 hard core users." Beyond that, visitors to the site tend to split along two lines: "some people tend to focus on question creation... to get onto the [home] page," Eccles said. "Some are focused on the leader board."  Those who make more accurate predictions are ranked higher on the leader board.

As a service that puts citizen journalism in the expert seat, the accuracy rate is an interesting point of discussion. Hubdub doesn't yet have any succinct figures, but Hubdub betting rates are aligning with real life prediction rates. "Whenever we have a question that is one with real money bets, we are generally in line with those, so I would say accuracy should be quite good."

Moreover, Eccles has been impressed with the quality of the comments. "We've really moved to an era where a news organization can't produce a poor quality article and just expect people to accept it." Sometimes, "the quality of the comments is much better than the original article."

Eccles contends that the interest in Hubdub is indicative of readers' desire for someone to "come out and say what's going to happen." And therein rests a potential force to improve editorial quality.

"I've spoken to editors and journalists about this, and they saw this as an opportunity to put some discipline on journalists in terms of making predictions about what's going to happen," Eccles explained. "[The Hubdub model] is quite a good discipline mechanism" as well because it is then possible to see if a particular journalist is making successful suggestions on likely future events.

Indeed, the application of Hubdub's concept to newspapers may not be that far off.  According to Eccles, Hubdub has "very engaging functionality," with around 60 page impressions per unique user. "We would love to distribute that functionality," Eccles said. "[Users] are discussing news content, so we are aiming to take our functionality and let news organizations put it on their site."

This raises the question: is making predictions really the ultimate goal of a newspaper? Although readers may want to see journalists forecast outcomes, that type of outlook leans towards news becoming opinion, which is a concept at odds with the long standing journalism principle of striving for objectivity.

Newspapers still have time to debate; integrating Hubdub functionality within newspapers is still several months off. In the meanwhile, a more simple development will debut within weeks: a widget to place on a website "which shows where the market currently is."

Certainly such a move adds a social dimension to the news, in the same vein of the Twitter effect. Moreover, incorporating citizen journalist opinion can be an excellent way to give weight to a story.

However, there is a risk for a sort of tyranny of the majority. A blogger or journalist might choose to align his or her story with the mass opinion just for the sake of seeming authoritative: a kind of mob mentality for grown-up journalists. It's important to remember that users, while informed, are taking their cues from professional journalists; journalists can't be afraid to contradict majority opinion if that is where their research leads them.

Click here to visit Hubdub.