This is pretty cool – I just stumbled on Hubdub – a play on wisdom of crowds techniques for predicting the outcomes of news stories. After I found newsflashr the other night, I was curious to find any other sites that are doing unique things with the torrent of real-time information that we now have available to us. On Hubdub, the users create questions which are then voted on (not unlike Digg) by the community. Rather than the thumbs up or thumbs down of Digg, Hubdub gives you points which you then use to vote. Actually, Hubdub is more like Las Vegas than Digg. In Digg, the users are not vested in their votes (unless the user cares about his reputation). With Hubdub, the user is vested in his decision and how strongly he feels about something. Well, not really – because we are talking about “points” – not dollars. Online gambling in the US is illegal and if they were using dollars, then it would be considered gambling.

It is fun to go around voting on questions. It is even more interesting to create your own question and let others vote on it, so I created a question:

Since most investors don’t deal with oil futures, the most approachable instrument for trading oil is the Oil ETF – symbol USO. The USO does not mirror the oil futures or spot market dollar to dollar, but it is an indicator of the the direction the oil markets are moving. USO closed at $86.06 on Friday, Sept 5th.

Once you create a question, then you can track it with an embeddable widget:

Will the U.S. OIL FUND ETF (USO) close below $80 before Friday, Sept 12th?

Head over and vote on my question or start creating your own questions.