2008 has been a year of surprises. We entered the year with Clinton the favorite to take the Democrat nomination and therefore the White House. Economists predicted that the sub-prime issue was working its way through the system and wouldn’t result in recession. In tech, Digg getting bought was much tipped by pundits. And the Patriots were widely expected to win the Super Bowl and complete an unbeaten season.

That none of these things happened makes some people question the wisdom of making New Year’s predictions. However making predictions is really no different to sports betting. And we know in sports betting, while many people bet, only a small number of people consistently make money. That is why we are launching the Hubdub New Year Pundit Awards to help find those winners.

The awards will review predictions for 2008 made by journalists and bloggers 12 months ago. Any journalist or blogger with a reasonable following is eligible provided they made at least 5 public predictions by the 2nd week of January 2008. Each set of predictions will be judged against three criteria: clarity, accuracy and unobviousness. There will be five categories: politics, business, entertainment, technology and sport.

The winner of the category will win one of these beautiful engraved quaichs (pictured) popularly used in Scotland for drinking a wee dram of whisky. We hope it will help these prophetic pundits as they peer into 2009. At the other end of the spectrum we will also be awarding a wooden spoon for the pundit who got 2008 most spectacularly wrong.

In the next post we will list the pundits that are currently nominated for each category. Please use the comments to suggest other pundits we’ve missed out. We’ll take nominations right up to the 31st of December with the winner being announced on Monday the 5th of January 2009.

Pundit Awards