Huge quality improvement (well, considering that they started from 1,000 meters below the sea level) in the BetFair blog, lead by their resident prediction market guy, Mike Robb

Chris F. Masse April 23rd, 2008

The guy has shown commitment. Look at the semi-long list of posts he has produced.
The guy has finally understood that people want red meat —dynamic charts (i.e., self-updating) that link to the said prediction markets.
I observe, in passing, that their Pennsylvania compound chart is still alive (which is good), but, alas, the individual Clinton and Obama charts have died less than 24 hours after the primary elections. (I have strongly regretted this situation, to say the least, as you remember. If you want to compare BetFair with the other prediction exchanges on that technical matter, click here to see all the expired Pennsylvania charts.)
They have output an embeddable compound chart with news markers, as I blogged about, some time ago. It’s a great idea. Except that their political comments are childish, and that BetFair should let any external blogger add their own news markers.
The contrast is now great between Mike Robb’s blog posts (which now have a vital data visualization component) and the other contributors’ writings (which are just raw texts sent over e-mail for publication on the BetFair blog). Look at this dull Monte-Carlo story and this pale Champions League article. I suppose that these contributors are external, freelance journalists, who moonlight for BetFair. By contrast, Mike Robb (whose real HammerSmith name is “Michael Robb“) is a resident BetFair employee, who has access to, what I would call, the betting exchange culture (which includes spying on Midas Oracle for ideas). So, the fix to apply to the BetFair blog is simple: Fire all the external writers and get more of in-house BetFair writers like Michael Robb. Then, unleash the innovation gate (again, by spying on Midas Oracle for ideas).
So, the story of the BetFair blog (created in August 2007) is a story of arrogant incompetence. Today, (that is, 9 months later), for the first time, a semblant of sanity is piercing thru the crass.