The current market gyrations have investors running everywhere seeking advice. What better time to launch a newswire culled from the latest posts of financial bloggers? That’s the idea behind Wikinvest Wire, which has just been launched by the user-edited investment site Wikinvest. Except that it is not really a newswire in the traditional sense. It is more like a contextual recommendation system for the blogs invited to participate.
Wikinvest Wire is starting off with 100 financial blogs, including Confused Capitalist, Money Morning, College Analysts, The Mess That Greenspan Made, Financial Armageddon, and Old School Value. All told the blogs attract about one million unique visitors a month. Wikinvest is also in the process of syndicating the Wikinvest Wire to mainstream media sites, where links will appear on their stock pages. Wikinvest Wire is invite-only, but interested bloggers can apply.
The Wire will exist primarily on the participating blogs themselves, on Wikinvest topic pages, and on the yet-to-be-named media sites. For each of the 100 financial blogs, at the end of each post three links will appear to posts from other blogs in the network discussing the same stock or financial topic (such as “Google (GOOG),” “bailout,” or “credit default swaps”). The contextual links will also appear on relevant pages on Wikinvest and other stock and financial sites. (See screenshot). In this sense, it is similar to contextual recommendation systems like Sphere, OutBrain, or BlogRovr, which all append recommended links at the end of blog posts or news articles using a variety of methods.
Nevertheless, Wikinvest co-founder Parker Conrad positions Wikinvest Wire as really taking on SeekingAlpha, an investing news site that republishes posts from select blogs and media outlets (including TechCrunch). Conrad argues:
This launch puts us directly in competition with a larger site—SeekingAlpha.com—in that both SeekingAlpha and the Wire are syndication platforms for investing bloggers. However, there are some important distinctions:
SeekingAlpha requires a blogger to give up their content to SeekingAlpha. The bloggers’ articles are published on SeekingAlpha, and SeekingAlpha distributes links to content on their site to their partners, such as Yahoo Finance. Investing bloggers use SeekingAlpha, grudgingly, because it increases their traffic marginally. But they also hate SeekingAlpha—because 99% of the traffic to their posts actually goes to SeekingAlpha. Selling ads against the bloggers’ content is, after all, SeekingAlpha’s business model. But you can see why that might chafe . . .
Wikinvest, however, does not require bloggers to host their content on our site—and all links, from media partners, wikinvest.com, and other bloggers, go directly to the blogger’s own site. What we get out of it are links back to Wikinvest which are included in the Wire.
There’s also another big difference Conrad forgot to mention. SeekingAlpha is an actual site where readers can go and see all of the posts it hand-picks in one place. There is no one place you can go to see all the posts included in the Wikinvest Wire. The links are generated algorithmically and distributed piecemeal all over the Web. There is not even an RSS feed that pulls all the 100 financial blogs that make up the Wikinvest Wire together. (Although, you can get an RSS feed for any Wikinvest topic page, which will include Wikinvest Wire posts for that topic).
All of this is by design, as Conrad explains above, to generate more traffic for the participating blogs. But it’s not really a wire unless there is one place you can go to see all the posts popping up as they go live. So I’m not sure SeekingAlpha has too much to worry about.
Nevertheless, the addition of relevant financial blog posts to each page on Wikinvest should help to make it an even more useful site than it is today. If you are trying to figure out what to do with your stock portfolio, it is worth checking out for the comprehensiveness of the data and collection of arguments from both bulls and bears on each stock. They also have great charts that anyone can annotate (I’ve embedded one below).
Now this is what I call market trend oriented entrepreneurship – Those guys are faster than day traders
I guess you have to return to spamming he comments section, since you can’t get a hold of Arrington via email or phone?
You spammed here for a while >> Got a TC writeup >>> left for w while
Now, public beta >> starting heavy with comments again (how about seesmic? lol)
You seem like an opportunist without any organic interest, just sayin.
This is a great idea because daytraders are not going to go away. It is now easier than ever to trade yourself with out the need for a financial professional as the online trading platforms get more sophisticated.
I think people should stay with a professional, then maybe we wouldn’t have this mess as bad with the markets. People that are weekend warriors get most of their advice from message boards and have more of that herd mentality.
Because that will never happen this site as well as others will at least get the info out to the people that need it. Go Wikinvest!
I hope this really takes off. More godawful day traders out there collecting their losses means there’s more gains for the rest of us. Remember, less than 30% of investors beat the market once brokerage costs are figured in. Why waste your time – just put your money in a zero-cost index fund and beat 70% of the schmucks.
i’d much rather see a variation on alltop.com for this subject – and this could be done in drupal in about 4 hours with views, cck and simplefeeds…somebody else has already replicated alltop as a variation on drupal for political news with leftwingnuts.com – free and easy baby, free and easy…
Now, five tough days for the market and counting. Investors really need to make changes to their investing strategy if they have not already, especially since the market has not hit the bottom yet.. This means move money into T-bills and municipal bonds and invest some overseas to guard as a hedge against the coming inflation of the US dollar. I use offshore bank accounts for this and they have helped me. If you would like to learn more, feel free to visit my site.
Best,
Frank Miller
http://www.theo...bankaccount.com
My blog was fortunate enough to be selected for this, and we’ve seen a noticeable traffic increase since the Wire started up.
So far it seems like a good value-add for readers, as it displays relevant content at the end of each post, within the network of blogs – usually three related posts/articles of related content.
I am curious how wikinvest justifies that they own the content that other people write. This is quite a rip-off considering they live of other people’s contributions… According to their terms of use you cannot use their service for your own applications…
very interesting development, especially since it allows financial bloggers to retain their own content and enables the same content to promiscuously insert itself all over the web. a not-so-shameless plug for a new startup that similarly gives greater voice to everyday/amateur investors is Piqqem – a new web app that applies the wisdom of crowds to stock market predictions. most of us make investments based on the opinion of few expert analysts, whereas Piqqem is interested in gauging the stock market wisdom of the crowd, so to speak. particularly relevant during these times of economic crisis. I highly encourage checking it out at Piqqem.com, and feel free to get in touch!
Our blog tracking hedge funds was selected as well and have to say everything has gone well so far. Will be interesting to see how things pick up once the wire is added to various mainstream media sites. overall though i’m impressed and happy.
Jay
marketfolly.com – hedge fund tracking & market commentary
I work for Fisher Investments. We have put out some books on investing that might be useful for those also interested in Wikinvest. Check them out at Fisher Investments Press
I work with Fisher Investments, and there’s a great bio on our firm’s CEO and founder Ken Fisher at http://www.fool...ken-fisher.aspx.
It covers his background, his career with Fisher Investments, and provides information on the various books he has authored!
I also signed up for Wikinvest Wire back in October and so far I am happy that I have done so. It’s a great concept, and I do hope it succeeds in the long run!