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September 11, 2006

SeekingAlpha & the Billion-Footed Blog Beast

I spoke on the phone earlier today with David Jackson of SeekingAlpha, and he gave me a heads-up about tonight's news with respect to having landed venture funding from Benchmark. We also talked about the bigger business news at SeekingAlpha, which is his new deal to syndicate SeekingAlpha network commentary to Yahoo Finance.

David humbly, ahem, calls the latter news "game-changing". Is it? Well, it does represent a further step in the democratization of financial media and equity analysis -- call it the attack of the billion-footed blog beast. SeekingAlpha is the hub of an ad hoc federation of financial blogs, one that pulls content from a host of sites, including this one. But bloggers still own their commentary, and more importantly, it is now syndicated to a high-traffic financial portal, Yahoo Finance, with blog source linkage intact. It is, in a sense, free advertising (i.e., traffic) for bloggers.

Some will carp that we're giving megaphones to nutters at virtual street corners, which is true at the margin. But far more important is that David is giving a big platform to people who richly deserve more exposure. Yes, it won't be easy to make this work, and the opportunities for self-interested behaviors are legion, but the direction is one to watch.

Congrats to David for pulling this off.

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