AOL launches a blog network on stocks
After buying Weblogs Inc. last year, AOL has decided to open another blog network, bloggingstocks.com, dedicated to individual stocks. So far, this new network is composed of eight blogs and the writers are supposed to follow strict guidelines about the stocks they’re commenting upon. For the moment, AOL is covering technology companies such as Apple, eBay, Google, Microsoft or Yahoo!, but also mainstream ones like General Electric, Time Warner — AOL parent company — and Wal-Mart.
Here are two quotes from the welcome note posted on the new blog network on April 27, 2006.
If you’re visiting Blogging Stocks around the time of this post’s publication, you’re one of the first to view the beginnings of what will be a revolution in the quality, depth and passion of online stock news and analysis. Sure, you can get stock charts (and good ones!) anywhere.
But nowhere can you get opinion and quality meta-analysis that goes deep into the stocks you care about - the ones you hold in your portfolio - like that you’ll see here. Nowhere can you get passion that runs as red, yellow, green, black and blue.
Here are the direct links to the first eight stocks of AOL network in alphabetical order: Apple Computer, eBay Inc., General Electric, Google, Inc., Microsoft Corp., Time Warner, Wal-Mart Stores and Yahoo Inc..
Are there potential conflicts of interest between the bloggers and the companies they will follow? AOL has posted a code of conduct for the bloggers. Here is an excerpt.
Transparency is […] one of our most dearly-held company values. Therefore our writers each disclose all of the stock holdings of the writers or their immediate families in their biography page (that you can read simply by clicking on the link at the bottom of each writers’ post), with the exception of the individual stocks held in the writer’s mutual funds. Our bloggers will publically disclose when buying or selling stock, except through stock purchase plans.
In fact, I’ve only looked at a couple of bios of the bloggers and found which stocks they own, but not the number of shares.
Now, does anyone in France want to start a similar blog network?
