Blogs continue to mystify the MSM

Congrats to Seeking Alpha on their Yahoo! deal. I was getting dressed this morning when the head of Yahoo Finance was being interviewed bu Joe Kernan on CNBC about their deal to carry Seeking Alpha on the Yahoo site.

It was apparent from the questioning that there is not a whole lot of understanding about blogs and what they do from the MSM.

Yahoo! in general, and Yahoo Finance in particular, have been enormous content aggregators.  Seeking Alpha very effectively organizes, assembles and filters many different financial bloggers. It was a natural fit — just like Yahoo! was with Marketwatch and TheStreet.com. Its what they do.

The combination makes sense, as its a relatively simple formula: "Seeking Alpha + Blog Content Aggregation = Yahoo! Finance content." And I agree with Paul Kedrosky, who notes that this is "free advertising (i.e., traffic) for bloggers."

I don’t want to rag on Joe Kernan — he is a self-admitted technophobe. But the most telling aspect of this entire discussion is the general head scratching that has met the rise of the blogsphere from most of the MSM. It is in a word quite fascinating.

Congratulations to David.

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Source:
Financial blog site in deal with Yahoo Finance
Aaron Elstein
Crains, September 12, 2006
http://www.newyorkbusiness.com/news.cms?id=14715

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  1. oldprof commented on Sep 12

    Barry has nailed it. CNBC’s lame efforts at blogs show that they do not really understand. They are missing an opportunity to get great feedback from a crucial part of their audience and keep their content relevant.

    The SeekingAlpha deal makes sense for everyone, but further threatens the television franchise. They know that many viewers now have the station on ‘mute.’ Why else all of the captions?

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