Saturday, February 17, 2007

Management by Blog Post

We read a lot of blogs at Judy's Book, and by we, I mean me. No seriously, we all do.
As per The LazyWeb, nearly any decision we face has come up before and been elegantly described by someone in the entrepreneur/vc blog world.

I have joked before that we could outsource decision making to a properly tuned blog aggregator and filter - virtual management!

Turns out, the sharp team at Collective Intellect are making this happen, albeit in a valuable and serious way.

As far as I can tell, Collective Intellect aims to be a kind of Bloomberg for New Media - capturing news, experience, and opinion online and packaging it up in a hopefully actionable manner. There is big money in this - hell, four-page, desktop-published hedge fund newsletters can sell subscriptions for $2,300 a year.

Guys, If you're listening, here is a new use-case: I would like to use a product that sorted through all the image stock spam that I get in my email - and separated the *real hot tips* from the chaff. What about this one?

4 comments:

Timothy said...

Matt,

First of all, thanks for the post about Collective Intellect. This is an exciting time for all companies working in what appears to be a revolution in content/news creation and distribution.

Regarding your new use case, stock tip emails are almost all penny stocks and the spam is intended to inflate the stock price so the sender can profit. All of the ones I've tracked rebound back to their former range in a short period of time. As an aside, we run a virtual stock game at Collective Intellect and one person nearly won the game by shorting stocks in spammer tips when he got at least three for the same one in a single day (you can short penny stocks in a game but not in the actual market). For more information there is an NPR story here and a great site that fully describes the stock spam phenomenon here.

The embedded image spams are especially hard to weed out with current spam filtering technology. This would probably be the most profitable stock spam use case to focus on.

Mathew Johnson said...

Tim - thanks for the comment - sorry, I can be a little dry - the stock spam bit was intended to be tongue in cheek.

Good Luck!

Timothy said...

LOL :)

If you haven't already, you should check out the movie, Boiler Room. The stock spam phenom takes this to a whole new level.

DK said...

I'm up to about 20 hot-stock tips per day. While the stock picks might not be great, their ability to create emails that beat spam filters is VERY impressive. This makes me think these guys are making enough $$$ off this scam that they can invest in the best Russian spam programmers that moeny can buy. Sort of scary!

-DK