robwebb2k » Analyst’s Edge

My picks: The best content on the web

Rob Webb — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 13:24:00 +0000

My buddy Will recently asked me what feeds I subscribe too, so I thought I would post what I pulled together for him here in case anyone else is looking for the good stuff. I subscribe to tons more feeds, but these are the ones I find myself consistently reading. I’ve found myself helping people set up NetVibes accounts recently, and this is generally what I put together, with each header being a separate tab within the same account. I’ve linked to the sites when possible and included the feed addresses below them. If you want to subscribe to one, copy the feed address and paste it into your aggregator (“Add content” >> “Add feed” in NetVibes). I’ve included feeds from my sites because I read that stuff too.

Tech/VC News
Venture Beat

http://venturebeat.com/?feed=rss2

Barron’s Tech Trader Daily
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/feed/
TechCrunch

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch

ValleyWag

http://www.valleywag.com/index.xml

The Alarm Clock

http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/atom.xml

Digg.com: Technology

http://www.digg.com/rss/containertechnology.xml

Analyst’s Edge: Venture Capital News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnalystsEdge-VentureCapitalFirmNews

Entrepreneurs
Marc Andressen: Ning

http://blog.pmarca.com/atom.xml

Roger Ehrenberg: Monitor110

http://www.informationarbitrage.com/atom.xml

Keith Schacht: JobCoin/Freshwaterventure

http://www.chicagobeta.com/feed/

Noah Kagan: Mint.com

http://feeds.feedburner.com/okdork/tZRC

Steve Newcomb: Powerset

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SteveNewcombBlog

VC Blogs
Jeremy Liew: Lightspeed Venture Partners

http://feeds.feedburner.com/lightspeedblog

Ask the VC (Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson: Mobius Venture Capital/Foundry Group)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/askthevc

Venture Hacks

http://feeds.venturehacks.com/venturehacks

Econ
The Big Picture: Barry Rithholtz

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/index.rdf

Freakonomics Blog: Levitt & Dubner

http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/feed/

Private Equity/M&A
NYTimes: Dealbook

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/?feed=rss2

Seeking Alpha: M&A

http://usmarket.seekingalpha.com/by/type/mergers-acquisitions/feed

Analyst’s Edge: Private Equity News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnalystsEdge-PrivateEquityFirmNews

Hedge Funds/Public Equities
Infectious Greed: Paul Kedrosky

http://paul.kedrosky.com/index.rdf

Wall Street Folly

http://wallstfolly.typepad.com/wallstfolly/atom.xml

Controlled Greed: John Bethel

http://www.controlledgreed.com/atom.xml

Analyst’s Edge: Hedge Fund News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnalystsEdge-HedgeFundNews

Traditional News
WSJ

http://feeds.wsjonline.com/wsj/xml/rss/3_7011.xml

Economist
http://www.economist.com/rss/printedition/economist_printedition.xml
NYTimes
http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml

Legal
WSJ: Law Blog

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/feed/

Above The Law

http://www.abovethelaw.com/index.xml

Sports
Townie News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/fitzy

Boston.com Red Sox (no direct link because of their stupid registration crap)

http://syndication.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/red_sox_rss/?mode=rss_10

Boston.com Patriots (no direct link because of their stupid registration crap)

http://syndication.boston.com/sports/football/patriots/patriots_rss?mode=rss_10

ESPN

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/news

Enjoy! Also, let me know if you think I missed anything…

Filtering RSS feeds

Rob Webb — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 13:19:00 +0000

My friend Jason asked me recently if there was a way to filter RSS feeds for keywords or phrases. I hadn’t really thought about it, but with the +150 feeds I have coming into my NetVibes account (a number which has gone up since we launched Analyst’s Edge) I was interested to learn if something good was out there.

The first products I found were Feed Rinse and Feedshake. Both look nice and gooey – web 2.0 colors and round corners. The problem doesn’t seem that difficult (rss feeds + filter words/phrases = new rss feed) when I saw that Electric Pulp (the same guys that charged Guy Kawasaki +$12,000 for Truemors) runs Feed Rinse, I figured they would have an easy, clear solution.

I was wrong. Feed Rinse is not good. I spent 30 minutes trying figure out what difference is between filtering a feed and filtering a channel and whether they support boolean searching type stuff. When I finally thought I had something configured, I went to create a new “rinsed” feed and discovered that they create OPML files, not new feeds….OK shouldn’t be a problem…I can import OPML files into my NetVibes account. But not Feed Rinse files. After 10 more minutes I found the feeds were importing into random pages and weren’t filtering for the keywords I specified. Granted, this may have been NetVibes’ fault, but either way, it didn’t work.

On to Feedshake. On it’s surface, Feedshake is less snazzy than Feed Rinse, but I was optimistic when I started configuring the feeds to be filtered. The process was more straightforward than Feed Rinse and there was no confusion between channel or feed filters. Plus, Feedshake produced new feeds for me to subscribe to, which I liked…until I tried to subscribe to the feeds and found they were broken.

This sent me back to the drawing board. I figured since Netvibes makes a business of handing feeds, they might have a feed customization/filtering feature. Turns out they do, but it doesn’t create new feeds – the NetVibes search feature filters feeds you have subscribed to for specific keywords. This solves the problem – I’ll now subscribe to all of the feeds that I want to filter in one tab and then run filters on the tab daily. I’ll be running the same filters every day (“hedge fund”, “private equity”, etc.) which will get repetitive, so a feature that created a new feed would be a bit better, but at least I know this works and I don’t have to worry about anything other than NetVibes going down. Note that to use this feature, you need to go to “Settings” within your NetVibes account and select “Display search area”.

It’s surprising that there isn’t a functioning, easy to use solution for what seems to be a straightforward problem, although it’s not surprising that NetVibes has the best fix.

Analyst’s Edge: "News the Crowd Can Use"

Rob Webb — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 22:28:00 +0000

There’s a great article today on Wired.com covering user generated news sites. The article is short, very readable, and serves as a great backdrop to our launch of Analyst’s Edge earlier this week.

The jury is still out on the public’s ability to vet information, but the very existence of social editing indicates that a fundamental shift is occurring in way people think about news. Users of social editing sites are no longer passive media consumers. Instead they see media as a live discussion in which the public deserves a voice equal to that of an editor.

It is our hope that users will take the Analyst’s Edge site as their own, submit news, and vote up stories that they think are worthwhile reads. There are too many barriers between consumers of finance industry news and the producers of it. Too many sites have bizarre registration rules, crappy RSS feeds (or none at all), poor organization and usability, and little or no interactivity.

We have built Analyst’s Edge with the goal of eliminating these barriers and getting good news to people who want it…news the finance crowd can use.

$12,107.09? Try $1,937.97 (with Symfony and MT)

Rob Webb — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 17:31:00 +0000

Last month, Guy Kawasaki made some ripples about his site Truemors. Guy detailed on his blog the $12,107.09 he spent over ~50 days to get the site operational. The bulk of his costs were:

$4,500 in software development
$4,800 in legal fees
$1,100 on registering 55 domains
$400 on logo design

Today Joe and I are launching Analyst’s Edge, a user generated news and community site for the finance world. All in, Analyst’s Edge cost roughly $1,937.97 and took about 4 days to build…1/6th of the cost and 1/12th of the time it took Guy to launch Truemors. Our costs:

$1,920 in software development (2 guys * 4 days * 8 hours a day * $30/hour (our approximate rates if we were on eLance))
$0 in legal fees (our legal structure was already in place)
$17.97 on registering 3 domains (analystsedge.com, .net, and .org)
$0 on logo design

Also, Analyst’s Edge has integrated discussion forums and job boards (jobs can be posted for $150/30 days). Granted we had the legal structure in place and Joe is a whiz with Symfony/Doctrine but if nothing else this illustrates how easy it is to get interesting, interactive, and potentially useful and profitable sites up and running these days. Everything we used was either open source or free, from the server software to the job boards to the analytics package.

We are hosting the site on Media Temple’s Grid-Service and are using their MySQL GridContainer.

Let us know what you think!

http://www.analystsedge.com

and if you Digg…