- abridged version, full text on SI home page -
By Tom Webb
Eagle Washington bureau
Four million times a day, stock investors and corporate bigwigs check out
Silicon Investor, a booming Internet site with gossip, news and views on
U.S. high-tech firms.
What their Web site offers is a modern version of the town square,
where followers of more than 1,000 high-tech companies can read and write
messages about a company's new products, financial results, corporate gossip
and stock price. Thanks to the booming stock market, investors have come
stampeding to the site.
Silicon Investor as the Internet's first discussion site for high-tech
companies. Its free-wheeling public discussions have at times rankled
companies and, for a while, launched complaints that its town square
had too many village idiots trying to spread false rumors or manipulate
stock prices.
"Most of the complaints have come from the companies themselves," Brad said.
"Someone says, they're defaming the companies, or they're posting insider
information, or they're saying bad things about the executives."
But for untold thousands of investors, Silicon Investor has helped them
glimpse and grasp emerging technologies -- and made them money, too.
The Web site receives 4 million "page views" a day, Dryer says.
And Newsweek magazine recently noted that the site "has a reputation for
being the lunchtime hangout of bigwig executives from major technology
companies."
And who is visiting? "We know a lot of them work for technology companies,"
Brad said. "We have a lot of people in Silicon Valley who access our site.
We know a lot of them come from Cisco and Intel. ... About 35 to 40 percent
are from California."
He added: "We've been watching for Bill Gates, but he hasn't shown up yet."
There have been missteps along the way, and the message-board format has its
critics. At their worst, anonymous message boards can turn into ugly pits of
misinformation, personal attack, racist and sexist slurs and deliberate
distortion by people trying to profit from a stock move.
"Accuracy on the Internet is a recurring theme," said Andrew DeVigal,
a visiting professor in new media at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg,
Fla., a media studies group. The very nature of the Internet, he noted,
leaves it up to the viewer to distinguish between fact and fiction on the Web.
By 1997, Brad Dryer said, "the message boards were starting to get out of
control. People were signing up with 20 aliases, trying to hype stocks,
and some fights were breaking out."
So the brothers instituted a fee system. Anyone posting a message would
pay a one-time fee of $125 and provide their real name to Silicon Investor.
That cleaned up the abuses -- and provided badly needed revenue.
"It's given us an unbelievable amount of control," Brad said.
"If someone misbehaves, we can kick them off.
We have their credit card number.
People are more self-conscious if they have to give their real name."
Today on the best message boards, there's a great deal of sophisticated
investment advice shared. The Internet allows someone versed in corporate
finance to swap views with someone who understands technology, and then
compare notes with a stock technical analyst, or someone who's a customer
and has dealt with sales and service people, or someone who's heard gossip
on the street.
The phenomenon, IMO, people tend to get more intelligent through interacting,
"You can do research in isolation, but no one person can keep up with all
information, so there has to be some sharing that goes on." |
