Just an interesting read from from this morning's IBD:
investors.com
People Behind Bulletin Boards Often A Mystery Frequent poster
gets around Yahoo policies to uncover just who is sending just how
many messages
Date: 8/30/99
Author: I. J. Eisenstadter
Last week in Yahooland, an enterprising bulletin-board user unleashed a whirlwind of messages claiming he had
written a code that reveals how many times an alias, or user, has posted messages on any one board.
His main message? Too many users were leaving far too many messages. More generally, he brought into the
open some of the issues faced by investors who use the boards for information that's important, often crucial, to
their trading in stocks and other securities.
''Short-nik,'' as Chicago resident Norman Nithman, 37, calls himself - pointed the finger at hundreds of ''big
talkers'' on dozens of the individual message boards set up through Yahoo Inc., the largest Web portal.
In the sometimes murky world of bulletin boards - Web pages where people can post messages usually devoted
to specific topics -Nithman's message, which he titled ''Get a Life,'' produced a range of reactions.
While many of the accused told him to get lost, none denied what the numbers showed: Some users have hit the
same boards thousands of times.
Unearthing Buried Messages
Yahoo maintains almost 8,000 separate bulletin boards geared to investors. The boards individually cover many
publicly traded companies, as well as a few corporate divisions and other business topics of interest to investors.
The boards let investors share their joys, voice their disappointments or otherwise hype, spam and blather.
It's only in the last year that Nithman's new skills were needed. Until about a year ago, any bulletin-board user
could screen, or sift through, all past posts using the Yahoo search feature. The search engine now puts a cap on
that, going back only about four months.
Finding out such things as how many messages any alias has posted - a single person, of course, can use many
aliases - helps board users gauge the value of the messages. At the time, a Yahoo representative said the
company thought the older posts weren't useful. Company executives couldn't be reached to comment for this
story.
To make matters worse for investors, in the future Yahoo may let users delete their past posts if they want to.
Critics say that would make it easier for posters to avoid responsibility for their public comments about a stock or
company.
Thus, Nithman's breakthrough in pointing out top-10 posters on various boards sparked a lot of reaction, from ire
to merriment.
'Peewee' Delighted
On Yahoo's board for Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc., a regular message-poster called ''dbrett2k'' was
disappointed to be unlisted among the ''offenders.'' Stated dbrett2k: ''I'm completely insulted that I was left off
your list.''
Over at the CNet Inc. board, user ''Peewee105'' was delighted with his fame. According to Nithman, Peewee
had 1.57% of the more than 20,000 posts at that site. In fact, Peewee readily confessed that he was also the alias
''ajbarf'' on that site, which ups his total another 0.97%.
That makes him easily the biggest ''talker'' on the CNet board.
So how much impact has Peewee had on CNet stock? That is the big unknown with these bulletin boards geared
to publicly traded stock. Another unknown is the true identities of these posters. For this story, Investor's
Business Daily tried to uncover identities.
Bulletin board users do fill out an unverified profile of themselves when they register to use the bulletin boards.
So who's Peewee? His Yahoo profile says he's a 20-year-old male living in Yazoo City, Miss., which at least is a
real city.
Setting Records
Peewee's not the only big talker. On the board of Leapnet Inc., a company moving from conventional advertising
to Internet advertising, one ''Alai8'' is listed by Nithman/short-nik as making 1,500 of that board's 38,000 total
posts. The person also claims to own 300,000 shares of the company.
Nithman's system can't get at the real people behind the aliases, and in this case, Alai8 also used two other aliases
that made the top 10. Add those posts up, and this person is responsible for about 3,500 posts since he joined
the Leapnet bulletin-board discussion in April 1998.
Who's Alai8? A retired doctor living in California, he has said in many posts. But Leapnet spokeswoman Beth
Pastor says the company has received faxes from Alai8, and they come from upstate New York area code 518.
At the Amazon.com Inc. board, Nithman says one ''Nemesis-editor'' was responsible for 2,139 second-quarter
posts, more than 6% of the site's total.
Can that be true?
Apparently so. Double-checking short-nik's program against Yahoo's screening software backs up his numbers.
Who's Nemesis-editor? Check out Yahoo's user profile and you'll find a person who claims to be of ''neuter''
gender and whose interest is ''exposing Luddite prevaricators.''
Need To Ponder
All this raises the question: Can bulletin-board posters move share prices? Analysts say yes - at least with smaller,
thinly traded companies. For example, on April 13, 1998, Leapnet's formerly sleepy bulletin board had almost
1,000 posts. Its share price that day soared 50% - without the company having issued any news.
For some bulletin boards, a small number of posters have a big share of the total posts. The top 10 posters on
Nithman's list for such boards as Cypress Semiconductor Corp., Texas Instruments Inc. and Inktomi Corp. equal
at least a quarter of all posts.
Careful analysis of these boards is necessary to determine whether all players are having an honest conversation
among themselves or whether some of them are just attempting to mislead.
''Many (posters) have a benign interest in stocks,'' Nithman said, ''but others try to pump their positions and wind
up posting falsehoods either out of zeal, ignorance or outright lying.''
Thus, Nithman's insights notwithstanding, the real message remains the same as ever: Caveat emptor.
(C) Copyright 1999 Investors Business Daily, Inc.
David II
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