Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

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Technology Stocks : InfoSpace (INSP): Where GNET went! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: levy who wrote (14621)	12/7/1999 10:26:00 PM
From: jon zachary	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28311

interesting aricle about message boards, silicon investor : Most financial message boards on the Internet are filled with irrelevant chatter, but there are some pockets of community and civilized discussion if you know where to look. To help you find them, a guided tour of the Web's 4 dominant investment chat sites is provided: 1. Silicon Investor (www.techstocks.com), 2. Motley Fool (boards.fool.com), 3. Raging Bull (www.ragingbull.com), and 4. Yahoo! (messages.yahoo.com/yahoo/business_and_finance). Copyright Time Incorporated Sep 1999 Full Text: SOMEBODY'S TALKING ABOUT YOUR STOCKS ONLINE. TAKE OUR TOUR TO FIND OUT WHERE. [IMAGE ILLUSTRATION] Visit any financial message board on the Net, and you may feel like you've stepped out of the bus terminal and into the streets of some teeming, unfamiliar city. Where do you go first? How do you get acquainted with the locals? And who's the. freak named Food Stamps in a Bodybag screaming "Awesome earnings run!!!"? Most boards are filled with irrelevant chatter, but there are some pockets of community and civilized discussion if you know where to look. To help you find them, follow us on a guided tour of the Web's four dominant investment chat sites, then head to www.money.com/contents for a more detailed interactive guide with additional help and links to where the action is. SILICON INVESTOR (www.techstocks.com) Members: 120,000. Daily posts: 20,000. Best discussion topics: Most large-cap Nasdaq stocks. Lay of the land: Nicknamed SI by its users, Silicon Investor is the upscale neighborhood in town, attracting a high percentage of advanced investors and active traders. Anyone can read the messages for free, but to post your own thoughts you have to pay ($200 lifetime, $60 half-year). The fee may give SI an elitist air, but it's just steep enough to deter the less serious from joining, and many discussion threads are earnest indeed. "Stocks go down ultimately for fundamental reasons," writes dppl, the founder of the popular Technical Analysis for Shorts and Longs thread. "But these reasons are often foreshadowed by technical indications [that] can show the writing on the wall before the wall is even visible." Highlights: Not surprisingly, considering the site's address, tech discussions are by far the most popular forums. Some, like Dell, Intel and Compaq, have attained near legendary status, thanks to the variety and intelligence of their posts. But there are also good forurns that are not focused on individual stocks, such as Market Gems, with its bent toward short-term trading, or Ask Michael Burke, where a guy named, yep, Michael Burke, opines on subjects ranging from economics to John Travolta. Fitting in: Like a gated community, SI quickly escorts rule breakers out of town. Those who violate the site's hallowed Terms of Use by posting advertisements or abusive or obscene comments get booted without a refund. It's probably no accident, then, that unlike at most message sites, many participants here feel comfortable enough to post under their real names rather than kooky handles. Warning: Even the best neighborhoods have back alleys. You should avoid the $5-and-under forums not only here but wherever you travel, since those areas tend to attract users more interested in pumping stocks than analyzing them.

To: levy who wrote (14621)	12/8/1999 12:47:00 PM
From: Kaye Thomas	Respond to of 28311

I won't say it was easy, but it wasn't the hardest thing ever, either. I just immersed myself in learning Perl and then writing code for about three weeks. One thing I wanted that you don't get on most message boards is the ability to refer back from a response to the previous message without flipping back to a previous page. A lot of the tax discussion is fairly technical, and it's handy to be able to scroll between messages on a single screen (as you can here if you choose next 10). Now I'm not sure that was a wise choice. One problem is that even with the appropriate codes in place, browsers don't always refresh the page when they should, so someone can post a response and go back to the page where it should appear and not see it, so they think it didn't get posted. If they think to press reload/refresh, they'll see their message, but people don't always know to do that. I wouldn't have this problem if each message was on a separate page as it is here. Furthermore, separating the messages would give me a higher message count (good publicity) and create more page views (good for ad revenue). I figured SI's technology was one of the keys to their success and licensing wouldn't be available, so I didn't approach them. I had some talks with Raging Bull about licensing content to them and possibly getting the use of their message board technology but that broke down over a dispute that in retrospect was pretty silly. At some point I'll revisit my message board program and consider what changes to make. Eventually the thing probably has to be turned into a database application but I don't have time or budget for that right now. Kaye Thomas, author Fairmark Press Tax Guide for Investors fairmark.com