Data on Blog Post Distribution via Seeking Alpha and Yahoo

Two weeks ago I wrote a post about why the Seeking Alpha deal with Yahoo Finance was important for my blog (full disclosure: Benchmark is invested in Seeking Alpha) . It was all about distribution. What I did not realize at the time was how impactful it was. The following is an analysis accompanied by many charts and screen shots to show the results (sorry for the length).

My second post on the Yahoo/Facebook deal was picked up by Seeking Alpha. It was then distributed on Yahoo Finance on the YHOO ticker symbol. Because I wrote it early, it was the top placed story in the headlines below the Yahoo chart when the market opened at 9:30AM EDT. Below is a chart showing the hourly progression of traffic to my blog on the day the post appeared on Yahoo Finance via Seeking Alpha.16 O'clock in Israel (where I am) is 9am in NYC. Look at the spike in the pre-market and early opening hours of the market. Now look at the chart below.

Thursday 9/21 is the day my blog post was picked up by Seeking Alpha and posted to Yahoo Finance. You can see that visits to my blog increased 4X+ on Thursday. But here is the real interesting part, you can see that visits to my blog went up even higher on Friday. When I came back from the Rosh Hashana holiday, I could not figure this out initially since the post was off of Yahoo Finance's main page. I then found the answer comparing the following 2 graphs (thanks to Google Analytics for all these great free charts).


The above graph is from Thursday's traffic. Note that most of my traffic is coming from Seeking Alpha and 2 Yahoo properties. In a normal day, my direct traffic accounts for more than 50% of my traffic and Thursday 9/21 it was under 15%. Now look at the chart below.
All of the sudden a new traffic source appeared: thestreet.com. I had never before received any traffic from thestreet.com so I was curious where it came from. After searching the site, I found my way to this post by James Altucher (thanks to James for the kind mention):

I am guessing that James either saw my post on Seeking Alpha or on Yahoo Finance and linked to it. This was a spillover effect from the Seeking Alpha pick up that upped my exposure for a second day. Some of it (about 15%) was probably still traffic from the Seeking Alpha/Yahoo Finance posting but the rest of it was from a secondary source that found me through the original distribution. Friday, as you can see above, was 5X the traffic of Wednesday. So in the 2 days following my post being picked up, I had an order of magnitude more traffic than a normal day. What's more is that it was all new readers. In a normal day, 60% of my readers are returning visitors (nobody is that interested in what I have to say so I assume the other 40% are Google crawlers or accidental tourists). See these charts below for a breakdown of traffic on the 2 days the post ran on Seeking Alpha, Yahoo Finance and TheStreet.com (9/21 and 9/22).


You would get a similar picture if you look at the geographic breakdown. On normal days, I get about 50% of my visitors from Israel. On those today's Israel was a small blip on the map compared to California and New York.

Given that I started writing my blog to try to get a better understanding of the dynamics of the blogosphere, I found this entire experience very edifying and interesting. Has anyone had similar experiences?

Blog Update - Shana Tova

Shana Tova and a Happy and Healthy Jewish New Year to all.

Today, I have added my first widget to the blog. Thanks to the kind folks at MuseStorm, you can now see a Scoop.co.il widget on the right side of the blog. Yup, my very own doohickey. With apologies to those who do not read Hebrew, the widget carries the top headlines from Scoop right inside my blog. While it takes up more screen real estate than a simple link, I think it might add more value. Comments welcome.

I have received a number of emails suggesting that I change the background color of the blog to White. I am taking comments and suggestions.

Posting will be slow over the coming weeks due to the Jewish Holidays and two large posts I am working on. Part 4 in the series of Orthodox in the Modern Business World and a post on the impact of blog aggregators that I think will be very interesting.

Since this is the first post since the Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, I thought I would take the opportunity for a top ten list of things I am looking forward to in the new year or I will not miss from the past year. I tried to draw on all parts of life that the blog covers (kids, tech, VC, Israel, politics)

So with deference to David Letterman, here goes the list.
10. Kofi Anan - I am looking forward to the retirement of the most corrupt and amoral world figurehead we have ever seen. Kudos to my favorite columnist William Saffire for keeping the heat on Anan.
9. Aharon Barak - Israel's Chief Justice retired last week. Hooray! I found his over-reaching bench too much to handle. His Judicial activism and hand-picked supreme court left little room for the "elected" legislature. Maybe the New Year will bring a new spirit to the court.
8. My kids picking up their clothing from the floor - expect to see this on next year's list as well with the addition of wanting them to do dishes. (My wife would like me to pick up my socks as well).
7. A bubble! Why not? It was good for VCs last time :)
6. An IPO market - It is about time. There are a lot of private companies needing an exit and it would be nice if the public markets opened their doors.
5. A repeal of Sarbanes Oxley - no words needed
4. A new Defense Minister in Israel - Unfortunately I was right when I warned about Amir Peretz. More unfortunately, the joke is on us.
3. The end of Israel's electoral apathy. It is time for Israel's citizens to take political matters seriously and dive head first into politics. We need good people to go into politics, not the party hacks and career bureaucrats that are running our country.
2. An honest confrontation with Muslim extremism. If we do not confront the Iranian/Hamas/Hezbollah nexus this year, next year might be too late.
1. A happy and healthy Jewish New Year for all.

Yahoo Update - The Facebook Vertical

Not a proverbial 4 minutes after my last blog post on Yahoo's strategy, the WSJ reports this morning that Yahoo is in discussions to acquire Facebook. I have been trying to decide all morning whether a Facebook acquisition is more of the same Flickr, del.icio.us type acquisitions or does it fit the more vertical approach I was advocating yesterday.

My current thinking is that this is a step in the right direction. College students are a huge vertical with great spending power and lots of free time. Facebook already has a $150 million deal with MSN to monetize the site so they have proven that they can monetize the site. College students also eventually leave college, get jobs, rent apartments or buy first homes and invest in the stock market. It is actually the last time to catch and influence them before they go out into the real world. Facebook could be a great bridge for Yahoo to begin delivering deep vertical content and upselling services to a very important and highly viral demographic (stuff spreads rapidly on college campuses. It is also a bigger acquisition for Yahoo and one that in my opinion has much deeper engagement than Flickr or del.icio.us. It will be a big ticket acquisition (probably $1Bn+) but I think a good bold move....provided the rumors are true.

Yahoo - What Next?

The investment world is in a bit of a panic about Yahoo. The blogosphere is awash with worry and/or dire predictions. Om Malik asks whether the online ad boom is over. Some analysts are lowering estimates. Others like Safa Ratshcy are suggesting that this is all an over-reaction and calls it a buying opportunity. On thing to remember is that the sky is not falling in and Yahoo did not miss numbers. CFO Sue Decker simply guided to the low end of the range.

Let me jump into the fray from a "what next" perspective in terms of product. The ad boom is not over. It is just beginning. All the data I have seen points to a low ad spend per hour spent online when compared to TV or other media. What has happened is that Yahoo has lost the market in horizontal search to Google and Google is beating up on everyone in that space. Additionally, Yahoo has also trained the stock market to look at their new search engine monetization release (condenamed Panama) as the company savior in the hopes that this will juice Yahoo's relative performance in search vis a vis Google. That is a lot of eggs to put in one basket when Google is not sitting still.

Pay attention to the Yahoo announcement. They cited two verticals: Automotive and Finance as responsible for their weakness. They also seem to have led analysts down the path that the culprit of the poor results were Macroeconomic trends in those verticals. To me that feels odd. I can't prove it empirically but I think something else is amiss. I am not sure that the sectors are weak but rather market share is fragmenting to smaller and more dynamic focused vertical sites (more on this in a second).

In an attempt to leapfrog Google, Yahoo has also put down a stake in social (or Web 2.0) next- gen services. By buying Flickr and Del.icio.us and launching Yahoo Q&A, Yahoo is making a play for a horizontal young demographic that is generating tons of page views but not yet driving real revenue and, frankly, may never drive real revenue. These are big horizontal services that are a mile wide and an inch deep. They are also highly competitive (see Photobucket and ten other photoservices and foxmarks etc).

I think that if Yahoo wants to end-run Google and others, they need to head in a different direction. Yahoo's advantage over Google is in user engagement with multiple services. Remember the Hitwise data on Google's other services(chart below)? It showed that none of Google's services other than search were generating any real market share. Yahoo is a leader in categories such as Finance, Autos, Real Estate, Shopping etc. but the problem is that they have old and staid properties that are not deeply engaging. To use a catch phrase that I do not like - Yahoo's sites are sooooo 1.0. In my opinion, Yahoo got the engagement part right but picked the wrong segment by going after broad horizontal plays like Flickr.

I think that Yahoo needs to get after second and third generation vertical content plays with an aggressive acquisition strategy. They have the roadmap, it is the CPC values that advertisers are paying them in the general search context. Mesothelioma is often considered as the #1 keyword and I am sure Yahoo has the list of the next 10. There are widely read categories looking for content innovation and there are many startups pursuing these areas (putting up a list might be dangerous) who could be acquired by Yahoo and its $2.6Bn of cash. It may cost Yahoo more money than the ~$30 million that they have shelled out for each of Flickr and del.icio.us because most of the vertical plays are venture backed but it will be well worth it for Yahoo in the long run where online advertising is growing and migrating to vertically focused sites. The vertical plays exist in every high CPC category: automotive, finance, medical, legal, real estate, shopping etc. Yahoo can end-run Google with vertical depth that puts real context and content around advertising - not just the context of search terms in generic search. Pursuing deep vertical content plays feels to me like a better strategy than trying to one-up Google either in general search and CPC rates or by adding social features to the Yahoo portal. While I am sure Yahoo is concerned that many of these vertical properties are heavily dependent on Google's Search for traffic and Google has been rumored to remove links to companies that Yahoo acquires, I still think the positives of vertical content acquisitions far outweigh the negatives for Yahoo. And, were Google to remove the links, well then Yahoo would have a better search experience as well.

DooHickeys and MeTooHickeys

Kevin Maney wrote a terrific article in USA Today about the glut of widgets, effects and strange names that goes by the name Web 2.0.

Says Maney:

"What in the name of Moses is going on? Not even educated tech veterans can keep track anymore. Mooglets? Widget libraries? Mad4milk? Is this a scene from Harry Potter and the Stoned Venture Capitalists?

The tech industry is frothing. It is spewing companies and Web doohickeys and blog amalgamizers and Internet contraptions like video social-networking wiki cooking sites.

They have names such as Kiko, Tribe, Imeem, StumbleUpon, Meebo, Eyespot and Twitter. Sounds like the cast of Pee Wee's Playhouse: The Next Generation.

There is so much coming so fast from so many corners that nobody can possibly keep track, much less ever, ever try using it all. "

I have now seen the same phenomenon also in the mobile world. I cannot count on my fingers and toes the number of mobile apps (they all look reasonably similar) that have come across my desk in the last 3 months. They all go by the mantra of the "trend is their friend" and an alphabet soup of rising trends: GPRS, 3G, ARPU, MobileIM etc. Did I mention the number of Chinese and Indians who still do not have cell phones? I am talking billions!! I am so dizzy that they it is all starting to look the same.

Says Maney:

Hard to say if it will work, but if you add "social network" to anything right now, you can get $17 million. Walk into a venture firm's office and say, "I've got a social network for hermits." Boom. Seventeen million dollars.

Which is crazy, because no one needs millions of dollars to build a consumer Web business anymore. In fact, that's why there are so many new sites. Creating a complex site is way easier and probably 10 or 15 times cheaper compared with six years ago, tech entrepreneurs say.

Add this and mobile apps to the web 2.0 glut, MeToo-ism and an unfriendly exit market and you just get the feeling this is going to end with a lot of money in the ground. But I think there may be a non-VC glimmer in Maney's comment about the low cost of starting companies. I made a similar comment in an article I wrote for Israeli daily Maariv not long ago (Hebrew).

The web doohickey world is the corner grocery of this century. Because you can build and launch these businesses for next to nothing, you can build a beautiful small business out of web doohickeys and mini-apps. You can build a small business like this in Second Life (Benchmark company) or on eBay (Benchmark Company) or on straight on the web and quit your day job. You can use Google Adsense or just sell your product or service and make a good living. You don't need venture capital and all of the pressure it brings with it and you can have a wonderful small business. We should keep the venture capital focused on the really big opportunities and not the MeTooHickeys that may be good small businesses but will not be public companies. Take $17 from your savings account. Don't raise $17,000,000!

This also ties into a post about the IPO market written by Paul Kedrosky on SeekingAlpha (Benchmark Company). Paul predicts that the IPO markets will likely open next year and there will be a rush for the door. There are a lot of great and highly profitable companies out there that deserve to get through the door. However, we need to take care that the rush for the door does not bring with it a rush of Maney's doohickeys and 8 Pets.com look-alike MeTooHickeys that could cause another stock market wash out.

Solution to Jerusalem The Ghost Town - The Aliya Incentive Fund

As we gear up in Jerusalem for the holiday season of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, we, the residents of Jerusalem, are looking forward to our streets being filled by many tourists as well the return of Jerusalem's absentee home owners. I have written previously about non-residents driving up the cost of homes in Jerusalem dramatically and finding entire neighborhoods where the shutters are closed except around the holidays.

A few weeks ago, Netty Gross writing for the Jerusalem Report looked at the same issue from a different angle. Writes Gross,

"The foreigners responsible for what Tal terms "the new Jerusalem real estate juggernaut" are, in descending order, American (accounting for 45 percent of sales,) French and British Jews. "U.S. Jews, particularly the Orthodox, are falling over themselves to buy. There is a real shortage of large properties in the right neighborhoods" - which he defines as Talbieh, Rehavia and Sha'are Hesed, near the center of town, and the southern neighborhoods of the German and Greek colonies, plus Old Katamon and Baka. There is also high demand for other areas like Ramat Eshkol, in northeast Jerusalem, which is relatively close to the Old City and the Temple Mount, as well as to the courts of ultra-Orthodox hasidic rabbis and yeshivot in the Sanhedria, Ge'ula and Me'a She'arim areas.New Yorkers are the main American Jewish buyers of property in Jerusalem, says Tal, "because they are quick deciders and know what they want." Another reason, he suggests, is that though prices are spiraling by Jerusalem standards, they're still dirt-cheap compared to New York. The price of a prewar Park Ave. co-op apartment - the rough equivalent in terms of prestige of, say, Jerusalem's Jamal mansion - is $30,000-$40,000 a square meter, four to five times the going price in the Holy City.

The New Yorkers - particularly modern ultra-Orthodox Jews from suburban Monsey, and from New York, the Five Towns in Long Island - "are black-hat types but hardworking multi-millionaire businessmen and professionals, not like the poor Israeli ultra-Orthodox," says Tal. "There's the crowd that believes the messiah is coming and they want to be here for that," and another segment that "just believes in investing in Israel." Most of Tal's clients are politically right- wing and have children who study or live in the city.

One of the most interesting aspects of the new boom is that wealthy ultra-Orthodox Americans now behave like jet-setters, says geographer Dr. Amiram Gonen, director of the Floersheimer Institute, a Jerusalem think tank. "They have adopted the model of the multiple- domicile family. Only instead of Paris or Provence, they want a penthouse in Jerusalem," he says.

Modern Orthodox and non-Orthodox Americans are also buying in Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Ramat Hasharon and Savion east of Tel Aviv, Ashkelon to the south and even Eilat, says Anglo-Saxon's Loval, whose company operates all over Israel. He says a combination of Zionism and extra disposable income is fueling the decision of many to own a home in Israel. "The community is generally extremely wealthy. For some families it's a third home," he says.

But some people for whom Jerusalem is their first and only home fear that the hyper-gentrification is creating problems: Many of the new condos on choice land stand empty most of the year, and the high prices have made those areas unaffordable for locals. On the other hand, Gonen points out, locals understand that foreign buyers "pump up the real estate values" of their own homes, and provide business for a supporting cast of architects, lawyers and decorators."

I think this "juggernaut" requires a solution before the demographics are irreversible. I want to recomend the Aliya incentive fund as a possible solution that will also be a contribution to Jerusalem. The City of Jerusalem should assess a non-resident purchase tax on home purchases in Jerusalem. In addition, Arnona (annual property tax) should be raised by an order of magnitude (10X) for non-residents. Since foreign home-owners do not contribute to local businesses throughout the year, this extra tax income should be used for incentives for local businesses and home subsidies for lower income families in Jerusalem.

However, I think the tax should come with a refund. If the home purchaser moves to Israel (makes aliya), the municipality should return the tax collections of the previous 3 years. If as Tal says,

" though prices are spiraling by Jerusalem standards, they're still dirt-cheap compared to New York. The price of a prewar Park Ave. co-op apartment - the rough equivalent in terms of prestige of, say, Jerusalem's Jamal mansion - is $30,000-$40,000 a square meter, four to five times the going price in the Holy City..."

then this plan won't deter foreign home buyers but all of Jerusalem's residents and shop owners can benefit from "Juggernaut" instead of being driven out of Jerusalem by the upward "spiraling" home prices.

For those looking to make aliya, click here.

Why the Yahoo/SeekingAlpha Partnership Is Important For My Blog

This morning Benchmark announced that we funded SeekingAlpha, the largest network of stock market blogs, opinion and analysis. In addition, SeekingAlpha announced a deal with Yahoo!Finance where Yahoo!Finance will distribute all of SeekingAlpha's content on quote pages for individual stocks (example here). Since this is my personal blog and not a Benchmark blog, I want to address this from my perspective as a blogger and a long-standing contributor to SeekingAlpha.

Bloggers in general (and certainly me) are distribution challenged. Even A-list bloggers like Michael Arrington at TechCrunch and Om Malik at GigaOm have small audiences compared to Yahoo, AOL and others. Blog aggregators like SeekingAlpha provide organizational scale and distribution scale for quality blog content that does not succeed in reaching an audience that will benefit from their opinion and analysis. This is the perfect bridge between the micro-expertise that bloggers bring by being intimately familiar with the topics they write on (in this case stocks) and the distribution that gives readers a broad range of topics and content so they are not searching every nook and cranny of the blogosphere for the particular company/content they are looking for. To illustrate this, there are over 5000 stocks traded on Wall Street and hosts of ETFs and mutual funds. My guess is that the investment banking analysts cover less than 1000 stocks in total. By aggregating a broad range of blogger/investors, who are intimately familiar with the stocks they own and therefore write about, SeekingAlpha covers well over 4000 stocks, giving readers a supermarket of opinion for all of their personal and professional investing needs.

Furthermore, the SeekingAlpha deal with Yahoo!Finance has a critical component that I think will influence what I will write about in the future and what other bloggers will write on as well. All SeekingAlpha posts on Yahoo!Finance will link out to the bloggers who wrote the posts (see first line of article in this link). What this means is that I will get traffic from Yahoo to my individual blog in a way I could never have expected before. Knowing that there is distribution via SeekingAlpha (Yahoo and Barrons) for any item that I post to my blog about stocks, companies and the stock market, will cause me to write more posts in that category (in the hope that people will read the other topics I write about once they find my blog).

So good luck to all of us bloggers struggling for an audience. Now the pressure is on to produce quality content.

9/11

I woke up this morning in my hotel room in California and flipped on the TV where every channel was talking about the 5th anniversary of 9/11. I landed on CNN where they were doing a minute by minute "replay" of the events 5 years ago and interspersing the memorial events at Ground Zero today. There was one video memory that struck me more than the others. It was not the gruesome video of the second plane hitting the second tower but it was the replay of White House Chief Of Staff Andrew Card whispering the horrible news to President Bush while the President was sitting in a second grade classroom in Florida talking about reading.

Everything about that utterance and moment gripped me. Card's stating that "America was under attack." Bush's tensely clenched jaw but steely resolve not to alert the children to what would turn into the biggest terrorist attack on American soil. The irony of talking to children, our next generation, about reading and education while murderous terrorists were killing innocent civilians and children is striking. It brings into contrast the division of our world now between those who thirst for life and love of their fellow man and those blood thirsty terrorists who are motivated by hate and show little value for human life, neither their own through suicide attacks nor others, their victims.

We all remember and will remember where we were when we heard the news that the WTC was hit in the same way that our parents' generation remembers where they were when the news of JFK's assassination reached them. But I wonder whether we, as a world, have truly internalized the threats that surround us and taken the necessary but difficult steps to counter them.

As painful as it is, we need to ask: are we targeting terrorists or toothpaste. Are we searching through people's bags because it makes us feel better or searching for people who belong to a group more likely to perpetrate attacks? Do world leaders believe the terrorist in Teheran when he says he wants to wipe Israel off the map and is supporting a global nuclear Jihad against the entire Western world? Will we be content with lip service and UN Security Council resolutions or will we take action before it is too late?

The world is a scary place now. There are good guys and bad guys. On this anniversary of 9/11, we need to acknowledge this painful fact. Furthermore, we need to take uncomfortable but necessary actions to ensure that we do not face these same brutal terrorists again. It is the terrorists we need to look for and not their methods or artifacts.

It is not too late to take action and bequeath a better world to our children, a world that is focused on education and not Jihad. While we can maintain the steely focus and stiff upper lip around our children, we, collectively, better clench our jaw and root evil out and not make excuses. Our children don't deserve another 9/11 and I hope the courageous people who lost their lives on 9/11 did not die in vain. May God bless their memory and protect us from evil.

TSA Inc.

Just when I thought I had seen everything in airport security, as I emptied my laptop, shoes and everything else into a bin today to be x-rayed, I noticed that the boxes were white instead of the normal drab gray. Then I looked inside and saw an ADVERTISEMENT for Rolodex. I guess that is one way to fund the increasing cost of airport security. Next up, Google ads on LCD screens in the bottom of these bins.

Oh, and I have my own suggestion for TSA Inc.: How about taking the toothpaste and deodorant they now confiscate at security and selling it to passengers as they land in your local airport. Call it recycling :)

Are We Really In a New Age of Journalism

As many of you know, I am involved in an Israeli citizen Journalism project called Scoop (Today's Haaretz carries an article about Scoop in Hebrew). It has been a tremendous learning experience that has impacted many of my impressions of the media, some of my investment decisions and improved my general understanding of the internet and user generated content.

Scoop has also forced me to give quite a bit of thought to the evolving role of the blogosphere, journalism, publishing and its impact on Old Media. I blogged about it previously but two recent articles caught my eye.

In a somewhat lengthy article entitled Amateur Hour, Nicholas Lemann, writing for the New Yorker, claims that Citizen Journalism and the Blogosphere are much ado about nothing.

Writes Lemann,

"In fact, what the prophets of Internet journalism believe themselves to be fighting against —journalism in the hands of an enthroned few, who speak in a voice of phony, unearned authority to the passive masses —is, as a historical phenomenon, mainly a straw man. Even after the Second World War, some American cities still had several furiously battling papers, on the model of “The Front Page. ” There were always small political magazines of all persuasions, and books written in the spirit of the old pamphlets, and, later in the twentieth century, alternative weeklies and dissenting journalists like I. F. Stone. When journalism was at its most blandly authoritative—probably in the period when the three television broadcast networks were in their heyday and local newspaper monopoly was beginning to become the rule—so were American politics and culture, and you have to be very media-centric to believe that the press established the tone of national life rather than vice versa.

Every new medium generates its own set of personalities and forms. Internet journalism is a huge tent that encompasses sites from traditional news organizations; Web-only magazines like Slate and Salon; sites like Daily Kos and NewsMax, which use some notional connection to the news to function as influential political actors; and aggregation sites (for instance, Arts & Letters Daily and Indy Media) that bring together an astonishingly wide range of disparate material in a particular category. The more ambitious blogs, taken together, function as a form of fast-moving, densely cross-referential pamphleteering—an open forum for every conceivable opinion that can’t make its way into the big media, or, in the case of the millions of purely personal blogs, simply an individual’s take on life. The Internet is also a venue for press criticism (“We can fact-check your ass!” is one of the familiar rallying cries of the blogosphere) and a major research library of bloopers, outtakes, pranks, jokes, and embarrassing performances by big shots. But none of that yet rises to the level of a journalistic culture rich enough to compete in a serious way with the old media—to function as a replacement rather than an addendum."

While I agree with Lemann that there is a lot of hyperbole in the journalistic revolution, the new format and instant distribution of online information is making individual journalists and platforms much more influential and the low costs are engendering new business models.

This leads me to a second article written about Mark Cuban's latest journalism venture where he is using ex- St. Louis Dispatch Journalist Christopher Carey to influence the stock market and Cuban will be investing ahead of the scoops.

Marc Glaser, writing on MediaShift seemingly takes issue with Cuban both from a business and ethical perspective.

"In my lengthy email debates with Cuban, he told me that he wasn'’t out to manipulate the market and wasn't looking for short-term gains after publication of the investigative reports on Sharesleuth. So if he keeps his short position in a company such as Xethanol for the long term, how can Sharesleuth make money now?

“It doesn'’t, but that's OK, Cuban said. Hopefully I never have to cover [my short trades], if the quality of work is good and we uncover more companies and situations like Xethanol, the return can be lucrative. It just doesn'’t have to be fast. We don'’t have a staff of 900. I can afford to be patient."

I am less interested in the ethical debate and more fascinated by the business model. What Cuban's venture shows is that there are other ways to make money from online journalism other than advertising. By keeping costs down, you can look for novel business models to support journalistic or semi-journalistic/research endeavors.

Part of the debate on both of the abovementioned articles is due to the fact that much of the media reporting on the topic is analyzing and debating it through an old media lens. How do you get enough readers so that your ad model is profitable? Is this really journalism? Hasn't this been done already with handouts?

I think this misses the point. Technology is not just enabling a new form of journalism, media and entertainment, it is changing the entire definition of what journalism is, and what makes entertainment. I am certain most of Hollywood sneers at the media snacks on Metacafe (Benchmark company) and YouTube and says, that is not entertainment. Wall Street analysts and maybe the Wall Street Journal probably belittled the stock market analysis on SeekingAlpha as well, much as Lemann and Glaser do above. But people, readers, consumers want information and they want it in different and changing ways and it will impact them differently. The debate will shift when the Webster dictionary definition of all of these terms change, or should I say, when the answers.com definition changes.

Sound Byting the War and Getting Our message across

During the time of the second intifada (after Arafat rejected Barak's offer at Camp David), the Israeli tech market and the stock market were in somewhat of a swoon. Many journalists and others were pinning the cause on the intifada. At the time, I coined a term that the problem was NASDAQ and not Nablus.

In general, I think it is important to stress to investors and the press that Israel is a remarkably resilient country and that we much prefer to research the cure to cancer or create the next great internet company or mobile phone application rather than go to war. However, we do not have that luxury since our enemies, their war-mongering leaders and backwards societies, are intent on destroying our country and people. While we would love to beat our swords into the proverbial ploughshares, we cannot yet do that. We have made our desert bloom but while the Arab's deserts still flow with oil, they have not developed their economy or technology. This war was foist upon us but the country is united in its resolve to win it for the long term. That is what I have been telling reporters and others who have called over the last month.

I have developed a saying to express this theme: "Unfortunately, sometimes we need to put down our microscopes and pick up our machine guns." I kind of like it but am not sure it fully captures the correct spirit. I would love other suggestions if anyone has one. Please submit saying suggestions in the comments section below.