David Jackson

Remarkable Twitter Usage Stats

Tim, the only circumstances under which we delete the bios of contributing authors are:
- if they are illegal, pornographic etc.
- if the author behaves in a way that requires the deletion of their entire identity on SA (normally only professional spammers or people who are consistently abusive).

Contributing authors are able to update (and therefore delete) their own bios. But we rarely see authors delete their own bios. If no bio is in place, it's usually because we are waiting for the author to provide it. In that case, we insert the standard text that you quoted stating that "xxx is a new contributor to Seeking Alpha who will soon submit a bio." In this case, it looks as though the author might have deleted his/her bio, and our default text therefore appeared.

Note, however, that Seeking Alpha contributors can't delete their published articles from SA, or change the name under which those articles are published. This is one of the ways that SA provides accountability to readers, in contrast to the websites and blogs controlled by the authors themselves: readers can evaluate authors' track records, and authors aren't able to "cover their tracks" or delete articles retroactively.

It was that feature that enabled you to (correctly) point out that in this case the author isn't new.

We'll look into it.

Portfolio Thoughts

Nice to read something smart in (sort of) real English. :-)

BTW, if you tag this post with stocks TLT, GLD etc., it will come up in the instablog listings for those ETFs, and be seen by anyone who has a portfolio set up containing those ETFs.

Newspaper Circulation: Less Really is Less

Great coverage as usual, Ken -- thank you. A quick thought: the circulation declines are accelerating perhaps because of the recession. Even if you liked reading a physical newspaper and didn't feel it was "a print-out of yesterday's news", it's harder to justify the cost in a recession when you know you can read the news online for free.

Five Charts to Rule Them All

This has one of the best titles for a stock market article ever!

Bond Wars Update: International and Junk

iShares Lehman 20+ Year Treasury Bond Fund (TLT) and SPDR Lehman Long Term Treasury ETF (TLO)


On Oct 11 01:55 PM cma wrote:

> Are there any ultra-long bond ETFs?

ETF Investing Guide: Understanding the Core Portfolio

Thank you Rob!

Why Comments Matter

This couldn't be more correct. On SA, for example, we find that the comments often add as much -- or sometimes more -- value than the articles themselves. The quality of the comments is a combination of two things: (1) the articles themselves tend to elicit high quality comments, and (2) our users help us to police comments by reporting abusive comments, and our editors actively moderate comments.

We're in the process of making our stats publicly available. Here's release 1.0 of our comment stats:
seekingalpha.com/listi...

Dr. John Hussman

Fascinating quote. Can you link to the source?

All the news that’s fit to trade

Interesting post, Zack.

A key issue is the correlation between companies engaging in PR and them having a good story to tell. If companies do PR when they have a good story, then it makes sense that their stock trades up, but impact on the stock price, bid-ask spread etc. can't necessarily be ascribed to the PR. So any study of the impact of PR needs to compare companies with improving fundamentals that did PR versus companies with improving fundamentals that didn't do PR.

Do you know if the studies cited by Dick Johnson did that?

How to Measure a Website's Success

Michael, you're right about ajax and videos that don't generate page views. They do tend to show up as time on site. But there's a related issue that's harder to solve: more and more activity is happening "off site". For example, engagement via a widget or client won't show up as time on site, but is a critical metric for many companies.

On Jun 25 08:41 AM Michael Eisenberg wrote:

> David - This is spot on. I think twitter, ajax and videos are also
> forcing people to rethink this. Any suggestions on the best metrics?
> I think UUs is borrowed from TV and Nielson ratings as a measure
> of reach but in the attention-stressed medium we now live in, it
> is a particularly poor measure. Although, on the other hand, lots
> of people have built good businesses using SEO.

How to Measure a Website's Success

Zack, you're right: We also track other metrics that directly measure activity: number of instablogs set up, number of instablog posts, number of StockTalks, number of comments, number of comments per article, number of comments per user. But many people are highly engaged as readers and not as content creators. Average time on site has the advantage that it includes them as well.

On Jun 25 08:49 AM Zack wrote:

> Is there a way to measure engagement in terms of activity during
> the avg time spent/month. Meaning, you want to see that these people
> are actually involved. I guess the pageviews/visit tells you that
> they're consuming content.

A small victory . . . but I'll take it

Hi Jasper,

I greatly enjoyed reading your post, and particularly the phrase "SA's Terminator". Cetin has actually been highly useful to us: he's such a relentless spammer that he's forced us to improve our anti-spam mechanisms. He's tried to post under literally tens of user names. We view him is a test-bot for our anti-spam measures. The good news is that we're winning, and the volume of spam from him will fall sharply.

In the meantime, the whole team here at Seeking Alpha really appreciates guys like you who report abuse and bring spammers to our attention.

Best,
David
Founder, Seeking Alpha

What's Changed on the Seeking Alpha Website?

Blungrn, we actually made it easier for you to access your portfolio, by making it the first link in the toolbar at the bottom of your screen. Try it and let me know how it works for you.
- David

On Jun 15 05:16 PM blungrn wrote:

> Why did you remove the "My Stuff" tab from the dashboard? I used
> that several times a day for a quick snapshot of my portfolio and
> to help track stocks I was interested in. Now all that convenience
> is completely gone. Why? It kind of upsets me.

Facing a growing block of delinquent debt and restrictive new legislation, credit card firms sent out just 500M credit card solicitations in Q1, a 49% drop from Q4 2008 and the fewest in any year since 2000.

Wow -- *only* 500MM. How many is that per US citizen???

Website down and email down

Dave, any update on how your wife is doing?