Putting blogs to work for Wall Street: Collective Intellect has a goal: Make bloggers work for The Man.
The company has created a service that combs through thousands of blogs, news sites, chat rooms and other Web sites every day and then surfaces rumors and news reports that might be of interest to traders or corporate public-relations executives. Start-ups like Monitor 110 provide similar services.
The idea is to give traders back the early and easy access to critical data that they used to have when this information came through many fewer channels. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, a Bloomberg terminal or subscriptions to news services could give you a jump on the hoi polloi. Today, it's the masses that often have the jump, thanks to blogs and other tipster sites.
"They aren't sure where a story will break and how it will break," said Don Springer, Collective Intellect's CEO. "Traders are going crazy."
