By Dominic Jones
SUN Microsystems Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) CEO Jonathan Schwartz is now able to publish from his blog directly to his company’s page on Yahoo! Finance.
Here’s a screenshot from Sun’s Yahoo! Finance page showing a link to Schwartz’s most recent blog post about the company changing its ticker symbol yesterday.
Click on that link and you get the CEO’s full post on Yahoo! Finance:
Not included on Yahoo! are the 364 comments that people posted in response to the original post on Schwartz’s blog. There’s also no direct link to the original post at Sun so that Yahoo! Finance users can see the rest of the conversation.
Curiously, I noticed that Sun’s logo is featured in the top right of the Yahoo! page containing the CEO’s post. That logo links through to Sun’s homepage.
I’ve checked and Yahoo! Finance is not picking up the blogs of any other public company executives. Not General Motors, not Marriott, not Pitney Bowes, not Whole Foods, not Nortel.
Does the logo above the post mean Sun is paying Yahoo! for the privilege of having its CEO’s blog posts included on Yahoo! Finance? See the comments below.
Or is this a sample of things to come? Could major finance sites soon be going straight to the horse’s mouth to pick up disclosure content from companies directly, cutting out the aggregators like PR wires and Thomson Financial?
Last week, Katie Jacobs Stanton, formerly of Yahoo! Finance and now a Group Product Manager at Google responsible for Google Finance and other projects, told me that they “very much like the idea” of picking up content directly from companies via “a blend of a wiki, RSS concept.”
RSS allows them to easily do that for news, and XBRL will allow them to do so for detailed financial disclosures, probably starting this time next year.
It makes a lot of sense for finance websites and others to do this. The data they’ll receive is likely to be more accurate, more timely and more inclusive than what they’re getting right now.
Ahh, there must be a bullseye on the walls of the PR wires with your mug on it by now
Matt,
Perhaps, but I do hope they are spending more time worrying about how to stay relevant.
good stuff. Please write an e-book on the latest disclosure practices in IR. Those of us in online IR will distribute it like crazy!
Good point on the missing link to the original post so the conversation via comments is easily accessible — I’ll follow up with the Yahoo! folks.
Sun isn’t paying for this. Thanks to feeds, content syndication is a piece of cake and I agree it makes a lot of sense for other financial websites to follow suit.
[...] with Jonathan Schwartz’s blog or anyone else’s being republished on Yahoo! Finance (I’ve written before that it was a great thing), but Jonathan is not a “news [...]