I love catching a meme before the Major Media does. Sometimes I’ll read an interesting analysis on someone else’s blog (or even write one myself), and almost forget about it. Until a week or a month later, when it shows up as a front page story in a major publication.
I’ve been seeing that happening a lot lately. Blogs have been supplementing, and will soon be surpassing, the mainstream media.
Here’s an example:
“The Fed has in very short order lost pretty much all credibility with bond-market participants,” said Stephen Stanley, economist at bond dealer RBS Greenwich Capital. As a result, “Whether it’s right or wrong that the market feels that way, the Fed will be unable to jawbone long-term rates lower.” Indeed, yields have headed higher since the Fed on Tuesday indicated an unusually explicit willingness to keep rates low for a “considerable period.” –Fed Missed Mark on Impact Of Cut on Bond Market, by Greg Ip, WSJ, Friday, August 15, 2003
versus this
“The new Fed fear is deflation. For a while, they seemed to have successfully jawboned the bond market into believing that rates would stay low for a long, long time. The Fed Chief even suggested that they stood ready to make open market purchases to ensure rates stay low. As Bond buyers have discovered to their chagrin, this statement has turned out to be false (at least so far). The fixed income crowd has become Wile E. Coyote to Greenspan’s Roadrunner. The Fed Chief painted a tunnel entrance on a wall, and they ran face first into it. Forgive the equity crowd their snickering, as they had already paid their tuition to learn that costly lesson.” –The ACME Federal Reserve, August 07, 2003
Pretty cool, huh? (Ip, BTW, is the reporter who essentially challenged the Washington Post’s Berry over the half point rate cut prediction back in June. Ip was right, Berry was wrong, and the Bond market has since gotten shellacked).
If some geek can figure out how to scan, digest and analyze blogs for early meme detection (i.e., pre-WSJ), perhaps the next gold rush will be Investment Blogging. Could “blog millionaires” ever replace dot com millionaires? I doubt it. But there is so much good stuff in the blogosphere, I’m looking forward to seeing how people figure out how to sift through it all in real time.
I struggle with blog information overload. I wish there was a good way to scan through it all and find the key things I like to read…