know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.
Sun Tze
In order to become a effective finance aggregator on the Internet, I must first know what similar sites are doing so that I learn from their strength and exploit their weakness. Below is the list of the most popular finance aggregator sites.
pfblogs.org
1. pfblogs.org
Tagline: The Aggregator
Title header: The Ad-Free Personal Finance Blogs Aggregator
Favicon: Dollar Sign
Google Page Rank: 5
As I have plans for a logo, it will be helpful to look at what others have. I also wanted to have rough gauge of the popularity and I used Google page rank. Granted it may not be the best or most accurate assessment but the information is easily available.
Interesting this site have another URL http://www.pfblog.org/ that links to the same site. Smart move since it is common to miss out the letter ’s’.
On last count, this site aggregates over 700 sites and has approximately 137,000 items which work out to 2.7 million entries. However when I go to the last item, there was no entry. Nevertheless, I think the total number entries may still be in the thousands.
It makes me wonder, why would anyone want to visit such a site? Although it has tons of entries, it doesn’t provide any meaningful information. Although there is a search function and a attempt to add categories, finding meaningful information is a nightmare. Aesthetics is basically zero. You will easily be overwhelmed by tons of words.
To stand out from the tons of entries, pfblogs has a program known as “Friends of pfblogs”, it’s basically a paid membership and your entry will be listed with a star.
Personal Finance Buzz
2. pfblogs.org
Tagline: The best money and finance articles
Title header: Top Buzz | Personal Finance Buzz
Favicon: PF Buzz
Google Page Rank: 3
Owned by the same person who started MoneyNing Personal Finance. Visually, it looks better and less wordy. Probably due to the addition of small pics and icons and because it aggregates less sites. On top of the usual search function, it offers more categories and a voting system. It even allows for comments. However, most of the comments are more on advertising. In addition registration is required. I don’t quite understand what is the top users column though.
Financeoid.com
3. Financeoid.com
Tagline: financial news aggregator
Title header: Financial News by Financeoid.com
Favicon: Nil
Google Page Rank: 0
Crawls more than 15,000 fiinancial/business blogs and ranking all posts. Rankings are based on Karma points – calculated with their proprietary algorithm based on several factors. You can also create custom pages and news alerts with some specific keywords and topics, You can also subscribe to RSS feeds of your custom pages. This is very similar to popurls.
In addition to RSS feeds and Google bookmarks, it is also linked to all the major social networking sites i.e. facebook, twitter and myspace. Definitely, one of the better sites I have come across so far, although I’m puzzled why the page rank is zero.
skygrid.com
4. SkyGrid
Tagline: Nil
Title header: Receive high quality financial content, in real-time
Favicon: Greenish Square Logo
Google Page Rank: 5
First impression is that it is a very posh and professional site. User registration is compulsory before you can go any further which is pretty sucky. To entice you to register, there are a few video testimonials which I feel is pretty fake. Although visually appealing, I can’t help but feel that the default page will be cluttered with animation and pictures. Definitely one to look out for but the last blog update is in August 2009.
5. Finance aggregator
Tagline: Yes - non English
Title header: Finance Aggregator. News Finance, Trading, Forex, Finance Aggregator
Favicon: Logo of a stock chart
Google Page Rank: 0
The first non-English site that I came across. Not much to be said since I do not know understand the language but its pretty similar to Financeoid.com, even the page rank is the same – zero. The URL is pretty valuable though.
6. www.abilityfinance.com.au
Tagline: Finance Broker Home Loan Application
Title header: Finance Aggregator. News Finance, Trading, Forex, Finance Aggregator
Favicon: the word ‘af’
Google Page Rank: 2 (based on parent site)
The aggregator site is actually a micro site. Nothing to shout at but it has a category (”Loan Calculators”) which gave me an idea. On top of just providing feeds, I can incorporate some useful tools or links to calculate brokerage fee, housing loan etc.
7. BLOGHOO
Tagline: Personal Finance Blog News
Title header: Personal Finance Blog aggregator at Bloghoo.com
Favicon: Nil
Google Page Rank: 1
This layout was my original plan. There are already custom made wordpress themes like this such as OneNews and more recently accumulo. I was actually pretty excited about accumulo but somehow I feel that I am limited by the theme. Although I can always customized it, I still feel that it will be difficult.
The other plan is to use Thesis theme and a feeds plugin. This will definitely requires more customization but I know I can trust the Thesis community. However, finding the right plugin may be a problem.
After some thought, I will go ahead with the Thesis them with feeds plugin. I will create a something similar to Financeoid.com but more visually appealing and more user friendly.
The next question is how…
…back to the drawing board.
