What are you reading?

[Evan]

I assume lots of you have a similar daily finance news routine to mine. I wake up in the morning and check the news that happened over the night. I'll usually check it again during the day when i have some down time. Check again when I get home and then periodically through the night until I go to bed.

What I'm curious about is what you guys are reading. I used to start with the Yahoo Finance home page news, then go to the Wall Street Journal and that made up pretty much all of my business/finance news.

There were a couple of things I didn't like very much about that plan. First, I kept reading the same things about the same companies. I understand that these outlets have to focus on stories about Fortune 50 companies but more often than not I'm not particularly interested in that. Second, they almost never report on anything other than public company news. Again, I understand why they need to do this but I want more.

Eventually I moved away from these news sources and started getting nearly all of my financial news from blogs. Some of you may have seen my blog post in OOT. There I talked about all the blogs I read. I want to have a similar thread here but obviously focus on financial news blogs. I think they're such better news sources because it allows you to customize exactly what sort of stories you're going to get and you have a much better idea of whose opinion you're receiving.

What I'm reading:
Blog Maverick: This is Mark Cuban's blog. Probably something like 2/3 of his posts are about business related topics. He's written a lot about "GooTube" since the acquisition and also quite a bit about new media markets like HDTV and social networking. He can get a little evangelistic about his opinions, which shouldn't surprise anyone, but he is certainly worth listening to for his often insightfully uncommon ideas about what businesses should be doing to make more money.

Feld Thoughts: This is written by a venture capitalist in Colorado named Brad Feld. He writes pretty much exclusively about Web 2.0 products. Sometimes about specific startup companies and other times just about general ideas/markets.

A VC: Written by Fred Wilson, a partner at Union Square Ventures in NYC. His fund invests in technology companies in a variety of businesses. He writes about the portfolio companies' businesses obviously, but also all kinds of miscellaneous web business markets and ideas. Similar in concept to Feld Thoughts but with better ideas and more frequent posts. Union Square Ventures also has a blog where they talk almost exclusively about portfolio companies. I really like this one because it's one of the few east coast perspectives on the VC market.

GigaOm: Internet/mobile communications business news and opinions--lots of stuff about social networks and mobile devices/services. The blog is written by a team of 3 or 4 people but the founder, Om Malik, writes the best posts by far imo.

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Another venture capital blog, but he writes about a lot more than just VC and startups. He does quite a bit of commentary on public markets, as well economic data and pretty much anything else related to finance. This is definitely my favorite because of the breadth in coverage.

Valleywag: It's a stretch to call this one a financial blog because a lot of it is just Silicon Valley gossip, but they do write about startup tech companies/services often enough that I include it in this category. Lately they've done a ton of coverage on Second Life, often from an interesting economic point of view.

Venture Beat: Basically a newswire of venture capital funding. They usually give a description of the company and a summary of how much money they raised, in which round and from who. This blog really ought to inspire anyone to start their own business after you see the sort of crap that raises 8 figures in funding every day.

Venture Blog: More of the same, tech VC stuff. They post pretty infrequently but there's a really fantastic blogroll on the site. Whenever I am out of new news but want to read something I'll go there and just check out the stuff they read. That's how I found Fred Wilson's blog.




As you can tell, I read a lot of venture capital stuff. For a variety of reasons, that's what is most relevant to me, and without blogs it would be a real pain to get news out of that industry. So what are you guys reading? It doesn't have to be related to the stuff I've posted; mine basically ignore traditional equity investing, which is mostly what this forum talks about. Let's hear it!