We have no idea how successful they will be but AOL today announced that they are launching a number of stock-focused blogs. The bloggers will have editorial freedom it is said and be able to invest freely in stocks so long as they disclose their actions and positions. We feel this validates our view of the value of putting investment content out in unconventional ways and shows that publishing in this manner does not constitute activity that needs to be regulated by the SEC or NASD.

We’ll be interested to see how these properties evolve and what sort of content ends up here. The track record for such open social commentary sites is not great. For more information on that see work by Clay Shirky at NYU.