savageinfidel

I need to focus on research for the next couple of months, so blogging will likely be much less frequent for a while. I'm not closing down, but I am scaling back - probably only a post a week or so. In the meanwhile, here's a picture of the Billboard for Anders Bookstore , which is just at the edge of the Auburn campus. Smart marketing. For any students reading - good luck with finals - if you're at Auburn, consider a longer rental term. For all the faculty - good luck writing (and grading) them and wrapping up the semester.

Shortly after 2 today, Financial Rounds had its 250,000th visitor. Man - I never imagined there were so many people out there with Internet connections and this much free time on their hands. In all seriousness, thanks for reading. I'm humbled.

I also run a blog for Unknown University's Finance department. Unfortunately, I seem to have inadvertantly changed a setting on the blog (either that, or I've got some kind of virus). I was just trying to post something on the blog, and when I typed anything in, it immediately transformed into different characters. For example, if I typed in ABC It displayed as एबीसी Can anyone tell me what's going on, and how to fix it? update: yes, I am an idiot. Somehow, I had enabled the "tranliterate into Hindi option" in the settings.

Here's a very interesting piece from the New York Stock Exchange's blog: ...Certainly, any failure to convince others was not due to lack of effort. Perhaps Mr. Markopolos lacked only an effective medium to communicate his warning. Here's a thought experiment: What would have happened if Mr. Markopolos had blogged his analysis? That is, what if he had posted the entire piece on a blog, under his name or a pseudonym? RTWT here I think the blogger has a point. True, blogging wasn't available back in the late 1990's. But if it were, my guess is that a blog post like the one he muses about would have been picked up and passed around from trading desk to trading desk, and eventually gotten aired by a major news outlet. When a story like this "goes viral", it's hard to stop. And as a card-carrying financial economist, I typically fall on the side of "More Information is Good". Finally, who knew the NYSE had a blog. Verrrrryyyyy Interesting...

Sometime Tuesday night, Financial Rounds had it's 200,000th visitor. I'm amazed that this many people have so little to occupy themselves. Just kidding - I appreciate all the traffic, and I'm humbled by people actually reading what I post up here. When I started this four years ago, I never thought I'd be seeing almost 10,000 hits a month (the average the last few years).

Here's a word cloud for Financial Rounds I made at Wordle (click on the image for a larger version). For those who aren't familiar with a word cloud, it's a graphic representation of frequencies - the more often a word appears, the larger the word in the cloud. Looks like I've been blogging a lot about the credit crisis --not all that surprising, when you stop to think about it.

In the last few days, I've noticed big fluctuations in my feed readership along with a lot of strange things on Bloglines: all of a sudden, 200 new posts are listed for one blog or another. Is this happening to everyone, or just to me because of the last few political cartoons I posted?