Portfolio Widgets

RSS Include and Other Configurable Widget Services

Here's another fully configurable widget service: RSS Include. Like Feedsweep, you can use it to build customized widgets, for example of Seeking Alpha's stock-specific RSS feeds.

The RSS Include site also provides links to other configurable widget services. They are:

• Infinite Penguins RSS Viewer v0.14b
  
• Feedroll RSS Viewer
  
• FeedSweep
  
• Feed2JS
  
• RSSxpress-Lite
  
• Jawfish (commercial, $29.99/year,  free trial)

Making Money with Blogs and Widgets

Widgets make it incredibly easy to put up a website that points users to useful links but never requires manual updating and generates revenue from AdSense.

This is particularly easy with blogging platforms like TypePad, which make it easy to reuse the same sidebar elements on multiple blogs.

Here's an example of a website that took me a few hours to put up: Apple Dashboard.

Here's what I did:

1. Purchased the URL appledashboard.com (yes, I know, remarkable that it was available)


2. Set up a set of Feedsweep widgets that display headlines from various carefully chosen RSS feeds, including Seeking Alpha's Apple feed (http://seekingalpha.com/by/symbol/aapl/feed)


3. Set up a TypePad blog with the Feedsweep widgets as the only post.


4. Added a sidebar that contains Google AdSense Ads.

End result? A genuinely useful site (this page offers more coverage of Apple than Seeking Alpha's own AAPL page!) that never needs updating (the widgets show the latest headlines) and generates AdSense revenue.

Because TypePad and Blogger are amazingly cheap and stock-market related ads have high cost per click, this sort of website should start making money almost from day one.

Combining widgets and blogs is just a fast and easy way of doing mash-ups with RSS feeds. The value to the reader depends on your ability to find and aggregate useful feeds and to focus on usability of the website. And for that reason, I think that sites based purely on RSS feeds may ultimately be of limited value. At Seeking Alpha, for example, we have a team of (live) editors that filters, tags and edits contributors' posts, and it's that process that leads to the vastly superior reader experience versus automated aggregators. We even address the risks inherent in finance blog content with our compliance program.

But in some cases -- particularly if you can find really high quality RSS feeds -- an automated aggregator can provide a good user experience, and then widget-based sites are license to sit back and watch the AdSense revenue gush in. And even if a widget-blog RSS mash up is of limited value, it could still generate a constant trickle of AdSense revenue. And a lot of them could generate a lot of trickles... More on making money with blogs from Steve Pavlina.

There's a lot of opportunity. How about individual sites for Google news, Yahoo news, Microsoft news etc. that use Feedsweep widgets that sucks in headlines from feeds including those from Seeking Alpha and other sites? The RSS feed format for Seeking Alpha ticker-based news is:
http://seekingalpha.com/by/symbol/FEED/feed
where you replace the word "FEED" by the stock ticker.

Update: Now look at this one: In an hour, I put together and published Housing Dashboard with multiple feeds, and added a links to as many housing related blogs as I could find. As a result, this is probably one of the best resources for housing bubble news on the 'Net now, after only an hour's work.

If you succeed in publishing a site using widgets and ads, leave a link below so readers can take a look.

Feedsweep Versus Musestorm Widgets

Seeking Alpha is offering a set of pre-defined widgets via Musestorm. That's easier than explaining to bloggers that Seeking Alpha has RSS feeds for every sector, theme and stock ticker, and sending them to configure a widget using a service like Feedsweep.

One advantage of the Musestorm "pre-configured" approach is that its easier to replicate a widget you find on someone else's blog, since you just search for the configuration you want. With Feedsweep, you have to reconfigure the widget every time.

In contrast, Feedsweep here is higher maintenance for bloggers but is ultimately more flexible. For example, Feedsweep lets you build revenue generating websites.

Anyway, here's an example of the Seeking Alpha Internet sector widget from Musestorm:

Using Feedsweep Widgets for Stock Market News

Feedsweep offers online configuration of widgets for any RSS feed, or combination of RSS feeds. I first discovered Feedsweep via the Mad Money Options site -- there, sitting on the front page is a Feedsweep widget carrying links to Jim Cramer's latest stock picks.

The Feedsweep site is here.

What could you do with fully configurable Feedsweep widgets? Well, you could use this for any stock market blog or aggregator that has RSS feeds. Yahoo Finance and Seeking Alpha, for example, have RSS feeds for every single stock ticker, so you could program this widget with your entire portfolio and get news headlines on it.

Here's a Feedsweep widget showing headlines from a stock portfolio. This took about three minutes to set up. But note the problem: if the same headline appears for more than one stock, the widget shows the headline twice since it simply aggregates RSS feeds without identifying the overlap between them.

Yahoo! Finance Widget

Here's the Yahoo Finance stock quote and news headline widget. Three widths are available: