I have actually been on Twitter for some time now. But I wanted to update all of you with some social networking features the site now has and ways you can get more out of the content. Today, I will just talk about Twitter.

Twitter

I really like Twitter as a platform. What separates Twitter from some social networking sites is that it is an asynchronous communication channel.  On Facebook or LinkedIn, for example, in order to friend someone, you need to have them confirm you as their friend.  That means you can affect a walled communication garden of your friends, where anything you say is only heard by them.  On Twitter, I can ‘follow’ you without your having to follow me back. That’s what I mean by asynchronous.

The advantage is clear for any news agency or celebrity trying to get their stories out or burnish their public profile. You can see who’s who on Twitter via a number of third party sites. Twittercounter gives you the top Twitter users by number of followers (right now it’s Ashton Kutcher with 3.8 million followers. @aplusk is his handle. The site Twitterholic ranks the top 100 twitterholics as well.

I use Twitter for three things: to talk directly in real time with the people who read my stuff, to alert people of new content on the site also in real time, and to highlight what I am seeing and reading that shapes my views.  I would  love to see more of you signing up for Twitter and following me (my handle is @edwardnh). Whenever I post a new story, I always announce it immediately via Twitter. So Twitter is now the best way to catch content on Credit Writedowns in real time and to see what I am up to – much better than newsletters or even RSS.

By the way, please retweet my posts.  Retweeting is where you copy my tweet and put the handle RT @edwardnh in front of it and tweet it to your followers.  The more retweets you give our content, the more people it reaches.

There are great ways to use twitter apart from the web. My three favorite Twitter clients are TweetDeck, Digsby and Seesmic. All of these platforms allow you to see updates from your Facebook friends and Twitter followers. Digsby also notifies you about e-mail, LinkedIn and Instant Messenger updates. You can also get Twitter on the iPhone and other cellphones.

That’s it. I look forward to hearing from you all.

Edward

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• Get Daily Updates from Credit Writedowns
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I intended to write this post about high frequency trading. The idea was to link to a very enlightening podcast that aired yesterday on “Taking Stock” with Pimm Fox on Bloomberg Radio. Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge was on the program talking to Pimm about what High Frequency Trading is, who the participants are and why it is or why it is not a good thing. I found Durden, who spoke with a slight accent, to be very knowledgeable about the topic and fairly even-handed in his analysis (he is anonymous and uses a pseudonym from the cult film Fight Club, so I do not know his true identity. I reckon he is foreign-born based on his speaking voice).

But the podcast and any mention of Durden disappeared from Bloomberg’s site. Here is my iTunes list of podcasts with Durden sandwiched between a segment with John Taylor, a professor at Stanford, and a report on Jack in the Box.

Here is a list of the podcasts on Bloomberg the last time I checked right before I wrote this post.

The Durden podcast is missing. And Durden is nowhere to be found on Bloomberg’s site even though he did a show with Pimm Fox just yesterday.

Why is that?

Here’s what I think.  Tyler Durden became radioactive overnight due to a post in the NY Post and Bloomberg scrubbed him off their site. Here’s a blurb from that article.

A 30-year-old New Yorker who was barred from the securities industry last year may be behind an increasingly popular financial blog known as Zerohedge.com, which is catching flack for its obsession with anonymity.

Daniel Ivandjiiski, whose most recently listed address is on the Upper East Side, was barred last September by the financial industry’s self regulatory authority, FINRA, for insider trading.

Ivandjiiski is also suspected of being one of the founders of controversial financial blog Zerohedge.com, sources tell The Post.

Ivandjiiski didn’t return requests for comment, but he recently told industry publication Hedge Fund Alert that while he writes for Zerohedge, he’s not a founder.

So, can you see why Bloomberg decided to scrub him? I reckon Bloomberg are now wondering whether Tyler Durden is a good source of information and have decided to treat him like a pariah until his true identity (and those with whom he is affiliated) is well-established. 

This issue has unleashed a debate in the blogosphere about anonymous blogging and the relationship between established mainstream media sources like Bloomberg and bloggers like Durden.  Both Felix Salmon and Yves Smith have picked up on this story today.  Read their posts. To date, Dennis Kneale, a host on CNBC,  has been the one most vociferous about econobloggers and their credibility or lack thereof.  He has made it known on a number of occasions that he sees Zero Hedge and Durden in a negative light.

My personal view is this: If one is going to write a blog that points fingers and names names, to the degree one can, one should be as transparent as possible about one’s identity and reveal all relevant information publicly. To my mind, this enhances credibility. 

Zero Hedge is a site replete with copious information on finance and the economy and is often a necessary voice of scepticism in the blogosphere that keeps the mainstream media honest.  We need outlets like that.  And Tyler was on Bloomberg Radio in the first place because he has something to say that is different, interesting and adds value. However, the hyperbole, tone, anonymity and confusion as to which writer is using which pseudonym at Zero Hedge has long become a liability which reduces the credibility of the site.

My preference would be to see Tyler Durden come out and reveal his identity and the identity of those with whom he works or indicate on some basic level why he cannot do so.  If not, instituting a one blogger/one pseudonym policy would be advisable. And tone it down, please! As to whether one can glean important information from sites whose authors remain anonymous and whose agenda is unknown, it is a complicated issue. I tend to think it is the message that is important and not the messenger.  But, the message in finance is often complicated and many can become confused as to who is real deal and who is a charlatan.

As things stand now, Durden and Zero Hedge are losing credibility – so much so that it does seem they have been scrubbed off of Bloomberg’s website and podcasts. This is a loss for all of us who follow Zero Hedge, especially for those of us who write in the financial blogosphere. And that’s also why this post is not about high frequency trading.

Update 11:00PM: A commenter on naked capitalism found the link to the Bloomberg podcast with Pimm Fox and Tyler Durden.  I am posting it here for as long as it remains live.

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My RSS Feed is spitting out 25 posts an hour for some reason.  I apologize for the nuisance.  We are working to fix it.

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We expect to have a brief hiccup in service later tonight due to maintenance.  I apologize for the inconvenience.  Hopefully, we will be offline for a very short time.

Regards.

Edward

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This is a new, progressive economic policy blog from the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute that launched on April 29th.

The effort is lead by Robert Johnson, former Chief Economist of the US Senate Banking Committee. With contributors like Joseph Stiglitz, New Deal 2.0 is a “one-stop shop” for new insights, analyses and proposals on the country’s economic crisis.

Features will include:

• Braintrusters: Profiles and Q&As with the leading voices in economic and progressive policy, including Joseph Stiglitz, Jeff Madrick, Stanley Greenberg, Hendrik Hertzberg, Elaine Kamarck, Reverend Jim Wallis, Samuel Issacharoff, Anna Burger, Sean Wilentz, and Marcia Dyson.
• The Decoder: Experts explain thorny policies, complicated issues and complex arguments.
• On Markets and Morals: Reverend Jim Wallis and other leading voices offer ideas on the moral vision that should guide our policy making.

The official site, http://www.newdeal20.org, is now live.

In addition, The Roosevelt Institute kicked off the launch of New Deal 2.0 on April 29 in New York with a breakfast panel featuring Nobel Laureates Joseph Stiglitz & Robert Solow, as well as Robert Johnson. Panelists evaluated the economic policy of Obama’s first 100 days and recommend course corrections as the administration moves forward. Their discussion was live-streamed (and live-blogged) on New Deal 2.0. Following the panel, Stiglitz and Johnson gave a media-only, on-the-record briefing with time for Q&A.

Below is a clip from the April 29th session.

100 Days and the Road Ahead from Kara Masi on Vimeo.

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I will be on the BBC World Service at 2PM ET talking about the Chrysler bankruptcy. First will be a television interview and then a radio interview. I will post the clips if and when they become available.

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This past Sunday Felix Salmon wrote a post called “10 reasons for the lack of German econobloggers.” I found it inaccurate and offensive. Let me tell you why.

I was in Germany at the time I read the post and had been there for the better part of the week. In reading and watching German news, I was very heartened that there was a comfortable debate about the goings-on in finance and in the German and world economy.

Now, I would sum up Felix’s arguments regarding German bloggers as a typical and stereotyped Anglo-American view of Germany and the German-language realm. The core of the view is that Germans are hidebound, hierarchical, conservative and obedient. This is at odds with the ethos of the blogosphere. Therefore, Germany and the German-speaking world will never have a good blogging community.

I happen to think highly of Felix’s work but his views here are out of bounds. Moreover, he’s just plain wrong. There actually is a good thriving German-speaking econblogging community. I have four of the blogs on my blogroll and often correspond with their writers. They are:

• Immobilienblasen:  the blog title means property bubble in German.  I have aways considered Immobilienblasen a good bilingual effort that does a good job of bridging the German and Anglo-American world.  It has been around since well before the econblog space got noticed.
• Zeitenwende: this is a Swiss blog in German and has been a very good source of information fr me on the goings on at UBS, Credit Suisse, Glencore and other Swiss companies. It went on a brief hiatus earlier this year, but I am happy to report that it is back.
• egghat’s blog: Egghat is another German blogger who has been around for quite some time (since before the econblogging space became noticed after Lehman’s demise).  Although, he writes completely in German, egghat does have a lot of good information on the U.S. financial crisis as well.
• Blick Log: this is the most recent German-language blog I have been turned on to.  Very, very good detail on the German situation specifically.  If you want to know what is happening at HSH Nordbank, WestLB or Deutsche Bank, this should be on your list.

There are any number of other German blogs as well (Boersennotizbuch is one) that are not on my blogroll of which I am aware.

As to the substance of Felix’s argument – that German cultural traits prevent a flourishing blogosphere, I would say there might be kernels of truth in what he says. For instance, I was walking through the town centre in Duesseldorf on Monday. And whenever I came to a traffic light I felt that dreaded social pressure I always felt to be coercive and corrosive when I lived in Germany not to cross on red. Social pressure is subtle and the pressure to conform to social norms is one of the key ingredients that created a massive credit bubble. Here it was in action at the pedestrian crossing.

Nevertheless, Felix overstates his case. There are very good German blogs. Moreover, the German press is and always has been MUCH more critical of the government than the U.S. press has been. One could legitimately argue that magazines like Spiegel and even ARD and ZDF, the public television stations, take on a role in Germany that the mainstream media in the U.S. do not.

The arguments that there are few German bloggers compared to U.S. bloggers could be made regarding Australia, Canada, France, Spain, Ireland, or even the U.K. In the U.K, you have Alphaville, Willem Buiter, Alice Cook, and Mark Wadsworth as examples but there are not nearly enough econbloggers in the U.K. given the severity of the economic crisis there. And, it’s not because the Brits are ‘too German’ that there aren’t more blogs there.

Like Felix, I wish there were more blogs outside of the U.S. because they might give us a different perspective. But to say that the Germans will never develop a good econoblogosphere is just plain wrong.

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I am just back from the Easter Holidays and have had a good two weeks for self-reflection.  In truth, I am feeling a bit exhausted despite the fact that I was supposed to have just had a two weeks’ holiday. So, I have decided to make a few changes.  Before I do, I would appreciate some feedback from you regarding this site.

First, I want to give you a pretty unfiltered version of my thought process and then I’ll wrap up with some tentative conclusions I have drawn.  I’m hoping your feedback will help me draw some more definitive conclusions.

Thoughts

I love blogging. Ever since I decided to start blogging last March, I have felt fulfilled by it.  As you have figured out by now, I am a fairly opinionated guy who tends to have an opinion on everything.  Before I started this blog, I really didn’t feel I had a good forum through which to exchange ideas to help come to grip with all of the turmoil in finance and economics.  Now I do and I love it.

There is an incredibly diverse and talented group of econbloggers toiling away, adding their voice to this discussion.  For me, the econblogger space has become in 2008-9 for finance what the Netroots was in 2002 for politics.  It is the go-to place to get a well-informed uncensored view of what is really happening today in the world of finance.  Quite frankly, most mainstream media outlets have not done us justice and a void is being filled by econbloggers.

The incredible thing about econblogging is how good ideas and well-informed views rise to the top.  I mean, this is what the Internet is all about, isn’t it? It’s the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ in plain view for all to see and it should give us all hope for the future of economics, of journalism, and of progress more generally.

However, it’s not like any of us econbloggers is making tons of coin from this.  We do it because we love it.  But, I am not so sure of my future role in this space.  Blogging has taken a lot of time away from my day job (Consulting) – the admin side of things is crushing. And so I don’t think it is sustainable unless I find some way to earn money from this adventure.  I might also add that I have gained a few pounds in the last year as apparently blogging is not good for your health!  You’ve hear about college students and the Freshman 15?  Well, try bloggers and the Blogging 25.

Before Easter, I was in Mexico where I had nearly no connection to the outside world.  The mobile was off,  Internet access was an hour or two a day, and Television was banned. Quite frankly, there were times during that week when I thought about giving up blogging altogether. My thinking after the week was that I was going to cut back significantly on the blogging because it was costing me time and money.  So, I had every intention to write this post to inform you of my need to ratchet things back a gear.

However, the week afterwards was spent in Germany where I was much more connected – to Europe rather than the United States.  And I have a ton of ideas and thoughts to share from that week.  So, I am at a bit of a crossroads here.  I am not quite sure where things are headed at Credit Writedowns.  I am glad to have played my part in econblogging, but I am not sure what my role will be going forward.

Tentative Conclusions

The first conclusion I drew upon reflection is that my forceful opinions may be keeping some of you from commenting. There are a few of you who have no problem telling me when I’ve gotten it wrong (Denis, VangelV, you know who you are).  But, on the whole, I tend to think there are fewer comments from you than there should be.  I see this as a conversation, not a monologue. In this conversation, you should not be timid in voicing your own thoughts.

I have also been kicking around a few ideas regarding how to make blogging more (financially) rewarding.  Idea number one is a paid monthly newsletter.  Idea number two is a donations button on the site.  I have pu the donations button up already, but I wold definitely love any feedback you can give regarding what would be useful in a monthly newsletter and whether you would subscribe to one.

I have also been thinking a lot about writing a book.  A lot of econbloggers have made a positive contribution in this way: Michael Panzner and Barry Ritholtz to name two.  Yves Smith is also writing a book as well.  The problem with writing a book is it gives me even less time for blogging than I have already.

I would also like to write more about Europe and am looking for some ‘Partner’ blogs there to bring a fresh perspective.  You can see some of them on my blogroll already.  I would also like to talk a bit more about psychology and how it affects economic behavior.

So, you can see these conclusions are very, very tentative. They are more a wish list than conclusions at this stage. The only things that is clear is that I need to exercise more!

I love blogging.  I wake up in the morning brimming with enthusiasm, full of ideas to share with you.  I wish I could do this full time.  But I cannot.  Any way I look at it, there will be a new Credit Writedowns in the coming days and weeks. As I come to some more definitive conclusions on the way forward, your feedback is very, very much appreciated.

Edward

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I have gotten two kind notes that the feed is screwy again, posting links multiple times. Who do I blame? Feedburner of course. I have solved the problem but I would love a nice way to get away from Feedburner. They are really a problem.

If anyone is still seeing the problem, let me know.

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I am in London right now and through next Monday, I will also be on European time, so expect posts earlier than usual.

Also, I will be in transit for the rest of the day today. So posting will be light or non-existent. I’l be back soon.

Cheers.

Ed

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Over the next two weeks I will be traveling and will have a pretty sparse and sporadic posting schedule. Next week is Mexico and then the week after is Germany.

I am definitely looking to post but it probably will not be in the quantity you have come to expect.

While I am on the admin theme, I should note that I am back to using Feed Burner and most of the problems seem to have gone away (except for the wild fluctuations in feed count). Let me know if you are experiencing any delays in getting content. The best feed address to use in order to get timely updates is www.creditwritedowns.com/feed.

Have a great weekend.

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We will be doing some minor site maintenance this wekend.  Site access will be interrupted briefly Saturday night/Sunday morning around midnight EST.

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If you have been having difficulty accessing the site, my apologies.  The site has been down for part of  the day both yesterday and today.  We are working to fix the problem.  As a result, we have revered back to the old look and feel temporarily.

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Hello again.  I hope you all had a good few days away. I will keep posting fairly light today as we have one day left until the weekend. This is a brief housekeeping post.  I wanted to alert you to a number of changes we have made to the website.

First and foremost, we have updated the site’s look.  Now, that we have been using WordPress for over one month, it was time to start making some changes.  Please feel free to sound off about anything that you like or anything you do not like.

In addition, you should note that we have added a weekly newsletter in order to serve a number of readers who really wanted that option.  This newsletter will only include a “Best of” from the wek so as not to deluge you with more than you can read. Click here to sign up for the new weekly.

We have also switched our comments to a provider called Intense Debate.  It seemed to offer the best comments moderation of all of the third-party comment hosting companies we polled.  Let us know if you have any problems with commenting.

And we have one final housekeeping note.  The full archives are now available via the navigation bar just below the header.  Basically, the sidebar archives menu was pretty useless.  We have replaced it with a collapsible menu of all the posts in the archives in a new Archives page.  This allows you to browse the archive titles and click through directly to the articles or to do a simple search.  I think you will find this format much more accesible.  Have a look here.

That’s it.  At some point, we will add a Technology tab to recount the do’s and don’ts of switching hosts or URLs. Any of you with your own blogs might benefit from our travails. I know that Calculated Risk just switched URLs and it looks like it went off without a hitch.

Feel free to drop us a line on other improvements you feel would enhance your reading experience.  All the best.

Happy Holidays.

Edward

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It was a surprise and honor to visit the indispensable finance resource Business Pundit and find our site mentioned amongst the list of best business blogs for the year.

In putting together her list, Drea Knufken said:

Some blogs truly define today’s business voice. These blogs represent a healthy mixture of independent and mainstream voices, prominent academics and small business owners with equally strong opinions.

We compiled a completely biased sampling of our 50 favorite blogs, sorted by category. The categories are neither based on anything official nor are representations within them equal. For example, we have included a ridiculous number of finance and investing blogs, an industry where coverage truly stood out this year. It is possible that we have forgotten other categories.

However smattered the designations on this list, rest assured that every single one of these blogs is worth reading. If you find something missing, or want to show off your own blog, we encourage you to comment.

Thank you Drea for mentioning us. And thank you readers for getting the word out about our site. We hope to continue to meet or exceed your expectations for relevant and thorough business and financial analysis.

All the best.

Ed

p.s. – Do visit the list (linked below) as it is a great resource for finding go-to sites on many different business subjects. Sites like Calculated Risk, Financial Armageddon, The Economist’s Gulliver, or Beat The Press are all there.

Source
The 50 Best Business Blogs of 2008 – Business Pundit

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Today I learned that we lost one of the most talented bloggers out there, Tanta from the blogsite Calculated Risk.  Tanta had been battling cancer.  She died aged 47 and will be missed not only by those who knew her but by her many readers and fans.

Calculated Risk released a lovely memorial post to her yesterday:

http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2008/11/sad-news-tanta-passes-away.html

Please visit their site and add your condolences to the many who have already done so.

Sources
Doris Dungey, Prescient Finance Blogger, Dies at 47 – NY Times
Sad News: Tanta Passes Away – Calculated Risk

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A few weeks ago we attempted to switch the blog here over to WordPress from the Blogger platform. It didn’t go so well. In the interim, some of the technical issues seem to be sorted out. If you are reading this post, then we are all ready and set to go.

By and large, everything is about the same in terms of look and feel — although there are some minor changes. My hope is that WordPress will make page loads much faster. And perhaps it will allow more flexibility and bells and whistles that will make this a better blog as well. Please shoot me an e-mail, if you have any comments.

Edward

UPDATE 817AM ET 20 Nov 2008: A helpful reader alerted me that comments were not working.  They should be working now.  Thanks, Tom.

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Brian Gongol comes out with a list of the most-trafficked business and economic blogs every month. This month, we made it onto the list at number 25. I want to thank everyone for reading this blog and helping it get into the top 25 so quickly.

I started this blog back in March as a project to help bring a well-informed alternative view of finance, economics, politics and foreign policy into the mainstream consciousness. Most people could give a damn about economics and finance. They think it’s pretty esoteric stuff and have just not paid attention to their own finances let alone the world’s finances.

But, these have become very interesting times. And I imagine many more people are paying attention now. My hope is to be able to play a small part in bringing the right questions and issues into view so that we the people can bring a better-informed opinion to bear on our policy makers at this critical juncture in world economic history.

There are three thing which I hope come across in my writing. I very much respect the views of my fellow econ bloggers who I see as colleagues in an effort to make economics and finance interesting. I also respect the views of my readers and enjoy your many comments and criticisms. But, it is that final note — on criticism — where I hope to leave the best impression.

There are those times when I publish a post that I look back and wish I hadn’t! Sometimes it’s just a bad writing day, but other times it’s bad facts. The reality is I am going to get things wrong from time to time. I do my level best to reference my source material and check facts before I publish. But, errors do creep through. And despite being an opinionated blowhard on occasion, I must remain true to the facts. So, when I do make a mistake, I will always try to own up to it and correct it so that you as a reader feel you are always getting a well-informed view of the global economy financial markets and geopolitics.

As a result, I will always enjoy any feedback you can offer and am very grateful for your readership.

Thanks so much.

Edward

Source
The EconDirectory: Traffic Rankings for Business and Economics Websites – Gongol.com

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We have now moved from Blogger to WordPress as the software for the site, but everything else should remain pretty much the same. You may have noticed we were offline for a few hours earlier today, but everything is back to normal — or at least it should be.

Special thanks to both Tom and the blogger at http://www.recessionsurfer.com for your comments and suggestions about WordPress and TypePad. Feel free to offer any further advice now that the site is using WordPress,

Please let us know if you are still having some difficulties accessing the site or you notice some glaring errors or omissions.

In the meantime, I expect to issue a flurry of posts to make up for some lost time.

Cheers.

Edward

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I am off to the beach this weekend, so blogging will be light. But I wanted to ask for help on a technical issue first.

We have been using Blogger’s platform to run this blog for the past 8 months or so. However, we have run up against a number of issues that are limiting. Recently, we have been thinking about switching over to the Wordpress platform.

Please let me know if you have any opinions about Blogger, Wordpress and other blogging software. Your input would be greatly appreciated.

Edward

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Due to the market crash today, I will be making extra heavy posts. But, rather than over-post on the blog, I will be posting news items in the News Feed. Please check My News Feed in the sidebar.

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Today I added My News Feed to the blog’s sidebar, so that anyone visiting the site can also see the news items that we post once daily as a part of my RSS Feed and Newsletter.

The benefit of the feed and newsletter version is that all the links for the day are together in one location. The benefit of the site’s feed is that the links appear immediately after they are added.

I have also been feeding my favorite blog sites on the sidebar as well. The list shows the ten most recent posts from the list of blogs I read regularly.

Feel free to check these news items out any time. I hope you enjoy the extra news sources and drop me a line at edh@creditwritedowns.com to tell me if you like these features.

Cheers,

Edward

p.s. – if you are getting my feed, the best feed address is — http://www.creditwritedowns.com/feeds/posts/default . This original feed address is actually forwarded to FeedBurner right now. But I recommend using the original feed address, as it updates quickest and will always work regardless of whether we use FeedBurner in the future.

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Readers,

I have noticed recently that Google Reader has been taking an annoyingly long time to update some of my RSS feeds. NewsGator and Microsoft Outlook clients do not seem to have this problem. I have been trying to get a straight answer from Google as to what is happening, but am having little success.

Nevertheless, I have found that the feed that seems to update most regularly and consistently is: http://feedproxy.google.com/CreditWritedowns. If you are having any difficulties, please try switching to this feed, as you may find this is the one that updates quickest. Also, hitting the refresh button seems to get Google to ping the feed and retrieve the latest updates (although doing so automatically would be preferable).

For those of you who don’t know what the heck RSS feeds are, here is a post, “How best to subscribe,” explaining them. It’s very cool technology.

Let me know if you are experiencing any problems.

Regards,

Edward

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Credit Writedowns is a blog that updates you with the latest on finance, economics, markets and politics. If you sign up for our daily newsletter, you will receive daily emails from us on those topics. You can unsubscribe at any time.

To get these regular emails, please add your email address below (you will be sent an email asking you to confirm your subscription).

However, here are a number of other ways of following the blog too and a few related articles on RSS feeds (you can probably tell I am a bit of a tech fanatic):

• Bookmark it - many of our readers simply bookmark Credit Writedowns or set it as their homepage so that every time they log on they see the latest post.
• RSS Feed – one of the most popular ways that people follow what goes up on the blog is via a ‘news feed’ or our ‘rss feed’. This technology lets you subscribe to our site and be notified of updates on a variety of tools such as Google’s ‘Reader’ tool, iGoogle, My Yahoo and many other news aggregators and feed readers. If you want to use these to subscribe to Credit Writedowns, you will need to add this feed.
• Outlook RSS Feed – A lot of people use Microsoft Outlook to read e-mails. You can also use Outlook as your RSS Feed Reader.  That way you posts as if they wereactually e-mails.  The advantage of this is that you receive the posts as soon as they are written as opposed to waiting until the next day.  Microsoft does a great job describing RSS feeds and how to get them in Outlook in its article “Add an RSS Feed“.
• Daily Email Updates – if you don’t use RSS you can still get updates sent to you once a day by subscribing to our feed via email (that’s we highlighted above). You can do this by entering your email address on this page.
• Social Bookmarking – The last way that people are using to keep track of the latest posts on the Credit Writedowns blog is via a variety of social bookmarking tools. You’ll notice at the bottom of every post on the blog that there links like the ones below with words like ‘Bookmark This’ on them (this isn’t on the front page of the blog – just individual posts). If you click on the ‘Bookmark This’ link a little window opens up that allows you to bookmark the post on one of a variety of ‘bookmarking’ sites. Some of the more popular ones are Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon. In bookmarking our posts you have a way of finding them later when you need them but you also spread the news about Credit Writedowns a little and help us continue to grow. Check out the links – there is a whole other world and growing social community behind them.

I look forward to hearing all your comments and questions.

Cheers.

Edward

Related articles
RSS – Wikipedia
Introduction to RSS for Microsoft Outlook – Microsoft
Google Reader
Newbie’s Guide to Google Reader – CNet
Presidential campaigns, journalists share lists on Google Reader – CNet

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I am happy to announce that I am going to feature a guest blogger every week at the weekend. My guest host will be none other than Marshall Auerback of Prudent Bear fame.

Many of you may recall, Marshall wrote the international column at the Prudent Bear for a considerable time, giving his insight on geopolitical and macroeconomic situations that any investor should think about. His posts can be thought-provoking and controversial.

Marshall hails from the great white north of Canada and has a previous background as an emerging markets fund manager, having worked several years in Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York and London. More recently, he worked in the U.S. as a fund manager at Prudent Bear. He is an independent economics consultant for a variety of large funds, notably RAB Capital, Pinetree Capital and PIMCO, and also a fellow at the Japan Policy Research Institute in California. So, Marshall knows the international scene through and through.

Please look for his posts starting later today. I am sure you will enjoy them.

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