Posted by andy@assembla.com Mon, 13 Nov 2006 10:02:00 GMT

Please check out our new community news site, Rumrz – What’s Hot in Finance.

Site: http://rumrz.com

About: http://www.rumrz.com/content/about

Community sites like Rurmz always start from a very small base of contributors. I expect that traffic on the site will be slow for the next few months, but that it will grow at an exponential rate and become significant within six months. Your early contribution will set the tone and establish your expertise. Thanks.

First, I was laughed out of the room. This spring, I talked to some of my friends in the securities research business to find out if they were interested in using our Assembla workspaces to collaborate with clients. Everybody I talked to totally panned the idea of collaboration on securities research. Who would want to collaborate? They just want hot tips thrown over the wall. However, almost everyone we talked to was also interested in the idea of the “wisdom of crowds”. They were looking for some way to identify experts with unique insights, or to find out what people are talking about, or what direction opinion was headed. There was a general suspicion that social software techniques could yield useful information.

So, I looked for an opening – the simplest and most easily adopted type of social software. I looked at community news sites like Reddit and Digg. These sites are fun to read, and have a fascinating ability to show you what’s hot, through the action of thousands of readers and contributors.

To turn this into a professional tool, I added a twist that combines Web 2.0 accessibility with the old idea of controlled circulation. The site is open to the public, but users who register as Accredited or Professional users get extra privileges – and extra weight when they submit or vote. A person browsing can look for links rated by the public, or only by professionals.

Once I decided to move on this, our amazing development team brought us to a a beta release in four weeks. 15 years ago, I was working building financial information services to run on proprietary networks. In those days, Bloomberg was a startup that cruised past Telerate and Reuters with much faster product cycles. I think our fast, enterprise Web 2.0 release process will give us similar opportunities in the Internet age.