Sunday, February 26, 2006

PFBlogs.org Website Review

Bottom Line: PFBlogs.org should be towards the top of everybody's favorites list and serves as an excellent starting point for reviewing blogs with relevance to finance, investing and real estate.

Time is money, and I like saving both! Sometimes when i'm online I tend to spin my wheels looking for specific content. I frequently use cnnfn, yahoo finance, mymoneyblog.com and bankdeals as an entering point for my site's research. I now see where pfblogs.org could be considered the "google news" for financial blogs.

At first glance, the site serves principally as an aggregator for blogger postings. A user can specifically select between showing only finance, real estate or investing blog postings. Furthermore, users can search the site's blog archives and connect to affiliated blogs from pfblogs.org.

Pros: 1) Continually updates content, 2) Utilizes an efficient quick-look interface where users can read the title and a brief intro for postings. This seems to be rather effective in helping the user determine whether the posting is useful or useless to them, 3) Site FAQ section is robust and easy to use.

Cons: 1) Communicating with the site webmaster is not as easy as it could be. Links for the webmaster's email address generate an invalid listing. Bloggers desiring to communicate with this site should use the webmaster prefix but only the "pfblogs.org" extension. Come to find out, the webmaster's email address is listed this way to prevent spaming from "bots." Out of respect, i've parsed his email address above using the "prefix@extension" format.

2) The website does not add significantly to existing blog search engines. Reason resides in the fact that it searches only a catalog of blogs which request to be listed on their site. Don't get me wrong, the site is quite effective. It is the best site i've found to display personal finance blog content in a one-stop shop- then-surf approach.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the mention! About the email address -- this is the only good way we've found to protect the real email address from spam bots that scan websites looking for addresses to harvest. Hopefully your posting of our email address will go unnoticed by the bots. :-)

Perhaps we'll replace the email address entirely ... with a fill-in form.