This is starting to take over my life...

There seems to be no end to this issue. It's been picked up again here, and I have just a couple of things to add. I am a sell-side analyst, not buy-side as seems to be suggested by the strange quote: "...he feels that the insights he gains from the blogs he reads are highly complementary to the research he increasingly carries out for himself, rather than relying on that pumped out by the investment banks." (???)

That aside, I think the author makes some interesting points about a new entity formed from a sort of federation of bloggers. I did mention CNET in point three of my candidates list (after the brokers and financial media) for who might try this sort of thing, and I also think Corante could do it quite easily. It's important also to point out that, despite everything that I have written, I think it is quite possible that none of what I envisage will take shape - investors may just continue to piece together views from a range of independent, decentralized, and free sources.

The point of departure for this whole debate was my view about how changing information flows may affect the industry which employs me, and whatever shapes the new information flows to, and between, investors take (centralized, decentralized, information darknets), the outcome for the brokers may be unchanged - marginalization, if they don't try to reposition their research products to be more relevant.