AOL courts the personal finance community

AOL, which famously tried to build a walled garden which it thought could usurp the rest of the internet ("We have content, but the web doesnt,” they thought. It wasn’t so long ago, either.), has launched their own network of financial blogs.

For the initiative, AOL and Weblogs, Inc. collected a staff of journalists, industry experts, and independent investors to author single-stock-focused blogs. “Individual investors are the most passionate about individual stocks, and the further you get away from individual companies, the more the passion gets diluted,” Moe said. “What we want to do is become the place for any holder of these stocks--the place where they go there every day and know they’re going to get something they’re not going to get anywhere else."

AOL has identified a community - and it’s quite a broad one - that they’d like to influence. Whether the value they provide to readers is enough to bring great benefits has yet to be decided - and it will be decided, not by AOL, but by that community.

Link via Adriana Cronin-Lukas