Over the last month or two, we’ve been working hard to connect some of the web’s best financial bloggers. The result — the Wikinvest Wire — is here. The Wire syndicates related investing content and adds a mini news feed to the bottom of our blog partner’s posts, something like this:

In addition, we include links to related blog posts directly on Wikinvest articles.

The Wire is designed to give you, the reader, even more information about stocks and investing ideas. Readers of Wikinvest Wire partner blogs will be able to find more blog posts about their favorite topics. If they decide they need a bit more of a neutral voice, they can hop over to the one of our related, neutral Wikinvest articles. (The same goes for readers of neutral Wikinvest topics looking for some good ol’ fashioned blogger spin.)

For all of you bloggers out there, the Wire will syndicate your content and make it available on Wikinvest and over 100 Wire partner sites, including Kudlow’s Money Politic$, Random Roger’s Big Picture, Financial Armageddon, and Pharma’s Cutting Edge. Keep an eye out for the Wikinvest Wire on your favorite financial blogs, and if you don’t see it, tell the blogger to get with it and sign up for the Wikinvest Wire!

Coming soon, you’ll even find the Wikinvest Wire on several mainstream media sites…

We’ve been working with the team at Netvibes to build a widget that lets you track your stocks directly from Netvibes.  Enter in a list of stocks you track, and you can get stock quotes, WikiCharts, and some Wikinvest analysis right from your Netvibes homepage.   It’s still in beta, so let us know what features we should add to the widget!

You can add the widget to your Netvibes by clicking here:
http://eco.netvibes.com/widgets/294187/wikinvest-stock-widget

Today, Wikinvest launches the web’s first-ever interactive, embeddable stock chart. The charts are as easy to embed as a YouTube video, and your users can click, drag, pan, zoom, and play with no page refresh. And it’s all completely free.

If you’ve ever tried to include a stock chart in your blog, you know it’s a real pain: Press prnt-scrn while you’re on some finance website, paste it into a photo editor, crop the image, save, upload the image to your blog, include it in your post. No longer.

Our charts are zippy and responsive, because we think there’s nothing worse than a slow stock chart. Here’s an example chart, for Yahoo over the last seven months. You’ll also notice wikinvest’s user-generated annotations explaining major price movements:

The charts are fully customizable - you can embed a chart for almost all companies traded on U.S. and international exchanges, as well as commodities traded on CBOT and other exchanges. You can select zoom levels, date ranges, size, and whether or not to display annotations.

You can create your own custom chart at http://www.wikinvest.com/special/Embed_Stock_Chart

Wikinvest top contributor Shawn Woodhull was recently featured as an expert on the retail industry in the Wall Street Journal.  Shawn was quoted in an article about Wal-Mart’s plans to show new product lines at a fashion show in San Francisco on July 19.  Here’s the quote…

“With the economy being the way it is, shoppers are trading down,” said Shawn Woodhull, a retail analyst for Wikinvest.com. “By participating, Wal-Mart is trying to reach more people out there who want fashion at the right price.”

You can view the entire article here.

Congratulations, Shawn, on being featured as an expert on the retail industry.  Just one of the many benefits of being a Wikinvest top contributor!

Wikinvest recently welcomed its newest and youngest employee! Say hello to Ajax:

We had been talking for quite some time about getting an office pet. Well, a couple weeks ago, Parker took the plunge and picked out this cute little guy, who he named Ajax, … um … after the abrasive cleaner. Ajax is a Yorkshire Terrier, is about 14 weeks old now, and is already shaping up to be a consummate office pup. He’s forgone chewing on pigears in favor of shredding paper and chewing on Cat5 cable (which we are trying hard to discourage…), and has shunned his predesignated doggie bed in favor of sleeping on the nice cozy laptop bags that are scattered around our desks.

We love hearing feedback from all of you — we get rants, raves, ideas for new features, and everything in between. And that means EVERYTHING. A few days ago, this came in the inbox which we found amusing:

Please tell gasoline station attendants to say THANK YOU when giving a customer a receipt. RARELY does this happen at ANY station that I use!! Also, it is VERY UGLY, VERY UGLY to see guys in droopy drawers; I want to see pants that FIT; they may dress like trash OFF duty! Timothy, who works at Safeway gasoline station in Woodburn, Oregon looked really awful!!!! This should be a NATION WIDE policy!!!!!!!!! Thank you for your time! God bless you! Also, when I am inside of Safeway stores, the workers there greet customers & the cashiers say THANK YOU to the name on the receipt. This needs to be applied to all areas of Safeway business.

Anyways, keep the feedback coming — it really does help us figure out what we should be doing to improve Wikinvest!

We have gotten a lot of positive feedback about the content on our site, but quite a few people expressed interest in seeing more data. A few months later, WikiData was born. We wanted the feature to contribute to the overall effort of providing community members with a cohesive narrative on the companies and industries in which they are interested in investing. This meant that we needed more meaningful data. Revenue and net income have an obvious place in the valuation of companies, but understanding the factors that influence these two omnipresent metrics can be invaluable to investors. For instance, showing that net income has fallen because the price that an airline pays per gallon of fuel has doubled over the last 3 years adds a whole new dimension of value. Providing a mechanism for comparing the fuel costs for multiple airlines adds an another facet by allowing the community to see how industry wide trends can affect individual companies within an industry in different ways. WikiData is still in its infancy, but it is growing rapidly and will eventually cover thousands of companies across more than 100 industries.  Here’s a list of industries that have already been populated with WikiData.

The NCAA tournament was pretty exciting this year…especially for Mike, who picked Kansas to go all the way and won the office pool. The final game was pretty exciting - how about that three pointer by Chalmers to tie it? Mike was curled up on the couch in nervous anxiety as KU trailed by 9 with two minutes to go…then suddenly couldn’t stop yelling “Oh Boy! What a SUPER SWELL shot! I win!” as Kansas poured it on in OT.

Tim enjoyed some satisfaction early on as he watched his alma mater Stanford pound Roger’s Cornell. Poor Roger suffered most from bracket-busters like Davidson, while Parker was somehow vindicated in his LAME strategy of picking only the favorites when all the number one seeds made it to the Final Four for the first time in history. Rog came in last among those who filled out the entire bracket, and so he got last pick of the prizes…we’re still waiting for him to row the 10-K erg piece that he owes. Mike, meanwhile, will be sporting a mean Wikinvest lab coat in the new offices next month.

Can’t wait ’til next year, when the Madness strikes again.

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a lot of interest in the Bulls and Bears sections of articles. We originally envisioned the bulls and bears articles developing in ways similar to the neutral articles - one cohesive story woven together in a narrative. Sometimes we found people doing that, but a lot of the time, we saw contributors come in and add a specific bulls or bears reason, and it was often hard to rank the importance of any given reason compared to the others. So we’ve been working on the next iteration of the Bulls/Bears feature which we’re launching next week. There are two big improvements to how it works:

1. You can now create individual Bullish or Bearish reasons for a stock (instead of needing to incorporate them into an article). Of course, like most things on Wikinvest, you can improve an existing reason by editing it. An added bonus: all your editing is done in-line!
2. We want the Wikinvest community to help determine the relative importance of the reasons by voting whether they agree or disagree with the reason.

Check out the new feature by clicking on the Bulls or Bears tab on a company article.

The award was really earned by the entire Wikinvest Community which has helped make Wikinvest into what it is today. Thanks to you all and congratulations!

Here is Mike below with the award (yes, he’s very very happy).