Meet Bling — our new financial metric search engine. Have you ever tried searching the web for GE’s 2004 market cap? Or Bank of America’s Pre-Tax Income trend for the past 5 years?  Maybe you have a presentation and you need to find Sony’s revenue for the past 14 years?  Now, you can use Bling to search for and satisfy any and all of these data needs.

For example, search for “GE 2004 market cap” or “BAC Pre-Tax Income” or “Sony Revenue” and you’ll get the following, respectively:

• General Electric’s 2004 Market Cap
  
• Bank of America’s Pre-Tax Income
  
• Sony’s Revenue
  

Note: Bling searches will also work in the standard Wikinvest search bar.

These new data pages show how a particular metric has changed over the past several years and quarters as well as an assessment of whether this is a High, Low, or Average value compared to the rest of the industry.  Using the sidebar, you can jump to another year using the Time Machine or jump to a similar metric page for one of the company’s competitors.  If you want to read more about what a metric means, just use the Dictionary in the right sidebar to find out how it’s used, how it’s calculated, and a few examples of how this information is used.

As usual, all of our charts on these data pages are available for you to embed on your blogs.  Happy searching and feel free to let us know what you think of the new stuff!

Unlike other sites that simply fill your screen up with a thicket of raw numbers, Data Central provides insightful visualizations of a company’s most important metrics. In other words, we don’t just tell you what Google’s P/E is, we show you how it’s P/E, Advertising Revenue, and Market Share stack up to those of Yahoo and Microsoft.

This is data you can’t get anywhere else. And as always, all of our charts are embeddable!  For more information, check out our video introduction to Data Central.

Another new improvement to the site are the newsfeeds you’ll find on nearly any wiki article. Our newsfeed is smart - important stories are determined with a rich relevance engine, and not just with the appearance of a ticker. This means you won’t get bombarded with fifty unrelated stories that don’t deserve your attention.  Try it out on companies like our Exxon Mobil page, but keep in mind you can also use it for interesting concepts such as “unemployment“, “corn“, or the “Federal Reserve.”

Hope you enjoy the new stuff!

To vote for Wikinvest, register with Webby Awards and then pull up your ballot to vote for your favorite financial services wiki website! Fans can vote until April 30th to help improve our chances of winning the People’s Choice Award. Winners will be announced on May 5th, 2009 and awarded at the Webby awards ceremony in New York City on June 8th.

Thanks again to all for all of your contributions — Wikinvest is nothing without all of you. If you haven’t been back to the site in a while, now’s the time to help prove the strength of our community. Drop in and write a definition, analyze a company, or help explain some of the markets recent ups and downs.

Check out the article for the Times’ review, comments from a few of our contributors, and to catch a glimpse of Wikinvest headquarters.  Special thanks to all of our contributors who volunteered to speak to the Times about their experiences with Wikinvest!

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…

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

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

“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!

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.

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!