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Four hundred financial blogs. Who knew there were so many? Perhaps they have come of age now, at least as commercial entities. According to The Wall Street Journal, "Forbes Inc., was set to announce Monday that it will start selling ads this spring for about 400 financial blogs."

It is an open question as to whether Forbes can make money. Some of the larger blogs in the network are still tiny. Take Xconomy, one of the blogs Forbes is pitching. According to measurement service Compete, only a little over 18,000 people visited the site last month. Another site in the network, Talking Biz News, is too small to be measured by Compete or Alexa, another audience measurement firm.

If Forbes can pull together 400 sites with 5,000 visitors a month, however, it can have a network with two million visitors. And that's a lot.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

One source of contention among eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) users have always been that the company does not listen, or least hear, their concerns. Well, the company is hoping to change that when it launches a new blog next month, "eBay Ink.", which will be manned by social media veteran Richard Brewer-Hay.

Fortune Small Business was able to take a crack at Brewer-Hay and ask him the tough questions that many eBay users are bound to be asking themselves. It was a pretty interesting read to be sure, and according to Brewer-Hay his new blog will be completely his words with absolutely no control by eBay itself.

eBay has definitely been under fire lately. The e-commerce giant has been accused of losing touch with its users, and acting more out of greed than anything else. The company is hoping that this new blog will give users a more direct look into the internal operations and decisions by the company. While eBay currently has blogs and forums for its users to use, these are more geared towards more traditional corporate communications.

Social scientists, unlike some journalists, are reluctant to label anything a trend until they've amassed and evaluated a great deal of data often over years. A journalist can always cite a lack of information, or the crush of daily (and shorter) deadlines as a reason his/her news story did not describe reality, but if a social scientist errs in a refereed-article, well let's just say the action is not conducive to career advancement.

And that's why many social scientists are reluctant to comment on the impact of Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) run for the U.S. presidency: it's way too early to articulate informed conclusions that are likely to endure.

Still, that's not to say that one can't comment on developments that may -- and underscoring "may" -- be indicative of a trend. And along that line, here's what we know about the Obama candidacy regarding voting behavior:

Over the past few months, I've received a ton of emails asking what my favorite finance blogs are (other than BloggingStocks of course). So here are my top ten favorites:

(in alphabetical order or else I'd be killed by bloggers)

1. ChrisPerruna.com – the most well organized stock blog around, very useful analysis
2. Dealbreaker.com – if you want Wall Street gossip, this is where you go
3. FeedTheBull.com – an up and coming site where bloggers can submit articles and users can vote their favorites
4. HowardLindzon.com – one of the godfathers of stock blogging, a real pro investor focusing on stocks making new highs
5. pfblogs.org – a blog comprised of posts from 1,000 different finance bloggers, say good-bye to whatever life you had

Hygenie.com lists the Top 10 Dirty Businessmen -- corporate executives whose conduct has, for one reason or another, raised serious questions about their personal hygiene. Here's the list:

• Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer -- Check out the picture of him sweating: Yuck!
• Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky -- Face itcher!
• Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson -- Streaker!
  

I'm fascinated by the recent attempt of Australia's Virgin Mobile to apply the internet's unruly, free-for-all mindset on the real bricks and mortar world. If you missed it, Virgin used royalty-free images from Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO)'s photo-hosting site Flickr in a print ad campaign, and subsequently faces some courtroom headaches.

Now comes the equally engaging inverse of that case -- a situation that could be woven only on the web. Popular technology blog TechCrunch has been threatened with litigation seeking $1.5 million, accused of misappropriating this professional photo of Ashton Kutcher, the actor and host of MTV's Punk'd.

What's the evidence? This Google search, apparently. Go ahead -- click the search. Assuming Google hasn't switched things around on us, the, uh, dreamy beefcake shot in question should show up at the top, promoting Google (NASDAQ: GOOG)'s image search (by the way, when did the great Googly Moogly start returning "Extra Large Images"? I gotta keep up).

If you click on Ashton's shiny, hairless torso, you'll be taken to this TechCrunch post, regarding the voice-over-IP gizmo Ooma (bewilderingly, Demi Moore's main man-boy is Ooma's creative director). Clicking on a Google image-search result typically takes you to the web page where you can see the picture in context.

Damning evidence? Here's where it gets interesting, at least for those of us whose job duties include ritual prayers to Google -- TechCrunch never actually used the photo. What has the photographer's agency all litigation-happy actually stems from Google's rocket science.

Apparently, a sass-talking TechCrunch reader, in responding to the Ooma post, included a link to the offending photo of Kutcher -- just a link, mind you, not the image itself. In indexing the TechCrunch post, Google's search math processed the linked image and associated it with the TechCrunch post (the ones and zeros at work are somewhat related to Google bombing -- if you're unfamiliar, here's a rundown of the most notorious incident thereof).

The photographer's agency had best walk away from this one -- it has no case. Or maybe Ashton's really Punk'ng TechCrunch, and this is all a brilliant promotion as part of his duties as Ooma's creative director. After all, had you heard about Ooma before?

UPDATE: It figures -- the Google search now links Kutcher's photo to this Yahoo! Answers page -- I guess it's their headache now. Learn more at TechCrunch's post.

What's the price of a blogger's soul? In some cases, it's as little as dinner with a guest at a nice restaurant.

According to The Wall Street Journal, "As online food sites become increasingly influential in the restaurant business, chefs and owners are plying bloggers with free meals to get good write-ups. Some are also posting favorable reviews about themselves on popular Web sites or becoming Internet scribes."

This is as clear a violation of journalistic ethics as you will find. Real food critics dine anonymously and pay their own bills -- a known critic is likely to receive special treatment, which of course could make their experience less than indicative of what their readers can expect.

And then there's another problem: Is it really possible to be objective in a review when you aren't feeling the sting of having paid for it?

Blogs are certainly giving the traditional media a run for their money. But in order for the coup to be successful, they will have to adopt some of the ethical standards of the traditional media. For what it's worth, this is the policy for all blogs in the Weblogs Inc. (owned by AOL; includes BloggingStocks) network:

• Bloggers do not receive free products or services from the companies they write about.
• Bloggers do accept review units (e.g., a new cell phone at Engadget, a video game at Joystiq, or a week-long car loan at Autoblog); however, when they're finished reviewing products, they return these items to the manufacturers. If the manufacturers do not take the items back, we give them to our readers. This is the same editorial policy as the New York Times or Wall Street Journal.

Reuters (NASDAQ:RTRSY) has a blog section at the bottom of most business stories at Reuters.com. It is called Business Blog Posts, and it is powered by Blogburst. Blogburst is part of blog syndication service Pluck. And, Reuters is one of Pluck's owners.

Complicated? Yes.

The business blogs that Reuters runs are mostly small, one-person operations like Phil's Stock World and Captain Currency. Some, like The Kirk Report and Bill Cara, are well regarded. But, Reuters does them a disservice. It keeps the traffic for their content when it runs on Reuters.com. So, Reuters gets the ad revenue on those pages. The bloggers get their names on Reuters, and a link back to their sites, which is probably rarely used.

It is interesting to note that none of the big business blog sites like SeekingAlpha or Ticker Sense run in the Reuters program. They understand that the deal is good for Reuters and bad for the blogs. They aren't prepared to let Reuters compete with them for eyeballs using their own blog content.

It is a shame that Reuters has handled bloggers this way. Many other media outlets like WSJ.com and TheStreet.com comment on blogs but send traffic to the bloggers. Reuters has decided not to give the little guy a leg up.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St. which was approached about the Reuters program and turned the company down.

As newspapers nearly everywhere fret over the threat that bloggers pose to their very existence, one of the best and best-known blogs out there has decided she wants to have more in common with traditional media. The Huffington Post, which sports 43 full-time employees and another 1,800 bloggers, has decided that it wants to become an "all-inclusive digital newspaper," according to the Editors Weblog. Best-known as a left-leaning political blog, co-founder Arianna Huffington wants to make it more balanced, and has even suggested she would like have someone like Karl Rove join the staff.

The Huffington Post could give traditional news sites a run for their money because it links to contents from numerous other sites. It's status as a sort of news 'zine allows it to provide readers with a sort of "best of the web" news coverage -- a one stop-source for everything (some readers think) they need to read.

It remains to be seen whether The Huffington Post will be able to make the crossover into becoming a more "fair and balanced" media outlet. The founder, after all, has a history of switching sides as it suits the prevailing political winds.

And we all love our media "fair and balanced," don't we? We all turn to Fox News (News Corp. NYSE: NWS) as a place to watch right-wing whack jobs spouting their demagoguery, but no one would ever take it seriously as a source of information. Right? Right?!

For many entrepreneurs, the VC world is a mystery. What do VCs really want? What are the valuation metrics? What are the key terms in a shareholder's agreement?

It's all complex stuff (even for some VCs) and, yes, there are numerous VCs who are blogging about these issues.

Is it a good thing? Well, there's a piece on the topic on Boston.com. So far, it seems the answer is "yes."

After all, if entrepreneurs have accurate guidelines, it means that the parties won't waste time. Something else: certain companies – that may provide tremendous benefits – can get the funding they need.

Oh, a blog can also bring more deal flow for VCs, and in light of the competition, this can be a nice advantage.

What's more, VC blogs can be a good source for those who aren't looking for capital. After all, VCs must keep a pulse on the latest-and-greatest. So, they often have some intriguing opinions.

If you want to check out some of the VC blogs, click here.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.

As an M&A junkie, I'm always interested in cool blogs on the topic. The problem is: they're not many. But over the past couple months, I've been regularly following the M&A Law Prof Blog.

The blogger is Steven Davidoff, who is an assistant Professor of Law at Wayne State University. Before this, he was an attorney at Shearman & Sterling. Oh, and he is also the founder of Wasabi Sushi.

On his blog, Davidoff goes into detail on the intricacies of M&A transactions, covering things like Material Adverse Change clauses, tender offers, poison pills and so on. It's great stuff.

Well, he has a must-read M&A Fall Preview. Basically, the private equity crowd is going to be very busy with restructuring deals, renegotiations -- and perhaps some litigation. That's good news for strategic buyers (and, of course, deal attorneys). Also, it's a good bet that deal making in Europe will continue apace.

All in all, the M&A Law Prof Blog is standout. So, if you want to increase your deal-making IQ, definitely check out the site.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

As the name implies, TreeHugger.com is the place to get "green news, solutions, and product information."

And now the company is getting some green from Discovery Communications – that is, in a buyout. The terms have not been disclosed (but the rumors have the purchase price between $10 million to $15 million).

TreeHugger.com is in the form of a blog. But there are also videos, newsletters and user generated content areas.

And it's a popular destination. In June, there were 3.6 million pageviews and 1.94 million unique visitors. Even Oprah Winfrey is a fan.

TreeHugger.com also has some good-natured humor. According to the site: "TreeHuggers know that you don't need to run off to live with the wolves to contribute to the betterment of Mother Nature. (We do, however, prescribe this to anyone with strong urges to pursue cave art and moon howling). TreeHuggers live in the 21st century, make quotidian decisions, consume, have fun and maintain their aesthetic je ne sais quoi."

Oh, and TreeHugger.com has no issue doing some dealmaking, either.

And, if you want to check out some more recent M&A deals, click here.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.

In honor of the tenth anniversary of blogging, The Wall Street Journal interview a handful of noteworthy minds on the impact of blogging on society. For investors, the most interesting comments came from SEC Chairman Chris Cox:

As investors strive to make sense of the ever-higher mountains of data that we're buried under, the services of bloggers, whom we can imagine sitting at home in their pajamas trolling the Internet for us, free of charge, are likely to be an increasingly consequential addition to the investor's tool kit...

Do bloggers portend more lasting ramifications for the securities world? But of course. Shareholders are on the move, and technology has given them a cheaper and more-effective means to communicate. From improved price discovery to better corporate governance, investors, markets, managements and boards will never be the same.

It's encouraging to see that Chairman of the SEC recognizes the positive impact that blogs can have on financial markets, and all of us at BloggingStocks are thrilled to be "sitting at home in pajamas trolling the internet for you, free of charge."

His comment that bloggers can lead to "better corporate governance" is particularly interesting. Bloggers have the space to rant about executives in a way that few print publications to do. In the past, I've used BloggingStocks to try my hand at shareholder activism involving a company I own shares of, and I plan on doing more of that in the not too distant future.

Bloggers like Gary Weiss have used the internet to expose fraud and corporate shenanigans.

There's no question that blogging has already made a big impact on the investment world and, as it gains acceptance (The SEC chairman endorsing blogging!), I would look for that influence to increase.

In a sign of the increasing importance of high-end financial blogs, Reuters Group Plc (NASDAQ: RTRSY) is starting a new network of the sites. Or, it could be that the Reuters business development people have down time because of its upcoming purchase by Thomson Corp. (NYSE: TOC).

The offer that Reuters is making to a number of high-end blogs is that it will link to the participating sites from Reuters.com, offer free access to selected Reuters Headlines (RSS or Headline Wizard) and Reuters Video Player to publish Reuters News, and get 30% of an advertising program that the big financial services company will manage.

In return, each blog agrees to execute contracts with comScore and NetRatings to assign its traffic to Reuters.com. NetRatings ranks Reuters.com as the No.7 financial website with unique visitors of 6.1 million in May.

Reuters may be trying to match blog initiatives at media outlets including FT.com, WSJ.com, and AOL.com.

Either Reuters has a very high regard for financial blogs or it needs to pump up its audience ratings.

Disclosure: 24/7 Wall St. was approached by Reuters about this opportunity.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a principal at 24/7 Wall St.

I'm not writing this piece for my associate bloggers here on BloggingStocks. The fact of the matter is that most, if not all of them are far better, more well versed and more professional than myself. I don't even consider myself a professional writer. Basically I'm a hack commentator with some creative potential. But be that as it may, I do know a thing or two about presentation, and if there's one thing I've learned about blogging is that the presentation is what garners the healthy numbers. So, for the aspiring and struggling bloggers out there who want to expand their potential, this one's for you.

I get quite a lot of my material from three major news services. United Press International, Associated Press International, and The Financial News Wire. The angle is that I tend to quickly skip past the stories that I know everyone else is reporting. I know what's being reported because I research that fairly well. So when I get down to sifting through the news to determine what I'll present to you, I already have a pretty well formed picture of what stories are not requiring another go around. Sometimes I do present a piece regarding a story that has been hashed over pretty well, but in those cases you'll notice that I don't just put out a carbon copy of the press release. In the cases when I grab onto a hot headline to present content to the readers, it is my purpose to give them more of a scoop of my opinionated brain matter than just another carbon copied dateline.