As frequent user of Pandora, I was caught way off guard yesterday when an ad for McDonald's Corp. (NYSE: MCD) was played prior to my New Pornographers-esk music stream. For those of you new to Pandora, it's a personalized streaming music site and a great source for finding new bands. After completing the free sign-up, you create your own stations based upon a favorite band or song and Pandora mixes in music from artists with similar styles or sounds, creating an ad free, personalized, radio-like station over the internet.

After venting to a colleague about the McDonald's interruption, she discovered that I was not alone and that Scott Gilbertson from Wired's Monkey Bites felt very much the same way. Read what Scott has to say about the in-stream ads here.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm a huge fan of Pandora and highly recommend giving it a try. I think that what threw me off was that it was a McDonald's ad ... why not something more relevant to the music industry?

Web 2.0: Pandora, meet the in-stream ad originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 10 Jan 2007 18:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

As a self-proclaimed Web 2.0 geek (those who know me will agree with that label) I am constantly reading about the next wannabe MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube. On Wednesday, TechCrunch profiled Stockpickr, "the stock idea network" targeting the financially inclined and boasting a new partnership with TheStreet.com (NASDAQ: TSCM). I have to say it was a breath of fresh air. A rarity for Web 2.0 (although certainly not the ONLY Web 2.0 finance company), Stockpickr is proving to be very helpful for those of us who have a hard time choosing stocks and funds. The site allows users to create a profile of the stocks that they normally track and then generates stock ideas based on publicly available investing information.

I haven't had the chance to fully demo it (I do, in fact, have a full-time job) but I did navigate through some of the community profiles on the left side of the page, such as Warren Buffett's holdings. It not only showed me who else bought the stocks Buffett owns, but Stockpickr also told me what else they might recommend for buyers of said stock. For example, if you were interested in Costco Wholesale (NASDAQ:COST), Stockpickr shares what other people who own this stock also bought -- such as, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX), or Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO).

Read more of TechCrunch's review of Stockpickr here.

Web 2.0 meets finance in Stockpickr originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 05 Jan 2007 11:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.