Bloggin' 'bout the Bubble

There's an interesting article in the LA Times this week that made the front page on the business section: Bloggers Talk About the 'Bubble.' The article talks primarily about Ben Jones' very popular housing bubble blog, http://thehousingbubble2.blogspot.com/, which was the first housing bubble blog I started reading. It's a great resource because Ben adds links to various articles around the Web almost daily, if not several a day, and attracts so many readers that there are typically several dozen comments with each blog entry. Too, many of the entries center around the San Diego real estate market, which is of particular interest to me, although there are article links to housing bubbles all around the world.

It's interesting to read how Ben Jones got started blogging about the housing bubble. From the LA Times article:

A self-described "economic activist," Jones, 41, sees his mission as chronicling a seminal financial event, something future scholars can turn to just as historians today would read an anthology of letters written by Dutch tulip traders in the 1630s.

"In 100 years, economists may be studying the comments of this blog because this was a real-time skeptics' log in the middle of a financial mania," said Jones, who rents a house with his wife in Sedona, Ariz., and doesn't own any real estate.

The housing market today "is just like the tech bubble," said Jones, who holds economics and business degrees from Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. "That's why it's a mania — because people have forgotten the fundamentals." Not wanting his family and friends to forget ... Jones started sending mass e-mails last fall with links to media reports and other housing market information along with his pointed observations. When the e-mailing duties became too onerous, he created the website to simplify the process.

You can subscribe to Ben's blog at http://thehousingbubble2.blogspot.com/atom.xml.