Twitter is quickly becoming one of the hottest new communication mediums online (you can find me as @bargainr). The ability to quickly broadcast out your thoughts, questions, and comments (and get responses back just as quickly) is a powerful and useful tool. If you start using it (as I have @bargainr), it’s very important to include others in the conversation if you want them to respond. For example, if you want to complain or laud a recent customer experience, it’s important that you include the company or individual if you want them to respond.

To help facilitate this, I’m compiling a list of financial companies that are currently on and actively using Twitter for something other than broadcasting new offers. I hope this will become a valuable resource people can use so if you know of a company that isn’t on the list, please leave a comment and I’ll try to include it.

Warning: Never tweet sensitive account information across Twitter.

(Click to continue reading…)

This week, Will and Greg at Wise Bread announced that they’ve upgraded their Top 100 Personal Finance blogs rankings to include a variety of metrics and offer incredible sorting capabilities. I’m a firm believer that hard work should be rewarded and in the currency of the web, that reward should be in links.

I’m a little biased though… because by many metrics, Bargaineering is recognized as one of the top personal finance blogs. It’s one of the top sites because of you. Thank you. Thank you for visiting every day. Thank you for printing out articles and emailing them to your friends. Thank you for subscribing to the feed so you get posts piped directly to your email for free. When this site started four years ago, there were only five personal finance blogs – today there are hundreds of thousands. It’s grown by leaps and bounds, far more than I ever imagines, and I am honored that this site is one that you all come back to every day.

At the end of the day, we’re in this together. I’m glad to have been able to provide the platform for this burgeoning community on the web but I’m even happier that so many of you have joined me and bought into it. I’ve been very happy seeing the Bargaineering Forums grow as quickly as they have. I wanted it to be a place where communication would be a lot easier than in blog comments and you haven’t disappointed. Over a hundred members in the short time it’s been up, thank you so much! If you haven’t joined yet, please do, you get the expertise of a hundred people rather than the limited expertise of one.

Before this lovefest gets too carried away, I wanted to wish you all a happy weekend. I think I’m just sappy because my wife and I are celebrating our one year anniversary in Disney (those following on Twitter, you should join Twitter!, were getting some Tweets about it but normally I stick with breaking news or more useful financial information).

Have a great weekend!

First, what is RSS? It’s Really Simple Syndication and it allows you to receive the articles I write to the site without actually having to come here. You can read a lot of sites very quickly, without having to wait for them to load. Watch this video for a quick explanation:

On this site, the feed contains full articles, not summaries, so you get the whole thing as if you were actually at the site. Sometimes the images I put into the post that don’t appear entirely correctly and you will still have to visit to leave your comments (I hope you do), but RSS makes reading much quicker and easier. You can use your favorite RSS news aggregator (My favorite is Bloglines) or just have them piped into an email address.

To subscribe to the RSS feed, click on the HUGE orange icon below and Feedburner will walk you through the process:

Blog Feed By Email

If you want to get the feed sent directly to your email, Feedburner also offers an email digest service as well. Simply enter your email in the box below and click submit.

Twitter Too!

Twitter is a microblogging tool that lets you connect with people on a 140 character by 140 character basis. It’s a lot of fun and you should give it a try! I tend to post quick little 140 character ideas and posts to it from something crazy I saw walking around to giveaways and freebies to what I’m eating (ok, just kidding, I don’t twitter what I eat). It’s free, it’s fun, and everyone’s doing it. Please sign up and follow me @bargainr.

Here’s a brief video on Twitter:

I don’t think I ever mentioned to you all that I started using Twitter from time to time. On most weekdays I would tweet a few news stories that caught my attention or funny things I saw, and most weekends I’ll be either complaining about or celebrating whatever is happening in the NFL. I’m going to be changing my approach to Twitter and hopefully you’ll join me.

In addition to interesting news and stories that I find, I’ll start running contests to give away books, maybe some gift cards, who knows. If you want to win any Twitter only giveaways, be sure to follow bargainr (me).

Since 140 characters forces me to be brief, I’ll also be using it to publish anything particular useful and simply too short for a blog post. Good deals and awesome freebies certainly fit the list, but also any particularly hot financial offers that might be extremely timely. Blog posts tend to be longer, I’ll be using Twitter for the shorter stuff.

I won’t be posting updates every time a post is published here unless I feel it’s an especially good or timely article. I get irritated when I follow someone and just get updates about their blog posts, since I’m usually subscribed. If you aren’t subscribed to this blog, I really think you should because this blog is freaking awesome… just ask the 7000 people already subscribed, they wouldn’t have if this blog weren’t so unbelievably useful and good. Full subscription options and instructions here.

As always, if you want to reach me, the easiest and fastest way is to email me but I think we can have some fun with Twitter too. If you’ve been waiting to join, consider this an invitation.