Introducing PlanetAUX
I wrote a post a couple of years ago surveying the 20 biggest Australian listed companies in terms of how they syndicate the ASX announcements they make when they have news for the market.
All of the companies made their announcements available on their (or an associated) website, but that obviously requires that an interested investor or follower of the company regularly check the announcements page of each company they're interested in - not ideal, timely, or scalable.
"Push" or broadcast approaches are much more useful for this sort of thing, and back then 14 or the 20 did make their announcements available via email - which is useful enough - and 7 of the 20 also published RSS or Atom feeds, which are better still, because they're more lightweight, centralised, and standardised/re-mixable.
On the other hand, 7/20 is a pretty ordinary score, especially considering these are the biggest Australian listed companies. Smaller companies with fewer resources are presumably going to fare even worse.
Two years on the number of ASX20 companies with announcements feeds has now leapt to ... 9. :-/
And so towards the end of last year I decided to scratch this particular itch, and built an announcement aggregator site called PlanetAUX. It aggregates the announcements feeds of the ASX20 companies with them, and generates announcements feeds for those that don't have them.
Of the companies in the ASX20, there was only one whose HTML was so terrible that I couldn't manage to parse it. I figured 19/20 isn't bad for starters.
Plans are to add more companies as time and interest demands, presumably the remainder of the ASX50 initially, and then we'll see how things go.
Happy feeding.