Jim Moran is co-founder of Yipit, which aggregates and recommends Daily Deals based on your tastes. The site gathers offers from Groupon, LivingSocial and nearly 300 deal services, and sends the best to you each day based on your preferences. In a previous life, Jim worked in mergers & acquisitions at The Blackstone Group. He writes short thoughts about the Daily Deal space on Twitter (@jdmoran) and more careful thoughts on the Yipit Blog. If you haven’t read his article on modeling a Groupon deal value, you should do so immediately.

If you are looking to for an expert to follow in the deal space, he is your man. Here is his take on the articles that most influenced his thinking during the past year.

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The Ultimate Guide: How Media Companies Should Offer Daily Deals – The Yipit Blog, Vin Vacanti
Reasoning: immediately following this blog post, we received countless emails from major media company execs looking for feedback on how they planned to approach the daily deal market. We met with dozens of them, hopefully it added some value in the next wave of daily deal products.

Why Online2Offline Commerce is a Trillion Dollar Opportunity – TechCrunch, Alex Rampell
Reasoning: I believe this post opened a lot of people’s eyes to the scale of the market we’re all so focused on.

Shopping Apps That Can Point You to Lower Prices – The New York Times, Bob Tedeschi
Reasoning: this article made me sick to my stomach over the future of big box retailers.

Real Reason Groupon is Selling: They’re Another AOL? – The Yipit Blog, Vin Vacanti
Reasoning: We think this is a pretty powerful analogy/framework for how things will shape up for Groupon over the coming years.

Golden Footballs and the Economics of Groupon – Evan Miller
Reasoning: I am an economics nerd, and this was a very fun look at the theoretical underpinnings of the daily deal space.