Rumour: Yahoo set to leverage Blogosphere
Some interesting posts on Yahoo over the weekend that all seem to lead to the conclusion that we'll see some exciting stuff from Y! shortly as they expand their already impressive start on RSS and Blogging. Follow the title link for the full post.
Gary posts some news and links about Yahoo NewsCrawler Test showing up in logs - if you couple this together with some information a recent emerging tech dinner at Yahoo! then you'd be forgiven for thinking that Yahoo! plan to ramp up there already considerable leverage in the blogging space.
Okay, not really. We just got invited to the casual dinner at Yahoo, where they plied us with booze and chicken and then tried to take advantage of our post-prandial trance to slip some PowerPoint slides by us.
The 'takeaway' for the day of presentations and meetings Craig reported to be "using new lightweight applications...to allow almost anybody to become a journalism organization or a news organization." News director Neil Budde pointed out that Yahoo, unlike "certain other new sites" (read: Google), had human hands steering the ship of content through editorial control over the links to stories and sources. Offered as proof of the success of their model was their leadership in traffic amongst online news sites -- 20 million unique visitors in December according to Nielsen/Net Ratings, just ahead of CNN, with MSNBC, AOL News, the New York Times, ABC News and Google News trailing in that order. He said the most important thing to users was "accurate information that respected their intelligence," and that through personalizable services like MyYahoo users were becoming their own news programmers.
and Susan Mernit said of Yahoo and blogs:
- Yahoo gets the long tail, absolutely.
- Yahoo has the capability to turn into an infrastructure platform for blogging and micropayments of ad revenue and shopping, courtesy of work done by the My team and Overture. Do they want to become the Amazon of the blogosphere? They should, but they (understandably) ain't sayin'.
- Yahoo's potential to own a huge piece of the blogosphere via distribution, tool sets and content acquisition did not go unnoticed by media companies in the room---just the perception they can dominate could possibly spur progress by online newspapers (I hope.)
- Grassroots media folk and search companies present at the event took notice as well.
Interesting stuff from Y! and a good set of reads if you like puzzles and speculation heh..
I think Google are missing out bigtime on the whole blog lark, but then they could come out with a beta tomorrow and blow us all away, time will tell.
google's not gonna stand pat
Nick,
I completely agree with your last sentiment about Google having the ability to come out in beta tomorrow and blow us all away.
There's absolutely no question that they are going to figure out a way to be a major player in the blog/RSS search space. I mean, they are the biggest search engine in the world and they own Blogger... I don't think anyone has to explain to Google that these two categories are totally intertwined. In typical Google fashion, they seem to be keeping their plans (whatever they may be) top secret - for the time being, anyway.
In a related news, here's a post from the Sillicon Valley Watcher, indicating that Jupiter Analyst, Eric Peterson, suggested that Google should buy Technorati:
"It really seems like Google would want to add something like Technorati that uses the relevance mechanism for searching," Eric told me. "When people search they're looking for both widley linked to and new stuff. There's a great opportunity for Google to apply the news.google.com technology to blogosphere. RSS search would fit well into Gmail's threaded conversation mode.
http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2005/02/the_barrier_to.php
Personally, I don't think Google will acquire Technorati. I have no "inside information" but I suspect that their blog search will be homegrown.
Josh
Agreed
There has been plenty of muffled speculation on Google buying technorati recently but the home grown approach would also get my vote...