Yahoo: Busy as Usual
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With all eyes focused on the probably-abandoned (?) takeover attempt from Microsoft, it's easy to forget that business as usual went on at Yahoo. And boy, has the venerable search engine been busy. In this article I will relate just a few things Yahoo has accomplished. It might reassure the skeptics that the company still has some life in it.
I'm going to start with something I already reviewed recently: Yahoo Buzz. In case you forgot, Yahoo Buzz is an attempt to add a social twist to Yahoo News. Users vote on news stories they like, and content that receives lots of votes can end up on the front page. It sounds like a Digg clone, but it isn't. Other factors affect a story's score, including how often users mail a link to the story to friends, and the popularity of search terms related to the story.
One very cool aspect of Yahoo Buzz is that blogs can compete with the big guys. And yes, blogs can even get on the front page of Yahoo from Yahoo Buzz. That happened to ReadWriteWeb recently. Richard MacManus reported that the site got its first link on the Yahoo home page thanks to Yahoo Buzz. He wrote up the site's experience, which I'll describe in more detail in a minute. But the bottom line is, content creators will probably fall in love with Yahoo Buzz very quickly.
MacManus said that the story in question hit Yahoo's home page at 10 PM Pacific standard time, and stayed there for about three and a half hours. It didn't kill the site's servers, but it did produce 45,000 page views – outside of prime time. “That is more than a typical prime time digg or slashdot homepager,” MacManus noted.
There's even better news for those who like feedback. Just before the story hit Yahoo's home page, it had 30 comments. After Yahoo linked to the story, it got an additional 120 comments. “What's more, many of the comments [to the story] were thoughtful and added to the discussion,” MacManus observed. He didn't even seem to mind too much that many of the comments were critical; the important point was “that people were passionate about the topic.” In other words, Yahoo Buzz is driving engaged traffic to content creators' web sites – and doing it better than Digg or Slashdot.
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