Closed for Christmas…

I have been slow writing posts in the last 2 weeks. Reason being, that the yearend tasks at work have been slowing me down a lot – I guess the same has been happening to a lot of you, too.

During Christmas break I will take a deep breath. A lot has happened this year, a lot of new chances are arising for the interactive space next year.

But during the break, I don’t want to think about anything of this sort. I rather go on to enjoy the offline pleasures of good meals, a lot of parties with family and friends and relaxing a little.

So, next post will most likely happen after January, 3rd, when I am back in Frankfurt.

Have a merry christmas and a very good new year!!

rh.

Wooow – Yahoo! buys Del.icio.us

Wow, what a cool move by Yahoo!

Kudos to them for making this move after having bought flickr already. BuzzMachine pointed me to this piece of news, and also to some more info on the del.icio.us Blog and to the blogged „press release“ of Union Square Ventures.

Yahoo! is on to the tagged, semantic web. Onto user empowerment and all the other wish-wash that is summed up under that loosely defined meme of web 2.0. I can’t wait to see how Yahoo! leverages their two new acquisitions (Flickr and Del.icio.us) in the future to enhance their portal…

It’s an interesting battle between Google and Yahoo!, both trying completely different approaches in organising the web. We can only wait and see what’s going to be more successful, but Yahoo!’s strategy is clearly more engaging and fascinating.

Kudos also to Joshua Schachter, who is the maker of Del.icio.us, and, according to Union Square Ventures spend most of his spare time in the beginning making it come true. For his sake I hope he made a fair share on this deal.

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Updated:

  • Some more Info on the Yahoo! Search Blog.
  • Rubel has also some news, plus a very short messenger interview here.
    Main message: Del.icio.us and My Web 2.0 of Yahoo! will stay separate.
  • Yahoo Answers All

    Search Engine Watch reports on the new Yahoo! Answers, that started just now. Some other comments are here and here.

    Questions can derive from all sorts of areas, even things like „where can i get the best coffee in Frankfurt“
    The whole system relies on points that are given for each answer and which rank the respondents in terms of trustworthiness.

    I like this approach of Yahoo! as it much more resembles the true web as it is coming to be, then Google Answers, where the people asking questions have to pay „experts“ for their answers, as Business2Blog writes.

    Yahoo!’s approach is much more „wiki“, where everyone can write, and it goes much more along the lines of „wisdom of the crowds“ where the aggregated masses know more than the single expert in his lonely office.

    It’s still in beta, so we’ll have to wait if it works. But just by choosing this approach, Yahoo! proved that they understand the fabric of todays web much better than Google.

    (Nevermind Yahoo! „choosing“ Flickr, myWeb, etc. – taking all their recent efforts into consideration, they clearly a very good sense of what’s driving todays social web developments)

    Links & News – 07. December

  • CNN launches web-only TV called CNN Pipeline, as Random Culture writes. It costs $24.95 a year, but you can also get a day-pass for 99 cents. Not sure, why I should pay extra, i.e. in addition to regular TV, except for it’s ad-free. But then again, ads on US Television are a lot more annoying than I ever thought, as I just found out during my vacation in fall.
  • Gawker has launched a consumerism blog („Shoppers bite back“), as PFSK writes.
  • iTunes has sold more than 3 million videos now, as it says in their press release. Even though there are only 300 episodes available…
  • Companies testing blog-based campaigns

    Adverblog just pointed me to a new campaign by Nokia, which is including a blog:

    Welcome to the Nokia Nseries N90 Blogger Relations Blog site. Here you will find blogger and media information that you can repurpose and utilize in your blog postings about the N90.

    Seems like blogs are increasingly on the list of marketers. With different concepts, which makes it interesting.

    Budget, as many know, ran a blog-based treasure hunt:

    The company is placing stickers in sixteen different cities and giving text and video clues as to there location on the Up Your Budget blog. (via)

    Now as I found out through AdJab, there is a first report on the quantitative success of the Budget campaign here.
    Seems like it was indeed a success, even in terms of results relative to costs.

    I am curious to see what results the Nokia approach will have, as it doesn’t (from what I could see sofar) include the response amplifier of incentives.
    Instead it’s a PR tool with regular news bits, presented in the format of a blog – offering the typical tools to incite conversation: trackbacks, comments, permalinks, etc.