Wooow – Yahoo! buys Del.icio.us

von | Dez. 9, 2005 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital News

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

    von | Dez. 8, 2005 | Blog, Digital Culture, SEO / SEA

    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

    von | Dez. 7, 2005 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing

  • 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

    von | Dez. 5, 2005 | Blog, Digital Marketing, Digital News

    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.

    Honda’s power of dreams

    von | Dez. 5, 2005 | Ad News, Blog, Online Advertising

    Quite a few sites pointed me to the new brand image advertising of Honda: The Power of Dreams. While I wasn’t necessarily interested at first, the number of positive reviews changed my mind to have a look. And it is great, no doubt.

    What I also noticed, the website showing the webversion of the spot is also interesting: All the products featured in the spot are there to explore, with explanations and stories around them. So make sure you check them out, too.

    Oh, and not forgetting about the print ads: at adland, you can also see the print ads for this campaign.

    Links & News – 04. December 2005

    von | Dez. 5, 2005 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital News

    Looking for stuff on RSS I came across a range of interesting posts and articles about RSS, it’s relevance for Web 2.0 and the future of content distribution and meshup:

  • Starting out with the article by Dick Costolo of Feedburner, it becomes clear that RSS ist now widely used, not just in blogs. Dick also talks about the new form of content distribution in small atoms/chunks.
  • Read/WriteWeb has picked up on this.
  • „A VC“ also picked up on this and in addition refers to Ray Ozzie at Microsoft, who is thinking about using RSS in combination with SSE to make RSS a two-way communication.
  • Adaptive Path talks about the Experience continuum
  • Stephan Spencer wonders whether RSS will overtake email as a marketing channel.
  • The Digital Web Magazine writes about the implications of the new technologies on Web 2.0 and it’s impact on content distribution, user behaviour and design of web content.

    • It’s amazing to read all this and think about the implications about future content distribution as well as user participation and expectations on this matter.

    Let’s stay tuned…