Yahoo Inc. and BellSouth Corp. said Monday they agreed to offer high-speed Internet service across BellSouth’s nine-state region, putting Yahoo one step away from nationwide broadband coverage. In a joint statement, the world’s largest Internet media company and the No. 3 U.S. local phone company said the new service will begin in late 2006, at no additional charge, to all new BellSouth residential broadband subscribers. Yahoo already has broadband partnerships with SBC Communications and Verizon Communications, the No. 1 and No. 2 U.S. local phone service providers. This means Yahoo lacks a deal with Qwest Communications International Inc., the No. 4 local carrier, to fill out a national map, which would allow it to market its services nationally instead of region by region.
Internet giant Yahoo’s (Quote, Chart) decision to create original news material may eventually change the way users look at the portal.
But for now the strongest looks are coming from concerned content partners keeping a close eye on how their own content is faring on the site, say analysts.
As an early entrant in the Internet portal space, Yahoo was among the first to license and aggregate content from a host of media partners. But a recent push by the Sunnyvale, Calif., company to create original material has some of those same providers wondering if their work won’t suffer against a home-field advantage.
“Yahoo is trying to find meaningful directions that will give it some legs,” said Shel Israel, an industry analyst and author of the upcoming book “Naked Conversations, How Blogs are Changing Business Talk with Customers.”
“On one level, there really isn’t a desperate need, because advertising is up,” he said.
Yahoo has denied it is attempting to become a news gathering organization and said it is not planning to compete with its content partners, which provide the portal with the majority of its news, finance and entertainment content.
“We have no intention of duplicating those efforts,” Yahoo spokesman Brian Nelson said. “We get incredible content from our partners, but in this case, we are covering largely under-reported stories and bringing them to our audience.”
An example is last month’s launch of Yahoo’s first original news content with multimedia reports from conflict areas around the world, featuring veteran correspondent Kevin Sites.
Although moves like that may not concern most content partners, last month’s launch of a series of exclusive financial columns from authors, economists and financial advisers may have, said Rafat Ali, editor and publisher of PaidContent.org.
It must have especially caught the attention of partners like Forbes.com and MarketWatch.com, said Ali.
Rafat did concede that, as the entertainment portal expanded use of its own content, it might concern some longtime partners who may worry Yahoo’s material is going to receive preferential treatment.
Representatives from Forbes.com and MarketWatch.com were not immediately available for comment.
Although the approximately $30,000 a month content partners often pay Yahoo to display and link to their material may seem a scant sum in the Internet business, dividends can be great.
Poor positioning, or harder-to-locate links, could translate into reduced traffic for the content partners and ultimately lower advertising revenue on their own sites, Ali said.
This year, Yahoo has pushed hard to get involved in community-based content, created by and shared among individuals, with its Yahoo 360 blogging service and the Flickr photo-sharing service.
Yahoo Inc. said on Wednesday it will bar chat rooms that promote sex between minors and adults and restrict all chat rooms to users 18 and older.
The changes come under an agreement with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning. “This is about protecting kids,” Bruning said.
Spitzer said authorities did not have to resort to litigation. He said Yahoo, “acting as a good corporate citizen, … did the right thing. We asked them to create a filter to stop this kind of thing and they have done so.”
In June, while still in discussions with the attorneys general, Yahoo voluntarily closed its user-created chat rooms following complaints that some had names suggesting they facilitated illegal conduct, including sex between adults and minors.
Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako said on Wednesday that Yahoo was still determining if and when user-created chats would be restored as it makes improvements “to enhance the user experience and compliance with our terms of service.”
If they do get restored, the agreement calls for Yahoo to review the names of such rooms ahead of time and reject any deemed inappropriate. Even if a room’s name is innocuous, Yahoo also will bar any whose postings encourage sex acts between adults and minors, purging such chat rooms within 24 hours from when it becomes aware of them.
“These efforts are consistent with and build upon our long-standing commitment to providing a safer and more secure online experience for consumers,” Osako said.
The company also is eliminating the teen chat category and limiting usage of all chat rooms to adults, although it was not clear how the company would prevent children from signing up as adults because credit cards aren’t required.
Spitzer, a Democrat running for governor next year, said he started the investigation at Bruning’s urging.
“The agreement we have today is the first of its kind,” Spitzer said. “We think this is an agreement that can be a template for others to use.”
Bruning said the agreement means “our children are safer online and predators have fewer opportunities to prey on them.”
Among the illicit chat rooms removed were those with labels such as “girls 13 & up for much older men,” “8-12 yo girls for older men,” and “teen girls for older fat men.” Many of these were located within the “Schools and Education” and “Teen” chat categories.
An undercover investigator, posing as a 14-year-old while visiting one of those chat rooms, received 35 personal messages of a sexual nature over a single 25-minute period, the attorneys general said.
Spitzer and Bruning said they launched their investigations earlier this year after receiving tips that children had unfettered access to adult chat rooms.
Other measures announced under the agreement are: Yahoo will make it easier to report any threats to child safety, give priority to such complaints and designate specific employees to do so, the company will develop educational materials and feature them on the Yahoo network, promoting the safe use of chat rooms, donate $175,000 (about Rs 80 lakhs) to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s New York affiliates, and provide banner advertising to that organization targeted to teens.
Yahoo Inc. announced on October 10 that it would begin joining blog postings with articles from professional journalists and conventional media outlets on its news aggregator, Yahoo News, the most popular Internet media portal, reports Reuters. The site will adopt a three-tiered system: the top ten stories and relevant photos from mainstream media outlets will be listed first, followed by links to related articles and blog postings from 6,500 MSM sources and hundreds of thousands of blogs, and for those who want to go even deeper, a third level of search through 10 million blogs.
Although the product director for Yahoo Search, Joff Redfern says that his company will clearly distinguish between professional and amateur content, the move has the potential to re-ignite the ‘Journalists vs. Bloggers debate’ in that professionals may not appreciate their material being paired with rants from ‘the guys in pajamas.’ Well written topic-relevant blogs are sure to gain more exposure and considering their numbers, they may have the potential to drown out mainstream media sources.
Furthermore, with the popularity of Yahoo News and the depth that its aggregator now provides the curious reader through easy search and linking, more direct competition between MSM and blogs could result in a news atmosphere more based on trust. For example, who do you trust more; any random blogger sitting in his basement commenting on Iran’s nuclear situation, the journalist designated by a large brand-name media company to report on it, or an expert in Middle Eastern nuclear proliferation who happens to have his own blog?
Yahoo Inc.’s online news search tool on Monday added Internet journal entries as a supplement to professional media offerings - an experiment that figures to test the public’s appetite for information from alternative sources.
Under Yahoo’s new approach, a keyword search for online news will include a list of relevant Web logs, or “blogs,'’ displayed in a box to the right of the results collected from mainstream journalism.
Google Inc., which runs the Internet’s leading search engine, so far has treated blogs differently.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company last month introduced a specialty search engine that does nothing but sift through blogs. Meanwhile, Google’s news section continues to focus on material from mainstream media.
Yahoo’s inclusion of blogs in its news section represents another validation for a growing group of people that are bypassing newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets to report and comment on topical events.
Although many top bloggers lack formal journalism training, it hasn’t stopped them from building loyal readerships or breaking news that the mainstream media either missed or ignored.
Those scoops have helped rally more support for “citizen journalism'’ - a cause that Yahoo wanted to recognize by spotlighting some of the news appearing in blogs.
“The traditional media doesn’t have the time or resources to cover all the stories going on,'’ said Joff Redfern, a Yahoo product director.
But the blogging community, or “blogosphere,'’ also is filled with rumors and inaccuracies. While the traditional media still faces the same problems, professional newsrooms ostensibly have more checks and balances to guard against incorrect or unsubstantiated information from being published.
That distinction is one of the reasons Yahoo is listing its blog results in a box separated from the roughly 6,500 “trusted'’ news sources tracked by its search engine, Redfern said.
Yahoo’s news users can view blog results exclusively by clicking on the box.
That option also shows relevant images posted on Yahoo’s photo-sharing site, Flickr. Amateur photos posted online have drawn particular heavy interest recently after major news events such as the terrorist bombings in London and Hurricane Katrina.
Redfern declined to specify how many blogs are included in Yahoo’s news search. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company is inviting bloggers to submit their sites to the Yahoo index.
He said the blog selection would be based on the most popular blogs among Yahoo users.
A nod to Mr. Zawodny for this little tidbit he picked up from Craigslist. The official title is “Marketing Manager - Blogmaster.” The job isn’t for the lightly blogged either. It requires 5 years of experience in communications with some editorial experience, knowledge of the Internet, marketing, experience in online communities like blogs, forums and discussion boards. Did I forget the degree?
If you think you’ve got what it takes, send in your resume. If you’re lucky, you can spend some time dodging little old ladies from Pasadena on the way to work. This is just one more case showing blogging is becoming a more serious form of media.
Yahoo Inc. has acquired Upcoming.org, an online event planning site that’s expected to infuse the Internet powerhouse with more content about local communities.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company confirmed the deal late Tuesday without disclosing financial terms of the acquisition.
Los Angeles-based Upcoming acts as a social calendar that depends on its users to post free listings about a wide range of upcoming events, from local rock concerts to picnics in the park.
The site, founded by Andy Baio, provides tools that enable users to share observations about the events and identify common areas of interests.
Yahoo plans to keep Upcoming’s current Web site separate, but eventually will incorporate much of the content into its own site to bolster its local search capabilities, said Paul Levine, Yahoo’s general manager of local search
“We think local search is about much more than being able to find a business in your community,'’ Levine said. “There is no question that local events are an important component, too.'’
Both Yahoo and its rival, Google Inc., have been placing a greater emphasis on local search during the past two years as more people gradually change the way they search.
With more homes having high-speed Internet connections that make it easier to load Web pages, people increasingly are turning to the Internet before the Yellow Pages for business referrals. And more people, particularly younger generations, also are turning to the Web to learn about what’s happening in their communities.
Both Yahoo and Google want to field the local search requests because they make money from the ads posted alongside each batch of results.
Because Upcoming revolves around social networking, Upcoming eventually might be blended into “Yahoo 360,'’ a social networking and blogging section the company is testing. The listings about concerts also shape up as a logical fit with Yahoo’s music offerings.
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