Yahoo’s revamped news search will present news and blogs side by side on the same page. In addition, the site will feature related images from Flickr, the social photo-sharing site that Yahoo purchased earlier this year, as well as user-contributed links from My Web (a feature that allows you to save and store web pages, and share them with others).
As before, the front news page will promote only stories from mainstream media sources, while the blog-news combo appears on a second-tier page that you arrive at when you conduct a specific search, or click for more details or more stories. No doubt, this was done, at least in part, to mollify angry news outlets who will likely call foul for making hard news share space with blogs. Still, the webscape has changed. All but the most cursory glance at the headlines will yield a richly confusing array of mainstream and grassroots sources.
(story, Yahoo Search Blog)
(thoughtful analysis from Tim Porter)
Category Archives: yahoo!
yahoo! announces book-scanning project to rival google’s
Yahoo, in collaboration with The Internet Archive, Adobe, O’Reilly Media, Hewlett Packard Labs, the University of California, the University of Toronto, The National Archives of England, and others, will be participating in The Open Content Alliance, a book and media archiving project that will greatly enlarge the body of knowledge available online. At first glance, it appears the program will focus primarily on public domain works, and in the case of copyrighted books, will seek to leverage the Creative Commons.
Google Print, on the other hand, is more self-consciously a marketing program for publishers and authors (although large portions of the public domain will be represented as well). Google aims to make money off its indexing of books through keyword advertising and click-throughs to book vendors. Yahoo throwing its weight behind the “open content” movement seems on the surface to be more of a philanthropic move, but clearly expresses a concern over being outmaneuvered in the search wars. But having this stuff available online is clearly a win for the world at large.
The Alliance was conceived in large part by Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive. He announced the project on Yahoo’s blog:
To kick this off, Internet Archive will host the material and sometimes helps with digitization, Yahoo will index the content and is also funding the digitization of an initial corpus of American literature collection that the University of California system is selecting, Adobe and HP are helping with the processing software, University of Toronto and O’Reilly are adding books, Prelinger Archives and the National Archives of the UK are adding movies, etc. We hope to add more institutions and fine tune the principles of working together.
Initial digitized material will be available by the end of the year.
More in:
NY Times
Chronicle of Higher Ed.
yahoo! hires finance writers
Following Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, Yahoo! takes another step in its transformation into original content provider (see Wall Street Journal – free). Though they say they have no intention of becoming a full-fledged news service.
Yahoo’s move suggests increased specialization and atomization of news media on the web, as full-fledged news services find it increasingly hard to stay afloat (as the recent wave of staff cuts at major papers suggests). As newspapers agonize over how to make more money from their websites (e.g. Times Select), companies with diverse revenue bases (like the big search portals) will find it a lot easier to deliver the news. But it will be a stripped down service, heavy on features. Can the news media as public trust survive this process of atomization? Or was the idea of a public trust always a fairy tale?
yahoo! experiments with multimedia journalism
Yahoo! has enlisted tele-journalist and blogger Kevin Sites to produce a one-year web program chronicling the world’s conflict zones in multimedia format.
Sites has become known for his jaunts as a “solo journalist,” trundling from hot spot to hot spot with a backpack full of gadgetry, beaming reports from his one-man broadcast station. It’s a formula that is tailor-made for the web. Clearly, Yahoo! was paying attention. The NY Times reports on “Kevin Sites In the Hot Zone”:
As he travels to these places, Mr. Sites will write a 600- to 800-word dispatch each day and produce a slide show of 5 to 10 digital photographs. He will also narrate audio travelogues. There will be several forms of video – relatively unedited footage posted several times a week, and once a week, a more traditional video report, edited in the style of a network news broadcast.
Mr. Sites will also be the host of regular online chats with Yahoo users who will be able to post comments on message boards. And he will post quick text messages on the site updating his activities throughout the day.
Counting on war and carnage as a surefire crowd draw, Yahoo! makes a rather tawdry entrance into independent journalism. But this is a very significant move nonetheless, evidence that Yahoo! is evolving into a full-fledged media company, and suggesting that the one-man-band approach to journalism and webcast might become a regular thing. If the Sites show finds an audience, they should try out serious investigative reporting or medium-length documentary.
the meaning of life? can you find an answer on the web?
On October 10, 2004, I was sitting with my laptop at a cafe in New York City trying to avoid writing a paper for my first-year humanities class. In a moment of despair, I typed “what is the meaning of life?” into an online forum. Fifty thousand hits and two thousand answers later…
That’s the cover copy for David Seaman’s first book “The Real Meaning of Life.,” due out this September. The book is a print version of the impromptu networked book, generated online in response to his question. Aphorisms like “be grease not glue,” and “there is not point to life, and that is exactly what makes it so special,” came from Buddhists, born-again Christians, atheists, waitresses, students, and recovering heart attack patients.
The public platform that the web offers ordinary people, introduces a new way to contemplate this perennial question. Typing “what is the meaning of life?” into wikipedia. yields an extensive post with over 500 edits and a lively discussion page. Here is an excerpt:
The person who asks “What is the meaning of life?” is pondering life’s purpose, in the context “Why are we here?”, or is searching for a justification or goal as in “What should I do with my life”? Thus, we’ve separated the main query into two different questions: one about the objective purpose of life (“Why are we here?”, and the other about subjective purpose in life (“What should I do with my life?”). Many claim that life has an objective purpose, though they differ as to what this purpose is, or where it comes from. Others deny that an objective purpose of anything is possible. Purposes, they argue, are by their very nature purely subjective. Subjective purpose of course varies from person to person. In some ways the quandary is a circular argument, the enquirer is in the midst of life seeking to validate life, or be it the meaning of it.
Books have, traditionally, been vehicles for the contemplation of this circular question. Scripture, scholarly texts, poetry, novels, self-help books, how-to books, grapple with the issue–“why are we here? And what should I do with my life?”–in various ways. It is interesting to see how the question plays out in the interactive space of the web.
Type “what is the meaning of life?” into the Google search engine and it yields 62,300 responses. Including an “Ask Yahoo” page from 1998 in which Juan asks the Yahoo search team to find the meaning of life for him. The letter he gets back reccommends a visit to the Yahoo meaning of life page. It also offers this advice:
Now, if you’re looking for the meaning of your life in particular, then we’re afraid we have to fall back on the somewhat predictable response: “It’s up to you.” Many people try to give lasting meaning to their lives by making the world a better place than when they entered it, either through scientific, philosophical, or artistic contributions. Others try by raising children that can themselves make contributions and preserve important societal and religious values for future generations.
There are also quite a few personal web pages that address the question. One particularly poignent example is JaredStory.com a site by and about Jared High, a young boy who took his own life shortly after a violent beating by a school bully. This heartbreaking site is filled with biblical quotations, audio and video of Jared, information about suicide, bullying, and a transciption of the lawsuit filed by his grieving parents.
Taken together these online “answers” create a wonderful mosaic of humanity striving to know itself and to connect with the universe. The web gives us an opportunity to read this interlinked accumulation of wisdom on a scale never before possible.