Yahoo Experimenting with Blogs?

Tee Emm writes "Sven Latham reports on his Yet Another Blog that Yahoo is (probably) experimenting with its blog services for its general users. The test bench is in Korea and may be followed by an international service on yahoo.com. On the main Yahoo site, blogs.yahoo.com as well as blog.yahoo.com both are active though they take you to yahoo groups interface."

Comments

How many blogs do you need?

[w.p.richardson]

Asked as I type this into a blog site...

The irony is palpable.

IM Blogs

[rf0]

Now what would be cool is if they could intergrate Yahoo IM so you could blog from your IM window. OF course just being careful that your talk with FitGirl 18/f/US (who is actually FatBloke 37/m/US) isn;t automatically logged :)

Rus

Not first post, first blog.

[51M02]

I would be interested in knowing which was the first blog system site ever created. My guess would be LiveJournal.com but I won't be sure. Does someone has a clue?

Re:Not first post, first blog.

[happystink]

Pitas.com was, it's mentioned in Rebecca Blood's history of weblogs.

Re:Not first post, first blog.

[govtcheez]

People blogged about sandwiches? Jesus, the Internet's been worthless since its inception, apparently.

Re:Not first post, first blog.

[dema]

According to an item in the LJ FAQ, LJ was started sometime in March 1999 while blogger.com says it was launched in August 1999. Those are the two older ones I can think of and if they really are the two oldest it appears that LJ beat blogger to the punch.

Re:Not first post, first blog.

[51M02]

As written on the LJ FAQ, LiveJournal started on March 1999, beating up Pitas.com which started not until July 1999 as Rebecca Blood stated in her "History of weblogs".

Re:Not first post, first blog.

[happystink]

Interesting, didn't know that. I am pretty sure I made pitas page in May 1999, so maybe that history is wrong, but good to know. One thing I do know for sure as someone who was involved in weblogs back then, pitas was definitely the first service anyone knew about. LJ exploded around 2001 or so and got really big, but back in 1999 the choices were Pitas (tons of users right away, mostly teens) and Scripting.com (but noone really understoodf how that worked) and then later, groksoup appeared (but noone used it and it's gone) and then blogger, which became the hugest one.

Re:Not first post, first blog.

[golgotha007]

If you think people would bother to read your blog, then you're either really famous (and you're trying to get your fans out of your face) or you're flattering yourself.

..or you want your friends or family to see what you've been doing if you live on the other side of the world. ..or you want to keep a journal of your life but don't want to carry around a book and pencil. you can get online anywhere, even on vacation.

i really don't care for all the online journals i've seen; they either had too much of one feature or not enough of another, so i decided to write my own.
it's a nice and easy format with a great admin interface for edits, a clickable calendar and image uploading.

if you're interested in obtaining a copy, you can email me spamdot@ventura.nu

Just what we need.

[slusich]

Another place for people no one cares about to post rants no one will ever read. Isn't there enough of this on the net already?

Re:Just what we need.

[kermitron]

On the upside; ever since my friends all got blogs, they've stopped sending me chain emails from 1791 that will give me good luck if I forward them to 15 other people within sixty seconds.

There might be a downside I don't see.

Re:Just what we need.

[Gherald]

> Why not put EVERYTHING that people want to use in one spot?

Does anyone _want_ yahoo ads?

Re:Just what we need.

[CGP314]

Just what we need Another place for people no one cares about to post rants no one will ever read. Isn't there enough of this on the net already?

Well that's the tradeoff on the net. Everyone has the ability to publish their thoughts, but it turns out not everyone's thoughts make a good read. That's why search engines exist: to help you filter out the crap.

Re:Just what we need.

[sootman]

Evidently, not quite. There will be "enough" when AOL and MSN and Yahoo! and everyone else offer them and every person has (at least) one. Same as anything else: companies constantly feel the need to make barriers to entry lower and lower until everyone who could possibley want one, has one.

Never seen that before.

[CGP314]

The story on slashdot was longer than the story it linked to.

Blog...

[LordYUK]

I've always thought the word "Blog" sounded like something you heaved up...

"Whats wrong with Bill today, is he sick?"

"Yeah, he's at home, blogging up his guts."

"Oh, I hate it when I blog."

or

"OH MY GOD PULL OVER I AM GOING TO BLOG!!" ::sound of blog hitting ground::

"BLOG!! BLOG BLOG!!! ugh, I dont feel well..."

Re:Blog...

[happystink]

Totally, I think originally the word stood for "butt log"

Re:Blog...

[Ominous Coward]

sadly, there was a hole in the language available for "Blog" to fill, as a verb. "writing a journal entry" is too long for these buzz-word filled days. "journalling" doesn't sound right, and it's still too many syllables. "blogging" is short, and to the point.

That said, I hate the word, and it's also pretty inaccurate, as a weblog (the originator of the word 'blog) is a site like Slashdot, not a personal web journal.

KR.

[CGP314]

Yahoo Korea looks like a lot more fun than regular yahoo. It all ani-ma-fa-kated.

I don't know about this...

[Capt_Troy]

There's something about a blog that is entirely created and maintained by the blogger. I mean, would any of us really read wil wheaton's site if he just kept it at yahoo?

Nothing against yahoo or anything. It's great for people who don't have the resources or knowledge to maintain such a thing, but I doubt I'll be perusing the blogs on yahoo any time soon. Would you?

t.

Re:I don't know about this...

[m00nun1t]

Just like no one would use an OS where you didn't have to compile the kernel yourself?

Blogging is still pretty niche and dominated by techie talk, and a LOT of meta-blogging. Something like this, the AOL blogging service and presumably MSN blogs (was in job ads a few months ago) will bring blogging to the masses, for better or worse.

Re:I don't know about this...

[gricholson75]

I mean, would any of us really read wil wheaton's site if he just kept it at yahoo?

I don't read Wil Wheaton's site anyway.

Re:I don't know about this...

[dsmoses]

>I mean, would any of us really read wil wheaton's site if he just kept it at yahoo?

I would be willing to bet that more people outside of /. would read it then.

Really, how many /. people use AOL, how many /. people think they can make money helping out our Nigerian friends. Yet these things still happen, and make money on them. /. users are the minority and I doubt that Yahoo is really considering the /. crowd as their target demographic.

AOL annouced earlier this summer that they were going to set up the ability for their users to run blogs, so now Yahoo has to do it as well.

When is a story not a story?

[kiwiokie]

Somehow this article seems more like a "first!" post than a news story. The actual post on yetanotherblog.com is no longer than the story teaser that Slashdot has posted. And the links (as reported) don't actually go anywhere particularly interesting.

Remember: patience is a virtue.

August 25, 2003

[PetoskeyGuy]

Spent all day reading slashdot again. I posted a comment and it never even got any points. Fark had an awesome story about a guy doing something dumb. I finally have my very own blog so I can share my thoughts with the world.

August 26, 2003
Spent all day reading slashdot again. That Microsoft Sux.

August 27, 2003
Spent all day reading slashdot again. I hate SCO, they suck.

August 28, 2003
Spent all day reading slashdot again. Just upgraded to Windows XP. It sucks.

Let's count

[mrpuffypants]

So now we've got:

• Blogger-Powered by Google
• Typepad-From those that brought you MovableType
• Slashdot Journals-From those that brought you misspeeled dupes
• Typepad
• AOL Journals-From those that brought you cybersex
• Yahoo! Journals-From those that brought you the dotcom bubble

...All so that we can hear about a 14 year old and her first day of school and how "impossible" Jr. High is. Wonder-fucking-full.

Re:Let's count

[Effugas]

You don't remember being 14, do you :-)

--Dan

Re:Let's count

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what I love, people who go on about how web journals are shit, and worthless. But then keep one (check out the homepage)

Re:Let's count

[Call Me Black Cloud]

I agree. It's much more interesting to read the thoughts of a 19 year old college student with his own domain name (with the name being swiped from MST3K).

So many 'interesting' people

[Willow_mt]

This is just another addition to the idea "I want to be reachable everywhere and I want to let everyone know how interesting I am".
Most people just don't see the point of how this makes them less interesting.

That said, let's make another entry in my journal ;)

Wheres Aol?

[OfficerNoGun]

I don't really see this doing anything to the blog world. If aol did one (or partnered with someone) It could be really usefull. Let it replace buddy profiles, have a little button on AIM to post a blog, Have a read my blog button in an AIM window. Hold the blogs at central server, but serve them locally (the only person who would hit there server would be the user, everyone else would read the blog off of the users computer, like the profiles are now). Im not really saying this will be usefull in anyway to the internet at large, but I't would let let blogs grow.

Actual Story

[GeorgeH]

The article neglected to include the permalink to the story.

On a related tangent, how long before our schools start teaching kids how to write in hypertext? I would love for MLA to cover rules like "the linked resource should be relevant to the words that are used to link to it," "never include punctuation in hyperlinks," or "you will die a fiery death if you link the word 'here' to a resource."

Does anyone still use Yahoo!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thought not. Better (less ad-infested) services can be found with competitors. They've stamped the only jewel in their crown, eGroups (now Yahoo! Groups) right into the ground - people only use it now because it's such a pain to migrate a mailing list elsewahere. If this blogging service is as bad as Yahoo! Groups is now, I can't see it taking off (I personally, will be sticking with my Slashdot Journal).

Re:Does anyone still use Yahoo!?

[Fammy2000]

I won't write in my Slashdot Journal because people will just mod it down. (-1, Offtopic)

Re:Does anyone still use Yahoo!?

[hswerdfe]

I still use maps.yahoo.com
in my opinion its still the best map finder on the web.
Fuck mapquest

Why?

[Jeremy Erwin]

Suppose Yahoo starts hosting blogs.
In three months, it will become popular.
In four months, it will become popular with "adults."
In five months, Yahoo Blogs will become a premiere conduit for erotic content.
In six months, Yahoo Blogs will force the reader to view a full screen ad before reading content
In seven months, Yahoo Blogs will start imposing bandwidth caps.
In eight months, readers of such blogs will be denied access to archives.

Yes it is true

[acehole]

I know the sys admin for yahoo, they've been working on a blog system since early this year. As with everything yahoo does, Korea is where they test it.

Korea is actually thier biggest money maker too, there is a avatar system that they have access to and people pay to buy virtual clothes and other such things for their own personal avatar. They make a fortune out of it, it's crazy.

But yeah... yahoo is definitely get a blog system.

Re:Yes it is true

[kermitron]

Korea seems to be massive for a lot of things internet related, and faster adapting too, so it's no shock that they'd test it there.

For example, you take a look at the highest trafficked sites. Not surprisingly, the top sites are yahoo and MSN... but somewhere around #3 you get a Korean site and from there on down you get a pretty solid representation between sites that are primarily American, Korean and Japanese.

The horror

[KU_Fletch]

Great, now I'm going to have to ignore a few thousand more blogs about how teenagers hate their parents and shut-ins hate society.

deltree c:\ /y should sort it out

[DrSkwid]

gosh, windows is bloated you say

why not add some comments to your slashdot journal about which options you removed, I'm sure we'd all be fascinated.

Content == King

[RobotRunAmok]

Having the resources or knowledge to maintain a blog does not make what you have to write in the blog any more worth reading than what the Yahoo-ites have to say. Sadly, many of the technically-savvy have failed to realize this.

The truth of the matter is, if what you say is worth reading on a regular, or even daily basis, someone will step in and provide you with the resources to maintain your blog, thereby freeing you up to focus on your writing. These resource-providers are called publishers. Whether or not the blog-writer has a publisher is a good litmus test for whether I will devote any of my time reading what he writes.

As for keeping up with friends' activities: we use the telephone. Terribly Old School that way.

It's like graphic design. The personal computer programs that have made it cheap and easy for someone to do the *work* of a designer do not magically transform everyone *into* a designer.

Redundancy

[satyap]

Too many blogs. I'll stick to livejournal, TYVM. At least it's relatively ad-free and I can get RSS feeds and export my journal.

Blogs are repetative

[jj00]

My roommate has a Photo Journal on his web site. While some days are really cool, and he is a really talented amature photographer, most days consist on what he ate for Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner.

I generally use it to figure out what I was doing on a particular day. His girlfriend gets a bit embarrased - she must feel like a rock star at times.

I'm wondering if in the long run this is work Yahoo's time and money. If it is cheap to implement, then why not.

Yawn...Blogs are just

[bob670]

an overly tech oriented replacment for "Dear Diary" and a waste of time for most readers. So unless your the current equivalent of Lewis & Clark or General Grant or Abraham Lincoln it's pretty much just cheap therapy and soap boxes for the commons...

Not trying to create flamebait, but honestly, what use is...

Dear Blog (July 25): Just read an article on Yahoo about the guy with no feet who is walking cross county on his hands to raise money for kids born without ear lobes. Isn't that uplifting???

Dear Blog (July 25) I love my new iMac, it's just so yummy and friendly, not like the evil Micro$oft Winblows. Yuck!

Dear Blog (July 26): I hate that darn Marsha Brady, she's just so perfect!!!

Dear Blog (July 29): I just read an article on Yahoo about world politics, what follows are my 3.5 pages of unfocussed rant, aren't I smart world?

Dear Blog (July 30): Why won't he notice me damnit? Well, he'll notice when his cat disappears, the PETA website says we should free all the domestically enslaved house pets anyway. Here goes nothing?

Dear Blog (July 31): Mom took me to the doctor today, they say the Lithium will take the edge off, but I am not sure what that means. Think I will take a nap now......

Who F ing cares, personal Blogs are 99% attention whoring. And there's plenty of chat rooms, message boards and newsgroups for that purpose, just use this post as an example.

Re:Yawn...Blogs are just

[limako]

Whereas I used to maintain a regular email correspondence with friends and family, I now spend most of that time writing a blog entry. It represents what I would have said to one or more of my regular correspondents, but it is written for a slightly more general audience. I still use email, but my messages tend to be shorter and more personal -- anything of general interest, I just post in my blog. I made the change because I found that I found that I fairly frequently wrote messages that mixed public and personal info together so that I would have to rewrite or resend the public stuff if I wanted to tell it to more than one person. The blog is just more efficient.

No One Patented This?

[Greyfox]

Call me paranoid but I got $10 that says that once they get established, some guy comes along with a submarine patent and sues them and every other blog site on the Internet.

If no one has patented blogging, it's not too late as many previous patent suits have shown us!

More targetted spam to follow?

[fehlschlag]

Wow! I use yahoo for a certain amount of anonymity, and am still surprised how they get hold of all the addresses to spam them.
Now I'll have the opportunity to provide even more info about my perversi..., er I mean interests, political and otherwise - yeah, that's what I meant :)

Re:Not first post, first blog. I want some stat :)

[51M02]

Looking at the LJ raw stats it's hard to tell when this site took off. Currently there is around 2500 new weblog account a day.

• First 10+ "new accounts a day" : 1999-11-08.
• First 100+ "new accounts a day" : 2000-06-12
• First 1000+ "new accounts a day" : 2001-04-16

It's very subjective to say when this site took off.

Reasons for and against blogs

[zapp]

I was always confused by the concept of a blog. Here's a few reasons I can think to use a blog, and why each one sucks.

1. Personal diary. Since it's public, you probably shouldn't put anything "diary worthy" in it. Also, years from now you can still pick up your paper diary and read it, think all these blog sites will still be around?

2. Updates to family and friends. OK, I can almost buy this, but really do we need to put up another barrier between those we love? I would rather tell my parents news on the phone, than tell them to go read my blog. Also, not everyone you know/love knows how to get to it.

3. "Making your mark on the world / etc". No one cares what you have to say, and no one probably reads it. If you have something worthy to say, make a real website, or find a position in the world where people will be able to hear what you have to say.

My biggest problem with though, is #1. I fear that the tech boom will hurt us big time in about 20 years when we realize all our digital videos, pictures, blog entries, etc have disappeared and we have no paper record of our lives. I am looking at it from a purely personal-records point of view, but it affects society on a much higher level as well.

korean blogs

[baomike]

does anyone else see a problem here?
I block most Korean sites, to much spam.

second thought: may be this is good, put all blogs
in korea and block it.

Recursion Anyone

[Karna]

If you want some of the scoop on what Yahoo is up to, you should probably be reading Jeremy Zawodny's blog, for example:

* Y! Blogs releases in Korea
* Y! Unix messenger group begun
* Y! Search group begun

And other goodies :)

Makes total Sense

[Monofilament]

Well hmm what happened earlier this year?

Google bought blogger.com or something like that, the biggest of the Blog hosting sites/engines.

So in Yahoo's scramble.. to figure out why they're loosing to google, they're gonna start blogs too.

Personally i think Yahoo has always had a lot going for them .. they should try and keep doing their thing instead of copying Google. Google is a wonderful salad bowl search engine .. but well .. their categorization of things into easy categories has somethingn to be desired. I've alwasy gone to yahoo for stuff when i didn't exactly know what the site was but I wanted to find it by driling down in categories. Yahoo has always been good for that.

oh well maybe they'll figure out what their looking for some day.

I don't know..

[Quass]

Blogs can serve a purpose..
Some people on here are just ranting about how the personal experiences, or "dear diary" type of blogs are just flooding the internet, and are completely devoid of any interesting, or entertaining thought. Well, that may be true.. and I'm sure Yahoo! blogs will foster this kind of thing even more (because of easy access, and a large user base), but there are certain blogs out there that are useful, and serve a purpose.

Take my blog for instance (no I'm not linking it..). I created it by using one of those bloggin' apps (pmachine I think..), created my own stylesheet, etc.. So for 1 it looks original. But aside from that, I use it as a way to communicate to my friends and family. I'm away from home (toronto) for the next several months on business in Costa Rica. I don't get to call home that much, and writing emails is tedious to 20+ people, so I update my blog on a daily (heh, okay a few times a week) basis. They reply to me in comments, and it's working out quite well.

So who says they can't be useful?

What I want from MY blog:

[NaveWeiss]

I hope Yahoo enables all of these fatures:

• Topic icons and preferably custom. I love topic icons!
• Friends like in here, along with new journal notifications. Communities are nice too (like in LiveJournal) but I'm not used to them.
• Erase comments of annoying people and ban them too, and block anonymous posters. Slashdot kinda lacks in that.
• Embedding pictures in the blog and preferably allowing to upload them on the same server too.
• Lists that can appear on the side of the blog.
• Marital status, searchable. Blogs can be a great dating service too!

What do you think? Will they enable those things?

Re:On LiveJournal and Blogging

[vpetersen]

QUOTE "LiveJournal predates the term 'blog', which is one reason why it's called "LiveJournal" and not "LiveBlog". Back when Brad Fitzpatrick was writing what would later become LiveJournal, I was writing something similar." /END QUOTE

Let's not forget about finger. Probably the earlist easily identifiable 'blog' (what an ugly term) predecessor. Many game developers and security experts had their finger info available for access over www. Those were thoughts and ideas! Unlike 99% of blogs existing today.