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Monday, December 12

Yahoo!'s strategy is ... blogging?

by Tris Hussey on December 12, 2005 09:35AM (PST)

Last week Yahoo! announced that it has acquired Del.icio.us (for about $40 mil), late yesterday Yahoo! has announced that they have reached an agreement with Six Apart (interestingly, this isn't on the Six Apart site right now) that Moveable Type will now be offered by Yahoo! for it's SMB customers:

"This is going to be our recommended (sales) channel for small business," he said [Anil Dash].

Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo said it will offer commercial blogs based on Movable Type as part of its existing small business Web-site management service.

Yahoo provides customers with a unique Web address, blogging tools and business-class e-mail services with spam and virus protections for less than $12 a month.
Movable Type is commonly used by businesses, Web designers and professional bloggers to create easily updated Web sites. Other blog software such as Google Inc.'s Blogger, WordPress, Xanga and Six Apart's own Live Journal, are more often used to create blogs for individuals.
Yahoo hosts roughly 30 million individual Web sites, including hundreds of thousands of small business sites, said Rich Riley, general manager of Yahoo's small business unit. One in eight U.S. online stores are hosted by Yahoo, he said.

While some might think this is an "also ran" news item, this isn't. This is a serious clue into Yahoo!'s plans. Flickr, Del.icio.us, now a close relationship with MT. These are three of the core tools in the Blogosphere. Things that make the Blogosphere tick. So in my mind I think Yahoo is going to be making a major play into the Blogosphere. Will Yahoo360 change to make it more open (and cooler)? Will they announce a new free blogging platform?

Again, like the Del.icio.us announcement, Google is trying to get all of our attention, Yahoo is buying the tools that already have it. Like I asked last week ... what/who is next?

Sources: Yahoo News -- ProBlogger

Technorati Tags : Yahoo!, Six+Apart, Moveable+Type, MT

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Sunday, December 4

Chitika's auditing PR problem

by Tris Hussey on December 4, 2005 10:40PM (PST)

Ouch. Boy Chitika has certainly taken it on the chin this week. I'm not going to revel in their woe. No value in that. They've come out with a response that I, personally, think it weak (Darren's take on their response). It doesn't go far enough to explain and say ... okay we blew it this is how we're going to do things differently. It's more like "more fool you for banking on the earnings in unaudited reports" how about just not put the earnings up?

The coverage was fast and furious (and still coming):

Darren
JenSense
Jim Turner (disclosure, Jim is a friend and business associate)
Tom Keating
BlogNews
Performancing
Dave Taylor

So, what's the lesson here, since I'm not here to skewer Chitika? On the blogosphere new breaks fast. Really, really fast. The time stamps on these articles are within hours of each other. Hours. Man. When was Chitika's response? Next day I think. No. Bad. Blogs and PR ... they go hand and hand. Hey I know this because here at Qumana we do this. And with AdGenta, just we've had our own questions to answer. Yeah I know your big question ... soon.