There's been some discussion recently about weblogs at Yahoo. It's not the first time, but it came up again. My co-worker Michael Radwin (who hasn't enabled TrackBack so that I can link this entry to his) posted his views recently.

I can't say if Yahoo has any plans to do it or not, since I don't speak for my employer, but I have to agree. Weblogs on Yahoo could be a very "sticky" service and Yahoo is fond of sticky services.

Even so, a blog service would be a win for Yahoo! in the long run. Feeling some compulsion to keep your blog up-to-date is sorta like email -- it's very "sticky". That means increased customer loyalty, which is always a good thing in the business world (even if it costs you some money).

Unlike the traditional Yahoo approach (build something that's a lot like our other services and technology), however, I have a very specific plan in mind should anyone decide it's something we want to do. It would get things on-line quickly with good tools and work like bloggers expect. And I have interesting ideas about how to integrate weblogging with some of our other large properties. Whether anyone will ask me or listen my ideas is a whole different question. :-)

(Yes, I've already offered.)

See also: AOL to Offer Weblogs?

Posted by jzawodn at December 30, 2002 01:02 PM

Reader Comments
# Derek said:

You'll be ignored. The yahoo way would be to buy blogger or blogspot for $500M and then completely gut it in such a way as to neither resemble the original popular site, nor to be useful to the users who want to use it.

Stop me when I lie, cuz you know that I'm not. :-)

on December 30, 2002 01:09 PM
# Jeremy Zawodny said:

Good point. I was assuming that the "build" half of the buy vs. build argument would win. That's probably not a good assumption.

on December 30, 2002 01:10 PM
# Dave Winer said:

Maybe Yahoo could provide back-end services to blogging front-ends like Radio and others, and make history by charging users for the service. Partner with little guys, giving users choice, and doing what Yahoo does better than anyone, run high performance backends, with data stored on the user's computer. Remind me to tell you about the time Yahoo lost all the data in my calendar.

on December 30, 2002 06:18 PM
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