Blogs in the Yahoo Directory

In Classification fun: where does your weblog belong?, John Roberts responds to my response to his earlier post (will someone build a threaded aggregator already?!) and digs deeper into blog classification:

When you search for John Roberts, you will get this blog as the only result. Hey, at least it's included. But you don't get the category placement as a navigation hint, which was one of the original innovations at Yahoo. You do for Zawodny and a few other well-known blogs. That makes sense -- focus on what people will care about. But sort of interesting that you can only see the "Most Popular" in the Weblogs category. Makes me think that there are no other blogs categorized. I don't blame Yahoo, for the same reasons cited earlier, unless you dump them all in a category called Weblogs and just leave it at that.

Well, it's a little known fact that blogs are listed in the Yahoo Directory. Heck, I even put a few of them there myself a few years back. Sssh. Don't tell the surfers that I remembered how to edit the directory! :-)

What we really need is some better integration between the directory, My Yahoo, and other aggregators. For example, in the Computer and Technology Weblogs sub-category (where I'm listed), you'd expect to see an obvious way to "Add to My Yahoo" or at least something equivalent to the orange XML button. Or an RSS (or OPML?) feed for that part of the directory.

But we have none of that. So much for integration.

The reasons why are... Well, some are complicated and some are lame. I suspect I already know most of them and can guess the rest, but that doesn't change your expectations as a user, does it?

Of course not. And there are worse examples, but I'll spare you those.

We ought to have a unified set of blog listings and categorization between Yahoo Search, the Yahoo Directory, and My Yahoo.

Are the "Most Popular" weblogs listed in the Yahoo Directory based on the same ranking system as those in the My Yahoo mini-directory? Clearly they're not--the categories aren't even the same.

My point, however, is not to beat up on the Yahoo Directory team. (I see we've renamed it "Yahoo Search Directory" now. How long ago did that happen?) The point is that we do have a slightly deeper classification of weblogs at Yahoo. And you may or may not agree with the groupings, but it's a starting point. And it's growing. Two years ago, it was a much smaller list.

Update: John responds and we learn that he, like most, didn't know blogs were in the directory either.

Posted by jzawodn at December 05, 2004 11:24 PM