A couple days ago, I was leaving work and was really surprised to run into Scott Rafer (Feedster CEO), Rich Skrenta (Topix.net co-founder), Ross Mayfield (Socialtext CEO) and a few others. I immediately suspected that I had completely forgotten about some important event, since that cast of characters is at nearly every conference I attend.
As it turned out, there were on-site for a dinner in which Yahoo folks were talking about Yahoo, RSS, Syndication, and so on. Since I was on my way out anyway and uninvited, I didn't head upstairs to see what was going on. However, I've managed to find a few folks who wrote about the dinner.
Over at sfist you can read a long summary of the presentations and questions that came up.
Susan Mernit wrote up a shorter summary that I hope others read. Her first two points are:
- Yahoo gets the long tail, absolutely.
- Yahoo has the capability to turn into an infrastructure platform for blogging and micropayments of ad revenue and shopping, courtesy of work done by the My team and Overture.
I'm sorta bummed that I didn't know about this event beforehand. It would have been great to spend 15 minutes there to meet some of the attendees who I've probably wanted to meet for a long time. But it looks like a few of the attendees are getting the message and helping to spread it. That's good news.
Posted by jzawodn at February 12, 2005 10:08 AM
n3t3v:
I'm *this* close to banning all your comments. You're beating the same dead horse. Give it up.
The SFist summary made an interesting point about monetization. This is something of a "we get free content to display ads on, content providers get nothing" situation. Excellent for Yahoo, more problematic for content providers, who may end up losing page views and ad impressions.
One possibly useful measure for the content providers may be those who cease reading them from My Yahoo, swith to direct reading and change from loss leaders to revenue sources.
Always a bit interesting when the revenue interests of the content providers and distributor may seem opposed - quite a challenge to change the situation. Google seems to have managed something of the sort with straight ads via AdSense so it'll be interesting what, if anything, Yahoo can come up with via the aggregation end.
Of course, Google is also a factor because Google is probably providing a fair bit of the revenue the content providers get, so Yahoo displaying the content may be depriving Google of AdSense revenue it would otherwise have. Which makes me wonder what Google, which surely knows this, is doing about it.
Its "n3td3v", sorry I made a typo when I wrote this stuff. Cheerio.
Muhahaha. They didn't invite me either and I don't give a hoot. We bloggers give too much hoot about everything IMHO.
Another name dropping post. The blogger execs have shot their wad, tell me something new.
