Thursday, September 30, 2004 11:23 AM
It's official, Yahoo! has entered the feed aggregator marketplace.
Just released into beta testing, the new myYahoo! has fully integrated RSS feed aggregation and display functionality. Moreover, of interest to the blawgosphere, users of myYahoo! can leverage Yahoo Search to find blawgs (or any type of weblog for that matter) and then easily subscribe to a particular blawg's feed. No longer are you limited to CNN, MSN, AP News, etcetera, headlines. Instead, you can create and filter feeds in accordance with your particular interest from any blawg or site that has a working feed. Yahoo! has even indexed quite a few blawgs itself, so that it is easy to locate and subscribe to a particular blawg.
Maybe I am alone in this thinking, but when I visit the major news sites on the web, it seems I always see the same headlines. Perhaps this is because so many news sites just repackage the headline feed coming from the major news wires like the Associated Press. This seeming reality has led me to the the conclusion that if I visit CNN.com to read the day's headlines, I don't need to hit any other news site because I can be sure the headlines will generally be the same as those on CNN.
On the other hand, with a service like the new myYahoo!, I can pick and choose from a variety of news sources, large and small, blawg and non-blawg. And, by selecting topical blawgs, I can tailor my news page to specific areas within the law, not just general law headlines. The playing field for information dissemination is now level. A myYahoo user can now just as easily subscribe to a blawg as to the major news services. And, while this truth has existed for early adopters for some time, seeing it hit the mainstream via Yahoo! is cause for celebration.
Take a look at myYahoo! sometime. It may well be one glimpse of the future for information dissemination.