Yahoo Experimenting with Blogs?

Tee Emm writes "Sven Latham reports on his Yet Another Blog that Yahoo is (probably) experimenting with its blog services for its general users. The test bench is in Korea and may be followed by an international service on yahoo.com. On the main Yahoo site, blogs.yahoo.com as well as blog.yahoo.com both are active though they take you to yahoo groups interface."

KR.

[CGP314]

Yahoo Korea looks like a lot more fun than regular yahoo. It all ani-ma-fa-kated.

When is a story not a story?

[kiwiokie]

Somehow this article seems more like a "first!" post than a news story. The actual post on yetanotherblog.com is no longer than the story teaser that Slashdot has posted. And the links (as reported) don't actually go anywhere particularly interesting.

Remember: patience is a virtue.

Re:Not first post, first blog.

[happystink]

Pitas.com was, it's mentioned in Rebecca Blood's history of weblogs.

Re:Wow!!!

[Ominous Coward]

are you new here? ...asks the user with a UID that's more than 5 times that of mine.

No, I'm not new, but this latest entry is bad, even by regular Slashdot standards. There's not even a story here, it's a few links to a few scraps of text. Must be a slow day in the tech world. Perhaps they could find a story that'd explain why gas prices jumped 20 cents/gallon over the weekend? I'd like to know why.

Yes it is true

[acehole]

I know the sys admin for yahoo, they've been working on a blog system since early this year. As with everything yahoo does, Korea is where they test it.

Korea is actually thier biggest money maker too, there is a avatar system that they have access to and people pay to buy virtual clothes and other such things for their own personal avatar. They make a fortune out of it, it's crazy.

But yeah... yahoo is definitely get a blog system.

Redundancy

[satyap]

Too many blogs. I'll stick to livejournal, TYVM. At least it's relatively ad-free and I can get RSS feeds and export my journal.

Re:Not first post, first blog.

[51M02]

As written on the LJ FAQ, LiveJournal started on March 1999, beating up Pitas.com which started not until July 1999 as Rebecca Blood stated in her "History of weblogs".

Re:Not first post, first blog.

[happystink]

Interesting, didn't know that. I am pretty sure I made pitas page in May 1999, so maybe that history is wrong, but good to know. One thing I do know for sure as someone who was involved in weblogs back then, pitas was definitely the first service anyone knew about. LJ exploded around 2001 or so and got really big, but back in 1999 the choices were Pitas (tons of users right away, mostly teens) and Scripting.com (but noone really understoodf how that worked) and then later, groksoup appeared (but noone used it and it's gone) and then blogger, which became the hugest one.

Re:Yawn...Blogs are just

[limako]

Whereas I used to maintain a regular email correspondence with friends and family, I now spend most of that time writing a blog entry. It represents what I would have said to one or more of my regular correspondents, but it is written for a slightly more general audience. I still use email, but my messages tend to be shorter and more personal -- anything of general interest, I just post in my blog. I made the change because I found that I found that I fairly frequently wrote messages that mixed public and personal info together so that I would have to rewrite or resend the public stuff if I wanted to tell it to more than one person. The blog is just more efficient.

Re:Not first post, first blog. I want some stat :)

[51M02]

Looking at the LJ raw stats [livejournal.com] it's hard to tell when this site took off. Currently there is around 2500 new weblog account a day.

• First 10+ "new accounts a day" : 1999-11-08.
• First 100+ "new accounts a day" : 2000-06-12
• First 1000+ "new accounts a day" : 2001-04-16

It's very subjective to say when this site took off.

Recursion Anyone

[Karna]

If you want some of the scoop on what Yahoo is up to, you should probably be reading Jeremy Zawodny [zawodny.com]'s blog, for example:

* Y! Blogs [zawodny.com] releases in Korea
* Y! Unix messenger [zawodny.com] group begun
* Y! Search [zawodny.com] group begun

And other goodies :)

On LiveJournal and Blogging

[Anonymous Coward]

LiveJournal predates the term 'blog', which is one reason why it's called "LiveJournal" and not "LiveBlog". Back when Brad Fitzpatrick was writing what would later become LiveJournal, I was writing something similar. Both were simple systems for personal use to automate the production of these kinds of sites, but Brad later modified his so that his friends could use it too. I'm now a LiveJournal developer, and my own software hasn't been touched in years :)

I think the main reason LiveJournal works as well as it does is that it was designed so that the users are all integrated with each other, unlike Blogger where each weblog is essentially distinct. Most people who keep journals at LiveJournal also read journals, so there's a nice mesh of reading and writing which keeps the thing going without anyone needing to be "famous".

The "six degrees of separation" thing has been proven to hold for LiveJournal.com's users who have at least a few "friends". You can try for yourself [petekrawczyk.com], even.