July 14, 2003: The Undeath of Yahoo!? and more


Just read in today's NY Times that Yahoo! is acquiring Overture. Assuming
the numbers crunch properly, this seems to be a great move for Yahoo!; they
get to combine what's left of their original directory with Overture's
keyword service, which actually makes pretty good sense for
consumer-oriented directories. Making decisions based on the biggest ad is
how yellow pages users often do it; similarly, bidding-based placement seems
like it should be appropriate to Yahooligans.

Overture up 12% today; Yahoo! up 3 cents to $32.28. Hmmm. Suddenly
Internet stocks are getting interesting to watch again.

Hmmm.

And to think, eight years ago I was predicting Yahoo!'s demise. Well, the
directory's, at least. This is the first time I've felt that prediction
might be wrong.


In other news:

* AIfIA's initiative to translate IA texts has gone live. It covers seven
(count'em) languages: Nederlands, Español, Português, Italiano, Japanese,
Français, Dansk. Pretty cool. Kudos to Peter van Dijck and team for their
great work!

* Speaking of international IA, Peter Morville's latest SemAntics column
finds "all sorts of idiosyncratic reasons why information architects should
reach across borders." Enjoy!


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LINKS MENTIONED
NY Times article ::
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/14/business/14CND-NET.html?hp
The Untimely Death of Yahoo! ::
http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1995/sep/last.html
AIfIA :: http://www.aifia.org
AIfIA Translation Initiative :: http://aifia.org/translations/
Peter Morville's column ::
http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000012.php