Blog #3: Yahoo, take me away.

Can you remember the commercial with the frustrated mother looking for relief from the stresses of daily life, and in the end she exlaims "Calgon, take me away." It became a best selling slogan. In earlier days you could call !Yahoo the digital (and masculine) version of Calgon. The current version of their site has strayed somewhat from that ideal.

In the beginning the web could be a frustrating tangle of hyperlinks. Yahoo!'s contribution to the net was to organize the madness and take you away from the confusion. It's early website was very simple. It used few graphics and was dominated by text. It organized information in an academic, open way in order to make you feel at home. In this way it became a comfortable place for surfersto return after their explorations around the web (Burnett and Marshall, 99). It may have been maintaining the appearance of openness, but it clearly had commercial ties. Burnett and Marshall said elsewhere in the book "The connotation of Yahoo! is that it is driven by the characterization of the Web as a form of media entertainment while making appropriate genuflections to the Web's role as information source." (97) While distinguishable in the older versions, as Yahoo! has developed these commercial ties have become more evident. Dynamic advertisements feature prominently. Where the old site featured primarily hyperlinks that would ultimately take you away from Yahoo! the current site provides links for various services and entertainment which keep you on yahoo.com. The theme in the past seemed to be simplistic. Following the advertising paradigm the new site uses eye catching icons and a variety of bold colors. In the center, the hyperlinks have been replaced with images and news articles offered in a way to allow you to get a glimpse at the top stories and then read those that interest you without ever using another service. The text that is present is displaye

d in different sizes and colors emphasizing those things that they want you to see. In a continued throwback to the good old days of the internet, they have preserved the search field at the top of the page. It is segmented from everything else though, and seems more like an afterthought.

If you find Yahoo!'s presentation unsatisfying, you can customize it by creating an account and choosing some of the links that will be displayed on the right side. However you can create your own custom page at my.yahoo.com which allows you to add and remove content (except for advertisements). Again, all of the information is provided by Yahoo! and there is never a need to go elsewhere.

I've added a screen shot of the my.yahoo.com website. It is interesting to note that almost none of the text is legible at the reduced image size, however you can still read the add and the Yahoo! logo.

Bibliography

Burnett, Robert, and P. David. Marshall. Web Theory an Introduction. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.

"My Yahoo!" Yahoo! Web. 22 Oct. 2010. .