Yahoo! News has a new redesign in the works, and in a move that will make many bloggers and “citizen journalists” happy, they are giving some love to blog posts that are covering popular news stories. On what appears to be each article page, there is a section for “most blogged” within the particular category you happen to be in.
For example, if you are reading a political story, you’ll see a “most blogged – politics” section. If you’re reading a tech story, you’ll see “most blogged – technology”, and so on. Under each article in the “most blogged” sections, there is a link to see more “blogs about this story,” which brings up a small box on the same page that you can navigate through independently. There are also other sections for “most viewed” and “Elsewhere on the Web.”
Some are giving Yahoo! a big pat on the back for throwing blogs a bone. “Yahoo! may be struggling financially, but when it comes to supporting the rest of the web with standards and generous links – they are in the lead among the the big search and advertising companies,” says Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web.
To be fair though, Google does have a similar feature on Google News in the left-hand column of its topical pages. They also once announced that they would filter out a good amount of blogs from its actual news results to provide a more “authoritative” selection of articles for any given query, but they do have the feature pictured at the left, not to mention Google Blog Search.
That said, there is definitely nothing wrong with what Yahoo! is doing. While Yahoo!’s not the force in search that it once was, Yahoo! News is still pretty popular. This is going to be a great way for readers to discover new and relevant sources to obtain information from. It is also going to give bloggers a chance to get some good promotion, which in turn will be great for their own readership.
According to Amit Agarwal, Yahoo!’s Buzz Tracker is used to come up with the content for the “Most Blogged” sections. To view the redesign, you can simply alter the URL of any Yahoo! News article page. Just change the “s” to “story” like below:
news.yahoo.com/s/…
news.yahoo.com/story/…
There’s no word on when Yahoo! will actually launch this redesign, and it is certainly possible that it could be changed before it is launched. It’s not bad though in my opinion. What do you think?
