I wondered how long it would take for the Search Engines to get into blogging themselves as a commercial endeavor and it seems that Yahoo! have decided to get in on the act with Yahoo! Health Expert Blogs.
As Steve points out this is probably a strategy that they’ll roll out on a larger scale which could be seen as something of a threat to many entrepreneurial bloggers (especially the networks).
I always did wonder what the ethics were of a search engine having it’s own content sites to drive traffic to are – any thoughts?
what ethics of Yahoo creating its own content blogs? no ethics. Zero comma zero. If Yahoo finds it OK that their own employee is admitting on his own blog that he is stealing copyrighted movies over Bittorrent, then such thing as creating content and being “everything to everybody” is not disturbing Yahoo.
Fortunately Google is not producing its own content… so not everybody is as evil as Yahoo.
They’ve got quite an impressive roster of bloggers over there, but I wonder how many would be able to manage an active blog given their hectic schedules as professors of medicine, etc. at the top medical school in the U.S. Of course, if they’re using ghost writers, that’s another story. Maybe I should apply to be one. :/
Darren,
I’m not sure about the ethics part, but medical information written by medical professionals is already widely available all over the internet (NCI, ACS, all of the medical universites, etc,) so except for the format, I don’t really see the difference. Unless they manage to really connect with readers in a way that most medical experts don’t, I wonder how much more successful these will be than the currently available sites. I’m not personally worried about how my site will fare, because I think personal (and personable) writing will trump sterile, status quo writing any day of the week when it comes to a blog’s audience. For this reason I’m not too worried about the blog networks either. The big players may get more visitors via their Google/Yahoo power, but how many will they convert into regular readers, and how many will stick around to find the info they need? I guess it all remains to be seen…
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