Live Blog: Yahoo News at Digital Media Conference

Alam Warms, head of Yahoo News

Election ’08 news: 50 percent of public getting info online, end of 3-network, major media election. Candidates working on SEO, comment moderation, etc.

“Credible aggregation” is key to draw audience. [Yahoo has biggest online news audience? Note to self: Fact-check later]

Question: Blogs have no fact-checking, little credibility. A: Blogs *can* do important work, fact-checking, etc. Blogs exposed CBS/MSM misreport on GWBush military service.

There is a role for editorial decision at Yahoo News: We have pulled down non-credible stories, make editorial judgments. [Note to self fact-check that one too.]

Yahoo plan–multimedia aggregation with multiple, quality partners. We do lots of A/B testing, usability, simplicity of use. We don’t believe in video ghettos, says Warms.

We can include exclusive content where we think there are gaps.

Did a web-exclusive interview with sitting President, in partnership with Politico, in May.

Good Morning Yahoo, sponsored by Dunkin Donuts, every day. An aggregation of morning content.

No audience quetions? What’s up with that?

Yahoo Beating Google! Sort of

The latest traffic figures from comScore shows that Yahoo has a comfortable lead over Google.

In a way.  If you look at the numbers in a certain light.

In the measure of unique pages views of site networks, all Yahoo sites delivered more views (136 million) than all Google sites (131 million).

In a measure of how many web users had viewed an ad appeared on on any Yahoo site, Yahoo scored 85 percent, compared to Google’s 76.

Of course, these numbers tell, at best, a part of the story. Comparing revenue, searches conducted, total reach, etc., Google has a commanding lead.

And in first place among ad networks whose ads were viewed by the most Internet viewers? Why, advertising.com,  now owned by Time-Warner’s AOL.

Mea Culpa: I Was Right

Listen, I hate to admit it as much as anyone, but I was right.

They say a stopped clock is correct twice a day, and this is far more likely to explain my apparent prescience than, well, any real prescience. One of my tics is to hammer blindly at the low value of Web video, so every once in a while I’m bound to appear correct. 

Right after the YouTube/CNN debates, the event struck me as a period piece, a captured moment when user-generated Web video is riding high as the 2.0 fad-of-the-moment. I predicted there will be no YouTube debates for the 2012 elections, that pop media culture will have lapsed into another fad.

Last week it was announced that, in an attempt to exploit the e-democratic juggernaut without appearing to simply rip off the YT/CNN event, three Web media outfits will host a kind of poli-geek Webinar with the Democratic candidates.

On Sept. 12 Slate, Yahoo and the Huffington Post will take user-submitted e-mail questions and candidates will “answer” them, live-chat style. The event will permit users to mash up the answers, picking the candidates or topics they want to see and letting them ignore the others.

So it took only a couple of weeks for user-generated video to get flydumped along the pop media highway, with a Webinar taking its (momentary) place.

New prediction, and I know I’m pushing my luck here: Every Democratic candidate’s campaign will have a widget by February.

Unless they already do, and I’ve just missed it.