.

A L S O_ T O D A Y Boo for Yahoo By Aaron Weiss How did the people's champ of the Net get so corporate and lazy? 21st Log Girl game pioneer Purple Moon shuts down   T A B L E__T A L K What is multimedia good for? Discuss the educational, entertainment and other uses for technology in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk   Search for technology books, software and more at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author     ____________________ Technology news from Teen in dispute with Apple over domain ____________________   R E C E N T L Y When candidates spam By Deborah Scoblionkov A mass e-mailing by a New Jersey Republican stirs up an online hornet's nest (02/19/98) Bear essentials By Tim Cavanaugh Christopher Byron explains how day traders have fueled the tech market roller derby (02/18/98) The war for Wired By Kevin Kelleher Lycos' takeover of Wired's Web sites sparks a bitter shareholder battle that could kill the deal (02/17/98) The tomorrow tribe By Etelka Lehoczky Virginia Postrel's "dynamism" manifesto reaches out to geeks (02/16/99) Confessions of an online sex columnist By Patrizia DiLucchio Sure, talking about sex is fun. So is telling people what to do (02/12/99) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - -

___Yay for Yahoo HOW DO I LOVE THEE? LET ME COUNT THE PAGES. BY ANDREW LEONARD I'm a fickle, fickle man, the kind of guy who will blithely abandon his favorite search engine for a fetching newcomer without a backward glance, not just once but countless times. The last five years of my Web life are littered with such betrayals: I forsook Webcrawler for Altavista, dumped Altavista for Hotbot, spurned Hotbot after a wild fling and hurried back to the forgiving arms of Altavista. Lately, I've caught myself making eyes at Google; and sometimes, desperate for an URL in the middle of the night, I've even been seen slumming around with the likes of Lycos, Infoseek and Excite. I have no shame. But through it all, I've remained more or less true to Yahoo. As in any relationship, we've had our ups and downs. I'm in a bit of a huff right now at the recent announcement that Yahoo will expedite the cataloging of Web sites for a fee. How could you, Yahoo? I was also appalled at the unseemly purchase of the free Web home page aggregator GeoCities, a house of cards if ever there was one. I don't even think all that highly of Yahoo's ungainly directory structure. When I'm actually looking for something on the Web, Yahoo is usually the place I end up after every other search engine has failed me, and I'm reduced to hoping that one of Yahoo's clumsy categories will at long last point me in the right direction. Nonetheless, I still love Yahoo. Indeed, as the years go by, I adore it with ever-increasing passion. It's the flip side of my fickleness. Where once I might have accused Yahoo of representing the dastardly commercialization of cyberspace, I now hold it to be an exemplary standard-bearer for what the Web can be. Where once I took pride in my inconstancy, treasuring my ability to always find the new hot site as my Eagle Scout badge of Web surfing honor, I now find I'm finally ready to pledge my troth: Yahoo, now and forever. But what exactly is Yahoo? I have always been loath to parrot manufactured "portal" hype, but I have to admit that the term "search engine" never did accurately describe Yahoo. Yahoo organizes Web sites according to human-selected categories -- it's more of a Yellow Pages than anything else. Or at least it was. Nowadays, Yahoo's "Internet directory" aspect is almost an afterthought. The real action is in the personalized services -- the finance pages, free e-mail and so on. I guess I'll just have to content myself with calling Yahoo a great big honking huge mess of stuff, with pages that load quickly, displaying information that I want. That doesn't make it unique, of course. One of the great ironic pastimes of 1998 was watching every major self-styled portal site scramble to ensure that it looked exactly like all the others and offered the identical set of services: e-mail, news headlines, weather, horoscopes and, inevitably, stock quotes. Is there a page on the Web anywhere today that doesn't offer stock quotes? So why Yahoo? Well, I have my reasons, and they range from the crass to the principled to the fundamentally lazy. Let's begin with the crass. Like most veterans of Web publishing, I'm a sucker for mind-boggling page-view counts. Yahoo's 167 million page views a day (in December) fill me with a trembling awe. Those are some big numbers: All by themselves they make the Web into a mass phenomenon and throw down the gauntlet at the feet of those doddering champions of old media -- TV, radio, print. Say what you will about the possible ineffectiveness of Web advertising banners, Yahoo's audience can't be ignored. It commands the respect (and lust) of Madison Avenue and Wall Street. Ah, but you say, what blithering fool would ever desire the respect of Madison Avenue and Wall Street? Isn't the Web's greatness supposed to be its diversity, its warm embrace of every niche and nook, its not yet necessarily ready-for-prime-commercial-time ethos? Isn't one of the best things about the Web the way it allows us to nimbly avoid being mass marketed and propagandized willy-nilly according to focus-group studies and demographic analyses? N E X T_ P A G E .|. Sure, Yahoo has compromised -- but less than everyone else ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM McCAULEY - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.