Yahoo has rolled out a new portal-type service called OurCity, a beta product that aggregates content about cities from across the Yahoo network and Wikipedia. It’s rolled out to just 2 cities so
far, Bangalore and Delhi. It is described on the TechMag blog (who
brought this to my attention) as a “mashup of yahoo service[s]”, which is an accurate
description as there is news, photos, events, videos, etc from Yahoo properties on the
pages. There is also some Wikipedia content, but as GigaOm noted –
no Yahoo Maps.
There’s a Yahoo
City blog online as well, which notes that you can use Our City to explore and share
photos, videos, events, news, weather, blogs – all based on locale. This is yet another
example of Yahoo spanning out to as many content verticals as possible. Doing city pages
makes perfect sense and I suspect it will be integrated into Yahoo Travel once it goes out of beta. City pages
would be a natural complement to Yahoo’s travel portal – think LonelyPlanet.
In related news, Steve Rubel picks up on a
redesign for Yahoo Sports. Steve notes that “it
features bigger photos, more video content and a look and feel that’s similar to the one
used for the new Yahoo TV and Yahoo Food.” He also compares it to Brand Universe and
concludes that Yahoo is still stuck in silos – i.e. their Web properties are becoming
increasingly inconsistent in design and in how much external content they utilize. I
think Steve makes a good point, although you have to remember that things like Brand
Universe and OurCity are at the experimental stage still (yes, betas!). The older style
Yahoo verticals, like Sports, haven’t yet made the transition to utilizing mashups and
external content. But they will in time. They have to, otherwise Yahoo risks becoming the
AOL of web 2.0 – with internally produced ‘walled garden’ content.
