Category: Net Culture

Inspired by a footnote in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web which reveals the secret name of Yahoo, I have undertaken a search on the site in question for information on its history. Here are a few facts that you might not know about the benevolent patriarch of internet directories:

• When the site first began, Yahoo! had no more than one hundred accesses a day.
• Across 1994, the site’s growth rate doubled almost every month.
• By May 1995, the site was receiving 2 million page accesses a day. God only knows have much it receives today.
• Yahoo! started off listing sex sites, but stopped doing so because every time they listed one, the amount traffic it would receive would bring it down. Porn sites rarely lasted more than a couple of days after being listed on the site.
• And I quote: “The San Jose Mercury news recently noted that ‘Yahoo is closest in spirit to the work of Linnaeus, the 18th century botanist whose classification system organized the natural world’.” Yahoo! – Company History
• ‘The two developers of Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, started their guide in April 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet.’ Yahoo! – Company History
• Yahoo was one of the first, and is still one of the few, internet companies to actually make a profit. And its annual revenue is huge: “For the fiscal year ended 12/31/00, revenues increased 88% to $1.11 billion. Net income rose 48% to $70.8 million.” Market Guide.

So what is the secret name of [god]Yahoo![/god]? David Filo and Jerry Yang insist that the name was chosen by themselves because they considered themselves ‘yahoos’, but many others suggest that the name is an acronym from a more wild geek frontier, an acronym which stands for: “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”.

Reasons for Matt Haughey to assemble london.metafilter.com / gb.metafilter.com or uk.metafilter.com: [Regional Metafilters?]

1. British webloggers are the single largest group of English language webloggers outside the US.
2. British webloggers are unable to participate in the large blocks of American-specific content that Metafilter currently provides (the election has brought that into focus).
3. Without wanting to sound all corporate, Matt has developed an effective brand and an easy to use, functional site that does exactly what it says on the tin.
4. There has been discussion about setting up a similar kind of site in the UK – but my feelings are that in this circumstance if we went with uk.metafilter.com we would be helping an individual extend a useful site – a site that might in time develop worldwide – while simultaneously having functionality, look and feel and an ethos that we respect. And any possible improvements to the concept and function could be implemented simultaneously over all the sites. It’s like with inconnected.org – the community helps the project because we find it interesting and we know the person involved. Any one of us might come up with a great idea like Metafilter, and it would be nice to think that if that happened, our colleagues and friends from other weblogs would help us develop it to its full potential.

Are you with me?

So ICANN are considering new top-level domains for the web – to which we can only breathe a sigh of relief and pray to god that the new ones will be both functional and worthy of getting excited over. People are straying too far into country domains to find the URL of their dreams because the current hierarchy is collapsing under the weight of demand.

The most worrying aspect of the new domains is intellectual property rights and “passing off”. If you have a name trademarked over several countries (and you don’t even have to be a particularly large company to do this), you can legitimately sue someone who is using your trademark in their domain name as long as they are encroaching on your subject of business. For a company like Yahoo! of course, there is very little that ISN’T their business already. Hence lots of people could be sued.

This is all sounds fine and dandy, but often it isn’t. Just because someone else doesn’t have the right to do what you are doing with the name doesn’t mean 1) that they can’t buy the domain name anyway or 2) that they won’t buy it and then decide to break the law (on the assumption that you just won’t take them to court). Which means that an increase in available domain names may very just mean an increase in the outlay of medium and large sized companies who wish to protect their brand.

,p>Clearly, the most sensible step is to clearly use the TLD to define strict areas of interest – strict in that they are clear and easily definable (like .arts or .xxx) rather than that they are enforced strictly. Enforcement should be irrelevant if the names are clear enough. The alternative – a proliferation of vague domain names such as .web (for which the apparent TLD analogue .net already exists) and .firm (TLD analogue.com) simply means that Yahoo! have to buy them. Large blocks of domain names will then disappear from public consumption. It is unlikely, for example, that Yahoo! could or would want to make a case for preserving its copyright on yahoo.xxx.

Of course the corollary of this is that a decent block of these domains have to be produced at the same time. If this is an incremental process, then new domains will be bought incrementally by the companies concerned which is to be avoided. Some of the proposed TLDs are: .arts .kids .xxx and I think perhaps that additional ones might cover the types of website presented as well as the subject matter at hand – perhaps some form of searchengine or directory TLD might be a useful one, or .zine or even .log (.blog?)