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The 9 on Yahoo – highlighting the web

by Darren

It seems that Yahoo is competing with RocketBoom now with The 9. The show is hosted by the lovely and upbeat Maria Sansone. The show does indeed look similar in format to the few versions I saw of RocketBoom, albeit with higher production quality. Maria’s presentation is relaxed and cheerful.

The websites they picked to highlight were strange, with an emphasis on self-promotion for Yahoo. The design is pretty slick, with a tabbed calendar system that allows you to easily navigate between recent shows.

The new Yahoo homepage has less and less references to external websites, and it definitely looks like they’re taking a further stab into the burgeoning field of web media.

I have no idea how long they’ve been working on the project. The option just sort of appeared on the new Ajax-y Yahoo home page. Maria’s 360 profile also looks new, but her WikiPedia page has more information. Her career has been steeped in old media work, including her record breaking stint as the world’s youngest TV reporter.

The new Yahoo homepage is getting very Web 2.0 in it’s appearance, and they’re doing interestng things to attract internal clicks. It’s almost as if Yahoo has gone the route of “vertical integration” and has taken every aspect of the web in-house. I’m sure similar projects are in the works for all the major web portals.

Have you seen the show? What do you think?