PR meets the WWW / Constantin Basturea’s weblog

(Updated April 23, 2005)

Yahoo’s blogging platform — cleverly named Yahoo! 360° — has launched a product blog. I really hope that the person responsible for setting it up will be interviewed and kindly asked to spell out, in print, on radio and TV, the weblog’s memorable, easy-to-remember, URL:

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-1qCkw2Ehaak.hdNZkEAzDrpa4Q–

Update:

Commenting on Steve Rubel’s blog, an anonymous "360 Team Member" is taking him to task for using the ugly URL "when the link on every single page is http://blog.360.yahoo.com/product_360 and it works just fine," and explains that "the persistent (scrambled) links are for people who want to protect their Yahoo! ID."

That’s great, but the problem is that most of the people will land on Yahoo! 360°’s product blog without being logged into their Yahoo! accounts. The permalinks for the blog are carrying the same ugly sequence, and if you want to go to the blog’s home, you’ll click in the left side menu on Blog or on Top Page, which –surprise– has the same 1qCkw2E…. in its URL. There’s nowhere on the blog an indication on what’s the blog’s friendly URL (in this case, blog.360.yahoo.com/product_360), so I don’t understand what the "team member" means by "the link [is] on every single page."

By the way, I stumbled upon Yahoo! 360’s blog by following a link from b-spirit.com’s blog, who read about it on The Blog Herald. I guess we’ll have to be excused for not logging into our Yahoo! accounts first :)

Now, it’s great that Yahoo! 360 thought about protecting the Yahoo ID of those who are using their services, but maybe it could reconsider how this feature was implemented. For example, how about allowing users to write the URL of their blog in (a more) natural way, a la Blogspot?

Here’s another example, that maybe it will illustrate better the problem on using human-unfriendly URLs. If the person commenting on Steve’s blog is actually a Yahoo! 36o team member (which I doubt), then the name of Jeff Weiner should ring a bell. Mr. Weiner is Senior VP of Search and Marketplace at Yahoo! — and he has a blog. Let’s say I don’t know the URL of his blog, so I’ll go to Google (I know, I’m mean) and search for "Jeff Weiner blog". Guess what I found? Exactly:

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-zuC3Zp07bKNSlo73LN4rX7c-

I doubt that Mr. Weiner will print this URL on his business card. There’s no indication on the blog’s homepage of what its friendly URL must be, or if it has one; and I’m not sure that the author will be willing to share his Yahoo! ID with the rest of the world. So, what’s to be done?