I just finished listening to this IT Conversations podcast of an interview with Yahoo's Terry Semel from the O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference last year:
http://www.itconversations.com/audio/download/ITConversations-844.mp3
Semel was knocked by the digerati as too old-school to help Yahoo compete effectively with Google. He does apply a "the-way-you-win-is-to-have-both-great-content-and-distribution" framework to Yahoo's strategy, but what this interview reveals is an appreciation of the equal importance of technology in the mix (for aggregating and syndicating that content), and an open-minded aggressiveness about balancing deals to scoop up others' innovations with Yahoo's own home-grown stuff. Also interesting to hear him comment on Google, its evolution from a search tool to a portal, and how that compares with what Yahoo has done so far.
More on Yahoo: this podcast of Paul Levine's (GM of Yahoo Local) talk at Where 2.0 on the "architecture of participation" (a term he borrows from Tim O'Reilly):
http://www.itconversations.com/audio/download/ITConversations-807.mp3
If you're not familiar with Web 2.0 stuff like map APIs and tagging, this might be useful to help familiarize you with these services as Yahoo implements them. If you are, this will be less interesting and feel more like an ad for Yahoo's experiments.
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