Yahoo to Buy Ad Company for $680M

Yahoo announced the acquisition of RightMedia — it had already been a “strategic 20 percent investment” — a wise, counterplay to Google’s recent $3.1B acquisition of DoubleClick. Doesn’t seem to be a hasty reactionary move as Right Media’s Exchange system could be a boon to Yahoo’s publisher network and it’s new Adwords-like search advertising platform code-named Panama. Yahoo CEO Terry Semel’s optimistic blog post is here. New York Times gets a jump on the story here. A conference call will take place Monday morning and surely the industry-watchers will have more deets and analysis.

AOL Launches Clone of Yahoo Home Page

Years ago, the backronym “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” (YAHOO) was born out of Jerry [Yang] and David’s [Filo] Guide to the World Wide Web and became the first successful Web portal. Later, Amazon.com’s model was the one everybody tried to copy. And now, it’s back to Yahoo. Yahoo updated it’s home page last year, and now, AOL is launching an eerily similar version in which not much more than the name changes. Is this infringing or just down right poseurish?

More on the imitation job at PCWorld, DownloadSquad, TechCrunch.

TribLocal, MySpace News, Yahoo Fully Swallows Upcoming

Is it any surprise that all of the primary links on MySpace News — digg style voting on stories by MySpace’s 160 million users — are to Murdoch-owned entities like the Times of London, FoxNews, and the New York Post?

Chicago Tribune goes hyperlocal with TribLocal — will be watching thic closely.

And After chewing for quite a while, Yahoo! finally wrapped upcoming.org users into their Yahoo! ID and migrates the event listings site to upcoming.yahoo.com

Yahoo! Goes Underground

Choosing to launch on April Fool’s Day, Yahoo! is live with its eccentric, odd news portal, Yahoo! Underground.

Despite whispers that this may in fact be a hoax, this project was mentioned in an October interview (as set for January ’07) with Y! News exec Scott Moore for the PBS Frontline series “News War.”

According to the transcript, Moore says, “We have another project coming out in January that’s called Odd News Underground, and it involves a journalist who also writes songs. So it’s a singing reporter, if you will, and he will be covering a number of very interesting sort of eccentric subject areas.”

In the televised version — you can stream it here — at just over halfway through Chapter 20 of News War, we see a snippet of what would qualify for a great April Fool’s prank, were it not broadcast in February on PBS.

The clip matches up to the content in the Gay Rodeo post, which promises: “We’ll lasso you into a two-step in April.”

The idea is a good one — everybody loves Odd News and profiles of fringe culture, and Brad Miskell has the talent to attract a younger audience to dig the news but unfortunately, the UI is pretty outrageous as you can see below.

As far as making the news fun again, I’m more optimistic about the proposed Luke Burbank-hosted Morning Edition alternative planned for NPR or even (OK, now this is sort of a joke) ONN, the Onion‘s planned 24-hour “news” network.