Yahoo has rolled out a new portal-type service called OurCity, a beta product that aggregates content about cities from across the Yahoo network and Wikipedia. It’s rolled out to just 2 cities so far, Bangalore and Delhi. It is described on the TechMag blog (who brought this to my attention) as a “mashup of yahoo service[s]”, which is an accurate description as there is news, photos, events, videos, etc from Yahoo properties on the pages. There is also some Wikipedia content, but as GigaOm noted – no Yahoo Maps.
There’s a Yahoo City blog online as well, which notes that you can use Our City to explore and share photos, videos, events, news, weather, blogs – all based on locale. This is yet another example of Yahoo spanning out to as many content verticals as possible. Doing city pages makes perfect sense and I suspect it will be integrated into Yahoo Travel once it goes out of beta. City pages would be a natural complement to Yahoo’s travel portal – think LonelyPlanet.
In related news, Steve Rubel picks up on a redesign for Yahoo Sports. Steve notes that “it features bigger photos, more video content and a look and feel that’s similar to the one used for the new Yahoo TV and Yahoo Food.” He also compares it to Brand Universe and concludes that Yahoo is still stuck in silos – i.e. their Web properties are becoming increasingly inconsistent in design and in how much external content they utilize. I think Steve makes a good point, although you have to remember that things like Brand Universe and OurCity are at the experimental stage still (yes, betas!). The older style Yahoo verticals, like Sports, haven’t yet made the transition to utilizing mashups and external content. But they will in time. They have to, otherwise Yahoo risks becoming the AOL of web 2.0 – with internally produced ‘walled garden’ content.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)