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April 1, 2007

Yahoo Underground Launches - Fringe Culture News

Michael Arrington

17 comments »

Yahoo Underground went live yesterday, although the blog post on Yodel Anecdoteal is dated April 1. April Fools joke? I have no idea. There was no PR outreach on the product prior to launch, which is rare at Yahoo. And the blog post won’t accept comments, which is also odd.

But the Underground site itself is fairly elaborate (creation of the underground.yahoo.com subdomain, and lots of original video and conent). If this is an April Fools joke it sure was a lot of work to throw away on April 2nd.

It’s purpose is to “explores America’s fringe cultures with reporting brought to life with original songs and music.” It’s run by Brad Miskell, who writes for the New York Times and seems to be an actual person who is into fringe culture. The site is integrated into Yahoo News and readers are invited to submit their own content via blog posts, flickr photos and Yahoo Video.

Yahoo Underground introductory video below:

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 2:53 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Stephen Sclafani

    April 1st, 2007 at 3:17 am

    Yahoo is probably pulling a Gmail.

  2. Michael Arrington

    April 1st, 2007 at 3:28 am

    yeah, that’s my current best guess (Gmail was also launched on April 1).

  3. security

    April 1st, 2007 at 7:26 am

    This is a cool idea :-D - Even it this does turn out to be an April Fools hoax, it should become a reality.

    There is also the possiblity of them needing to compete with the press that Google would surely be generating today

  4. Yakito

    April 1st, 2007 at 11:22 am

    Hehe pls don’t tell me the throw all that money just for a April Fools day.

  5. Tranix.net

    April 1st, 2007 at 12:58 pm

    It’s April’s Fool Day and hard to tell if it’s true or not :-)

  6. brian

    April 1st, 2007 at 1:19 pm

    Yahoo Tech tech.yahoo.com pulled a cute little April fools day joke as well!

  7. OhCash

    April 1st, 2007 at 3:40 pm

    What a great marketing strategy. Making you wonder for hours if they’re new feature is reality or a total joke. these companies sure have the money to throw away to play with our minds.
    Business School

  8. caca

    April 1st, 2007 at 5:05 pm

    what are vice magazine’s annual revenues? yahoo is really going long tail here

  9. Thom Zellik

    April 1st, 2007 at 5:43 pm

    Yahoo, the epitome of bland mainstream consumerism, doing an underground site? Oy.

    Is this another product from their hollywood branch that won’t die?

  10. Anon

    April 1st, 2007 at 6:24 pm

    Uhh, I think you guys are missing the point. Either they put way too much work into this site (which has a rather small audience) or, much more likely, this is a demostration of the huge flexibility of their infrastructure. Notice the integration of this with Flickr, Yahoo! Video, their news services, etc. Apparently, they have the details worked out so well, they can kick out a really thin “vertical” like this with relative ease. I would be really surprised if they didn’t release a ton more of these within the coming months, trying to pull tiny communities into the bigger Yahoo! network.

  11. Direct Textbooks

    April 1st, 2007 at 8:19 pm

    Real or not, it’s cool, and I think it’s actually got decent potential. Maybe not enough for them to bother with, but I’ve seen much worse.

  12. Rich Skrenta

    April 1st, 2007 at 10:09 pm

    This is ‘Yahoo Singing News’, which they put out a press release about a little while ago. Sigh.

  13. rack pallet

    April 2nd, 2007 at 6:31 am

    Just a mash up of - all of yahoo’s API’s …

    - Probably took 5 guys; 2 weeks.

  14. Frank

    April 30th, 2007 at 9:50 pm

    All I saw was a fancy dress competition.
    Could have done better!

  15. Jimmy

    April 30th, 2007 at 9:53 pm

    I understand the persective,
    but what are the goals of this show?

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