New (Beta) Yahoo Local News
This from Son-of-a-Pitch; Yahoo News is now offering Yahoo Local News headlines, something that Topix actually has been doing for quite a while now. You can kind of do the local news thing at Google if you sign up for Google Personalized Search but it’s not very streamlined.
By the way, Yahoo Local News doesn’t have a “add this to My Yahoo” button yet; that’s probably something that should go on the to-do list immediately, since according to this article from IT Management My Yahoo commands a whopping 59.02% share of the top 20 feed aggregators.
Thanks Wendy and a warm welcome to Slashdot Readers.
Yahoo is off to a nice start in its Local News offering (albeit late as AOL has been offering this, now via Topix.net, for the last 10 years), but ideally I would like to see the ability to choose between more targeted local news categories like Sports, Business, and Entertainment.
Most of the local news publications, especially the real world newspapers, offer such targeted section RSS Feeds and since Yahoo News is using RSS Feeds for aggregation sources, the integration of such a system should be doable.
Here are some examples of Yahoo Local News in action:
* New York
Yahoo Local News is also open to suggestions for Local News Inclusion, so if you own, operate or enjoy a local news site which is not listed, you can suggest it to Yahoo and hopefully it will be added.
Notice that on the Suggestion Form, question #4 asks : What geographic area does this news source cover?
Yahoo Local, with Maps, Local Answers, User Reviews, Ratings and now Local News is becoming an excellent starting point for local information and a strong marketing channel for Local Businesses. Now if Yahoo Search Marketing would get their geographic targeting act together!
