Check out a search for, say, “prom” or “football”. Would most folks making those searches rather be finding images about the subject in general, or pictures people have taken of themselves or other people they know? Both, I’m sure, but not the latter in preference to the former. That’s what you get with Yahoo. “images.yahoo.com” might as well be called “flickrsearch.yahoo.com”. It’s an ad for Flickr. And it’s annoying. And I say that even though I have >17,000 pix on Flickr and I like the service.

Worse, when you run side-by-side searches, you see how much slower Yahoo is. The football search didn’t have results for a minute or more. You think Microsoft is going to improve on that? Will two slows make a fast? Kinda don’t think so. It’s a side thing, but I am convinced that Microsoft+Yahoo = (-Microsoft)(-Yahoo). Where the dashes are minus symbols. The merger will kill or subtract Xtreme value from both.

– Write quotable stuff about interesting subjects
– Link a lot
– Give lots of credit
– Think AND logic, not OR
– Keep doing that

I think that there must be some type of subtle mental sync going on in the blog-o-sphere.

In my own experience the only things that gave me any “traction” when measured in terms of blog hits involved someone else picture of a cat in a trash can, and some experiments I’m doing in photography… I hope that’s not all I get remembered for.

Thanks again.

–Mike–