Neomeme

Not long ago, I blogged about my proposal for large corporations to quickly gather feedback from large groups of users and at the same time increase transparency by soliciting comments in an open forum with Digg-like voting. Yesterday, Yahoo implemented that exact system. I applaud Yahoo for this large shift towards greater openness with users, and I hope other major corporations follow suit. Consumers get their voice heard, Yahoo gets free market research, and everyone wins. And I applaud synchronicity for this almost too weird coincidence.

Unfortunately, Mr. Yahoo Bigshot obviously didn’t read my other post about how the average voter shouldn’t be trusted with anything(for those of you who are the average voter, the main point is in nice big bold letters in the middle of the post). As a result, instead of hailing what is arguably a very major step in applying Web 2.0 to market data, most of the comments on the Yahoo announcement range from “I hope you get sued big time” to “This is a rip off of Digg” to the far more eloquent “The cheapest ripp(sic) of(sic, again) I saw in a long time!” . Okay, so Yahoo used similar-looking buttons and basic layout. But, kids, can we please look beyond that and consider the concept? Yahoo is using Digg-style voting for a completely different purpose! Saying that Yahoo is just ripping off Digg is like saying American Idol is ripping off the American democratic process and we should sue Ryan Seacrest with some tactical nuclear strikes immediately.

One Yahoo user with intelligence of truly Einsteinean proportions took some time off from studying string theory to contribute the following insight:

“Who would be defending a ripoff of Digg for Yahoo! Autos other than Yahoo employees? Do you think there’s actual Yahoo! fans out there defending this? LOL C’mon guys.”

For the record, I am not a Yahoo! employee, and yet I like them, a lot. The’ve really taken major steps away from the “web portal” position, and have made some very intelligent and exciting acquisitions in the Web 2.0 sphere like Flickr, del.icio.us, and MyBlogLog. Their downfall in this case was that they were a bit too open, failing to moderate comments that were flat out idiotic. If these are the kinds of people who will be critiquing Yahoo in their voting feedback system, perhaps the wisdom of crowds they are relying on is not so wise after all.