Just a few days ago I posted about Yahoo! News's odd practice of not including a link to bookmark articles on del.icio.us, especially odd given that the company owns del.icio.us. To make my point, I used the New York Times website as an example of one of the many media websites that includes "Share" links to del.icio.us and other social bookmarking tools with each and every article. I even included a screenshot from NYTimes.com to illustrate my point.

Well, earlier tonight the Times has made some changes, and del.icio.us is no longer featured as one of the site's bookmarking links. It and Newsvine have been removed in favor of two newcomers to the game, Mixx and Yahoo! Buzz. Mixx, which has only been around for about 6 months, is a social news and multimedia site developed by a former exec at Yahoo! News and USA Today. It's sort of a cross between Digg and Newsvine, where users vote on content found around the web with higher rated content placed higher on the site. Yahoo! Buzz is a similar tool that debuted just a few weeks ago.

With this focus on social voting/ratings (the Digg model) in its "Share" links, the Times appears to be giving a quiet endorsement to that model over simple bookmarking (the del.icio.us model). There is, however, another possibility. Given that Yahoo! owns both del.icio.us and Buzz, its possible that the company simply asked the Times to switch which of its sites the news outlet linked to. Yahoo! clearly is giving Buzz a much bigger push than it has given del.icio.us, illustrated most clearly by the inclusion of Buzz, not del.icio.us, links within Yahoo! News.

What do you think? Is the NY Times betting on the future of the social web, or simply honoring a corporate request?

In the last couple of years, bookmarking and sharing links have become commonplace on news media websites. Read any article on just about any news site, and you'll have the option to bookmark the story on del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Newsvine or several other services. This is becoming as true on a small city newspaper site as it is on a giant like the New York Times.

For those of us who use such services, this is a huge convenience. In fact, that "Recent Reads" block over in the right-hand column of this website is partially powered by my del.icio.us account, with many of the articles in that list added via the kind of bookmark link I'm writing about.

For better or worse, my #1 source of news is still Yahoo! News. Using their RSS feeds, I keep up to date with top stories from the AP, Reuters and others all from one source. Sadly, however, Yahoo! News is one of the few big name news websites that doesn't offer its readers bookmarking links. Sure, they have a link to vote for an article on the company's new Digg competitor, Yahoo! Buzz, but there are zero bookmarking options. What makes this omission all the more notable is the fact that Yahoo! owns del.icio.us. Yes, that's right. Yahoo! owns one of the web's biggest social bookmarking services, a service that is linked to by nearly every major media outlet in America, yet the company doesn't even link to it from within its own site.

Note that, for your convenience, I've included a link for you to bookmark this post on del.icio.us. And I don't even own the company.

So Yahoo's instant messaging service and MySpace are both down simultaneously. I don't know how long MySpace has been down, but Yahoo Messenger has been unavailable since I got up this morning. That makes this outage quite significant, especially in light of the fact that Yahoo and Microsoft recently began a public test that allows users of one service to contact users of the other. The problems don't seem to have spread to Yahoo's new partner, however, because MSN Messenger remains in full-service.

If MySpace wasn't down, or at least significantly malfunctioning 75% of the time, I might think today's outages were part of some larger conspiracy. After all, in case you haven't been paying attention, World War III did start last week.

Gotta run. "Batman & Robin" just came on HBO2, and if I don't change the channel soon, my television (and my brain) will self-destruct. Besides, "The Big Lebowski" is coming on Showtime right now. Again. I think I'll watch that instead. Again.

Yahoo! has become one of the biggest facilitators of phishing scams, claims an anti-spam group, and the web giant is doing little to stop it:

Yahoo! is hosting thousands of fraudulent websites that have domain names containing the words "bank", "PayPal" or "eBay", according to a leading anti-spam group Spamhaus.

Spamhaus claims Yahoo! is hosting almost 5,000 domain names using these words, many of which are linked to phishing scams. [...]

Spamhaus had written to Yahoo! about a number of cases, but received no replies.

According to Spamhaus, both AOL and Microsoft frequently scan their networks for fraudulent domain names and remove offending websites from their systems.

A representative for Yahoo! says that the Spamhaus report is the first the company has heard of fraudulent use of its network by phishers.

[Silicon.com] The Spam Report: Yahoo! accused of hosting thousands of phishing sites (via LJ Tech Blog)

The story of a family's fight to see its late son's email is generating a lot of debate this week. U.S. Marine Justin Ellsworth was killed in Iraq last month, and webmail provider Yahoo! is refusing to grant his family access to his account. Yahoo! based its decision on company policy that email accounts and all contents associated with them terminate upon a user's death and that accounts are deleted after 90 days of inactivity. The story took a turn for the absurd today with USA Today reporting that Ellsworth's family has received offers from two hackers to help them break into their son's account. To their credit, the family has expressed no interest in such a course of action, opting instead to seek a resolution with Yahoo!

Those supporting the soldier's family state the importance of protecting history. Comparing the email account to letters written by WWII soldiers, they say the deletion of the email by Yahoo! would amount to the loss of important documents of family history.

As the son of an avid genealogist (and former Marine), I certainly understand a family's desire to obtain any record of their son's life so that it can be preserved and passed down to future generations. As a fallen American soldier, Justin Ellsworth deserves that kind of honor (and then some). But if his family wants a record of his wartime correspondence, they should obtain copies from the recipients of that correspondence.

Access to Ellsworth's email account would give his family access to a lot more than just his war emails. In fact, any emails authored by the soldier himself would only be included in the account if he opted to save his sent messages, an option that is turned off by default in Yahoo! Mail. What family members would be more likely to find are emails sent by others to their son. What about those people's right to privacy? Yahoo! is in no position to weigh the merits of every request it receives to open a deceased user's account. In a time when civil liberties seem to be disposable, a company that truly protects its customers' privacy should be applauded.

Ellsworth's father says that what he really wants access to are the final messages that the soldier didn't get a chance to send before his death. The family is hoping to print out copies of these drafts for inclusion in a scrapbook. Unfortunately, because Ellsworth had not yet sent these messages to anyone, it is arguable that he had not yet waived any expectation of privacy associated with the messages. Furthermore, it's simply not possible to grant access to these messages without compromising the privacy of messages that the family has no entitlement to see. (Unless Yahoo! staffers read all of the account's contents themselves to determine what to release and what to protect; but such a course of action in itself would be an invasion of privacy.)

There's a reason we password protect our accounts: because the contents are private. I love my family very much, but that doesn't necessarily mean I want them sifting through my inbox after I'm gone. In reality, I'd have no problem with them accessing my email accounts, but my ISP shouldn't make that assumption for me. Or anyone else.

What about corporate email accounts? Many people use their email at work for personal correspondence (regardless of their employer's email policies). Should companies be expected to grant network access to a deceased employee's family? I doubt such an expectation would ever garner widespread support. Why, then, should a corporation's right to protect its secrets be any more important than an individual's right to do the same thing?

[CNN.com] Dead Marine's kin plead for e-mail
[USATODAY.com] Marine's family gets e-mail dispute help
[Slashdot.org] Dead? Hope You Left Someone Your Passwords
[iafrica.com] Yahoo blocks dead soldier's emails