The New York Times Just Now Discovers OMG!

Looks like Saul Hansell, a blogger at the venerable New York Times has just now discovered Yahoo's "celebrity gossip" site called "OMG!".

DUH!

I stumbled across the thing the other day when I was trying to find out if Yahoo offered a comprehensive PC security software suite.

Now Saul Hansel is saying that OMG! is a copycat of AOL's celebrity gossip site, TMZ but that OMG! is getting a great deal more traffic because Yahoo is heavily promoting it on their main site.

I don't know where he's getting this idea.

In fact, just today I decided to add a "Celebrity Blog' section to my blogroll and went looking on the main Yahoo site and on the right side where the original OMG! link was, is some new site called Bix that is apparently a Karaoke and contest site or some such foolishness.

Now ... you have to go to the link that says "More Yahoo Services" and then you have to find OMG is just plain alphabetical order.

Of course I suspect all of these sites may be a rip-off of The Bastardly, although, to tell you the truth, I hadn't been keeping up with these "Celebrity Gossip" sites.

Of course one might wonder what sort of coverage the United Online twins, Juno and Netzero might have in this area. Of course if any of you have ever had a Juno or Netzero email account, you know that REAL trailer park experience you get with them from the constant mass inundations you get with spam from Publisher's Clearing House and the like.

Of course a little examination of these sites reveals something absolutely alarming - the United Online arena has NOT gotten into the "portal" business.

The main United Online site has some interesting news about the new NetZero and Juno Video Mail services. I have no idea if this works yet as I did send a short video mail from my Juno account to my mother's Juno account but she hasn't told me if she's gotten it yet. The main United Online Site also has links to the major United Online "brands": Classmates.com, MyPoints, MySite, Juno, and NetZero.

Now the two best known of these are Juno and Netzero.

Juno started out as a free "log-on, download, log-off" email service, but a cursory examination of the web site shows just an ad for the "premium" Juno services and not much else. No games, no chat rooms, nothing of the sort. Of course you can sign up for free web-based email, and then after you log in you get hammered with ads from Singlesnet.com, Ford, Microsoft Live Search, University of Phoenix, Best Western, and, let's face it, a bunch of dreck that you might see on HERE, but nothing FUN. On the other hand, I guess there's only so much FUN you can have on a modem, which presumably is the primary way that Juno users get online.

NetZero started back in the day with the notion that, with special software that REALLY brutalized you with ads, they could give away dial-up Internet access.

Turned out they couldn't.

The do still offer a free service that allows you to get online via dial-up for 10 hours/month, but their unlimited "HiSpeed" service costs $9.95/mo.

Again, you can sign in for a free email account, anc once you log in you get hit up with ads for StubHub, ING Direct, Bank of America, LendingTree, but no major excitment on the home page before you log in.

Well, maybe the United Online people will find this very blog and put up something interesting ... :)