Joseph "Dunphy / Party of One" D.'s Profile

I've read a little about the alleged extortion of restaurants by Yelp, and the alleged related censorship, and so (currently) rate this site with a noncommital three stars.

It's my way of admitting that I don't know who's telling the truth, and seriously wonder who's the extortionist in this exchange. Yes, a lot of people have written in to say "I was censored" ... but ... ever been to San Francisco? Ever notice just how many tourist traps that city has, as does Chicago, for that matter? Places that used to make a good income on the philosophy of "take the money and run" back in the good old days when consumers had trouble hearing from each other, except through the filter of an eminently corruptable media - good for them, not so great for us.

How many shills do you suppose those places could hire? How much of a vested interest might they have in seeing a place like this go down? So the truth is, it's difficult for any of us to know what is going on.

But, if you're concerned - and maybe, as a user you should be - one does have a simple, relatively easy alternative to hoping for the best. Create a blog on which you mirror your Yelp reviews, so that is you are censored unjustly, the fact will (one hopes) be witnessed by the lurkers, who will talk. Whatever the truth regarding these accusations might be, let's let it have a chance to be seen.

I would recommend not posting any reviews with this specific service; please note that this is not a generic criticism of Yahoo, but one directed toward Yahoo! Local, specifically. My parting note, which replaced each of my reviews there, gave a few reasons why:

"I couldn't help but notice that weeks later, this review had not found its way onto my blog, and that Yahoo's support staff had refused to respond to my problem report. I also noticed that the one time link from my Yahoo local profile to my Yahoo 360 profile (and blog) had been cut without reason or notification.

The gain in visibility for our blogs and websites is the only form of payment we ever saw, and now we don't even get that? That isn't even Yahoo being cheap, as the site and blog being linked back to were on Yahoo's server, meaning visitors wandering back were going to where Yahoo's ads were on display. This is just Yahoo being bizarre; there is such a thing as flipping the user the bird just for the sake of flipping him the bird. OK, Fine. If they want to be that way about it, I'll just relocate my reviews to a site run by another provider that has shown more respect to those posting reviews, and the yahoo local team can go flip the bird to somebody else."

That other provider, of course, being Yelp, where so far, the team and the people have been pretty cool. There is a Yelp review page for Yahoo itself located here:

http://www.yelp.c...

This rating is subject to being downgraded.

Why did I give them three stars? Because Yahoo isn't really one service, it's a collection of services, each run by its own team, and I felt funny about giving a collective score to such a balkanized outfit. Three stars is my way of shrugging and going "oh, I don't know" in this case.

Their search engine (their core business) still looks decent, for all of the sniping I've seen directed against it in a variety of locations. Geocities does have the virtue of reliability, though the bandwidth allotment is pathetic, so much so that I've found myself forced to host images with offsite services, and you can guess what a joy that has been.

One disturbing pattern that does seem to be consistent among the teams, though, is that Yahoo seems to lean toward being more supportive of the trolls who write in to make trouble, than of the actual users who provide Yahoo with the content that makes its ad revenue possible. Having been around for a few years, I haven't found the censorship at Yahoo to be as unrelenting as some have portrayed it as being, but it is there, and it can be a headache. More on the boards, though, than elsewhere, I think.

Yes, the Yahoo teams do tend to be nonresponsive. Reports of the so-called "peanut butter manifesto" have triggered a low scale panic among Yahoo 360 users, which I alluded to in a blog post

http://tinyurl.co...

and like I said there, a simple "so guys, is this true, are you shutting down" did not get an answer when I asked, or when anybody else asked either, apparently. This seems to be the pattern with them - reliable software (mostly), some degree of flexibility, but no sign that they respect or care about their users in the least. The only good  news about Yahoo support is that they're hardly ever needed.

Addendum, Jan 2008: After refusing (for months) to answer letters send  by users concerned about rumors circulating about Yahoo 360's closing, Yahoo finally confirmed those rumors on Oct.16, giving notice that the service would be closing down in "early 2008", but offering nebulous promises about an unspecified new service that the old 360 blogs could be relocated to, admitting that they, themselves, knew little about it (their own new service) at the time of the announcement. One way or another, those trusting enough to have adopted a "wait and see" approach may now look forward to being rewarded for their loyalty by watching their suddenly relocated blogs drop like rocks in the search engine listings. That's such an obnoxious trick to play on my fellow users, however imprudently unprepared and unwilling to pay attention to the signs (such as Yahoo's refusal to address a panic inducing rumor) as some of them may have been, that I think Yahoo deserves to lose a star for that.

This is now the second highly popular service (that I know of) to be abandoned by the cutting edge professionals in Sunnyvale after they got tired of playing with it. Yahoo Photos is gone, deleted in response to Yahoo's acquisition of Flickr, with reports of user photos lost during the "merger" of their accounts at the old service with their new accounts at Flickr. One might well wonder about the future of Yahoo Video, now that Jumpcut has been acquired.

Yahoo has been reviewed on Stumbleupon:

http://www.stumbl...

and I've started a Yelp review page for Yahoo Local

http://www.yelp.c...

We'll see whether that matters, giving the pending hostile takeover bid by Microsoft. Yahoo has also been reviewed on this other page at Yelp:

http://www.yelp.c...

I would have to agree with Jennifer K. I've been to the Vatican; the Art Institute does not impress on that level. To say that an institution is "world class" is a bold claim to make, and usually a sign that one has seen nothing of the world, which is still a big place. The Art Institute pales even by comparison to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which has done inventive things with its broader and larger collection, often placing objects in context that enriches the visitor's experience of encountering them. Compare seeing antique silver as part of a table setting vs. placed in a glass box; context gives life to the piece.

But that's a little like complaining that the town beauty doesn't look like Alicia Silverstone; odds are that you'd still have loved to take her to the prom. The very best is, almost by definition, a rarity, and the Art Institute is still very, very good, offering more than enough to keep one coming back and to keep a visitor to our city busy for days. The sad news of the closing of the Terra Museum has been good news for the Institute, which acquired the Terra's holdings and added them to its already impressive collection of American Art, displayed in the basement, uncomfortably far below the water table that close to the Lake, but let's try not to think about that.

Frequent shows bring plenty of fresh experiences when one thinks that one might someday get tired of looking at the Renoirs and Monets. The East Asian Art section could stand some expanding, and the African, Indian and Near Eastern art sections are barely there at all, but there are some beautiful woodcuts from Japan. There is also a sad remnant of the Old Stock exchange, a reminder of how casually Chicago's once great architectual heritage was squandered. The room itself can be seen in reconstruction inside the Museum.

http://www.artic....  (Link to Relevant Picture on Art Institute Homepage)

Yes, well worth many visits, and offering a rich variety of pleasant suprises, some old, some new. As the name "Art Institute" suggests, this is also a school offering classes in a variety of media, so there are student shows that are often worth visiting.

The free day, as somebody noted, is now Thursday, but strictly speaking the admission price is only a suggestion, and speaking as one of those to be currently numbered among the poor, I can report that I've seen no grief when I've paid what my budget would bear. (Less than the $8, very often). The Institute is open until 8 pm on Tuesday, and offers far more than I've even hinted at in this brief review.