US AOL news site gets 2.0 makeover
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 26 June 2007 at 08:11
Tags: AOL, Blogs, Yahoo
AOL is rebuilding its US news site in a blog-style format, Reuters reports. A look at the public beta of the new site (reported by PaidContent) shows that it has adopted many blog-style conventions, notably reverse-chronological listing of the latest stories. Each story allows commenting and includes Digg-style voting buttons.
Lewis D’Vorkin, the Time Warner-owned portal’s senior vice president of News and Sports told Reuters: “I truly believe that when you go to most news sites, it’s a Web 1.0 world … They have rearranged the furniture. We have built new furniture.”
D’Vorkin also revealed that personalisation features will be added to the site within three months using technology from Relegence, a company specialising in seach technology for financial news and information that AOL acquired last year.
Reuters reports that while rival new portal Yahoo! has been gaining readers, AOL has been slipping. In May figures, Yahoo! was up 8 per cent to 33.7m unique users, while AOL fell 12 per cent to 19.1m uniques.
Update 27/9: AOL UK has no plans for a similar redesign, the company says.
