That, I can't stomach 

See if you recognize this voice. The clip is the newest installment in my podcast game that is not catching on. Still, I'm unaccountably optimistic about it.

Poor Yahoo: one small example that might illustrate a bigger problem 

I find myself wanting to give Yahoo extra chances and too much benefit of the doubt. I want their stuff to be better than Google's, and they keep disappointing me.

Susan Mernit, who leads Yahoo's product development, wrote this week about criteria for prioritizing. I'm sure it must be tough to keep all the scattered and disparate projects in view. I don't know Susan, but I read her blog. She seems like a smart cookie, and I can't think that in her role she would be responsible for the production priority problems I'm suggesting here.

The now-infamous peanut butter memo came to mind this morning as I checked my server logs and went wandering. I hadn't done this with any of my sites for a number of months. I'm used to seeing Yahoo slurp come along and index things, but I didn't remember ever having seen this entry:

Agent: YahooFeedSeeker/2.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide)

So (you know, like you do when it's Saturday morning and you're feeling at leisure), I went to remind myself what "publisher" is and means at Yahoo. I think it's a newer 2-ohier frontend for MyYahoo, but with more emphasis on feeds? [Update: or maybe it's related to Publisher Network, the Google AdSense competitor, but that's not quite clear to someone stumbling on it. Is it?]

I don't frequent my Yahoo start page. Maybe I've been there twice. While I was mosying I made a new page on my MyYahoo space, as the instructions proposed.

The result was so uninspiring.

I don't know about you, but I expect Yahoo to be cooler than that. I know they know how, but -- here's where the peanut butter thesis comes in -- they don't seem to tend to all their properties closely enough to keep them up to date and on the edge. Spread too thin?

For example, see how the podcast feed displays:

Guess what happens when you click on the speaker icon. (You can try it here.)

These days, you would expect a nice little Flash player to slide out and start playing the MP3, wouldn't you. But it's just a plain link to the MP3 that Quicktime plays on a separate browser page. Handy as an alternative or to download? Definately. So three years ago to just have that link? Yes.

By contrast, see how Bloglines displays the same feed. I realize it's a completely different sort of app; I'm talking about presentation style.

In addition to providing the Flash player, it picks up an image and description from my feed, and the whole effect is... sorry, Yahoo, it's just cooler -- like you used to be. That makes me sad, because something like updating the way a feed displays would be so incredibly quick and easy to implement. Why not just do it, so others like me aren't led to believe that a) you are too disorganized to tend to little things that can be important, or b) you don't care.