Yahoo 360 moving is almost done

Those last few posts, which (as I've said) were the last few I posted to my old Yahoo 360 blog (the precursor to "Monday Never Comes") as the preface to a story I'll tell ... later. I want to get outside.

I will predict that very few people will be pleased with what they'll end up reading. While I will concede that Yahoo's actions are causing a lot of trouble for a lot of users, I won't agree that Yahoo is completely to blame for their difficulties. Note the date on those last few posts, which I've moved to this blog (instead of to Monday Never Comes) - as early as 2007, the signs of what was to come were unmistakable, and some of us had the sense to act on them. That's about the time I copied my 360 posts over to Blogger.

It's now 2009, Yahoo 360 will be closing in a few weeks, and what have the remaining users been doing? For over 1 1/2 years, they've been pleading with Yahoo to please not do this, calling the Yahoo staff fools for not keeping 360 alive, and sometimes copping an attitude with those who suggested moving on, calling on those present to adopt a "wait and see" attitude - in other words, wait for the river to start flooding before piling up the sandbags. Now comes closing time. I'm going to suffer a little, because I'll lose a few links that I can't update - mostly in posts to guestbooks I left back in 2007 - but the search engines have already found my new place. I should be in generally good shape.

Our wait and see crowd, on the other hand, has some frantic downloading to do, followed by years of trying to get into Google. If you saw my old place, toward the end, you saw the links atop the old posts, leading to their counterparts on my new blog. The spiders had 1 1/2 years to find those links, and Google had 1 1/2 years to respond to the find and accept that, yes, this was the new location of my blog. Somebody who followed that wait and see strategy over the last few years, today, will have to hope that the same will happen for him in under two weeks. He's going to get hurt. But the fact of the matter is that he will have been hurt by his own fully informed, stupid choices, and that's the kindest spin I can honestly put on the situation.

If one continues to stand in the middle of the street because somebody in a position of power tells one to do so, and one wants to kiss authority's backside, just how much sympathy should one expect to get when one gets run down by a car? People did this to themselves, and as unkind as this may sound to some, I think the blogging community will be a little stronger for their misfortune.