Yahoo is launching another one of its ready-made portals today, and once again it's an uninspired attempt. Yahoo Food and Yahoo TV, you'll remember, are all based on the same "instant portal" software, combining Yahoo Answers, personalization, rating, polls and video in different measures.
Yahoo Personal Finance is a repeat performance of those sites, aggregating content from CNNMoney.com, Consumer Reports, Kiplinger, The Motley Fool, Smart Money and The Wall Street Journal. It also provides quotes, portfolios, how-to guides and calculators to help you find the best action in various financial situations.
Yahoo's plan is to just keeping rolling these out - they even plan "brand portals" over the course of the year, combining content from social media sites like MyWeb, Flickr and del.icio.us. These verticals are quick to build and provide a way to sell targeted ads. Yahoo has to be careful, though, about applying the same treatment to older sites - the reaction to Yahoo TV was unanimously negative, since those users just wanted a simple TV listings site, not a full-blown portal. In this case, Yahoo Finance seems to be adequate for most financial news and research.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]