Jeremy notes today that Yahoo! News now has RSS feeds available. A good thing for finding news — but not for linking to news. For once, I’m in complete agreement with Dave Winer:

There’s another concern, linkrot. Links into Yahoo News rot relatively quickly, as compared to News.Com, for example, which is near perfect. So, until I hear something has changed, I’m going to use Yahoo to read news but try hard not to point to stories on Yahoo from my weblog.

I noticed this quite a while ago. Anytime I find or am sent a link to a Yahoo! News story that I want to link to, my first step is to copy the title of the story, head over to Google News and search for that story. Usually I can find a link to another news source that doesn’t delete its pages after a time. Yahoo! News and the corresponding RSS feeds will be quite handy for finding stories — but until they start keeping their archives online, they’re essentially worthless for linking stories.

[See also: Nothing to see here…move along… | JavaScript toggle code | Flickr’s on a roll | AdSense for Feeds | rel=“nofollow” : Massive weblog anti-spam initiative ]

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