A lot is changing with Yahoo!, and even the famous yodel is subject to change. In fact, earlier last week, Yahoo! set up a mobile recording studio in the middle of Times Square and invited anyone passing by to record their version of the yodel. Lucky winners with the best yodel will become famous and earn bragging rights that their yodel is the official Yahoo! yodel. The yodel was one of the things discussed in the interview with Elisa Steele.

She offered assurance that Yahoo! was going to continue using the original yodel; however, to align properly with their promise of making Yahoo! all about about person relevance, they are going to be collecting personal yodels around the globe. In fact, in addition to setting up mobile studios, such as the one in Times Square, Yahoo! has created a web based Yodel Studio.

So you might wonder why would Yahoo! want to re-brand after 15 years of being one of the most widely recognized and successful companies in the world. It may seem strange that Yahoo is investing time and money into creating one of the largest re-branding campaigns ever. Yahoo decided to launch their new brand campaign is to remind consumers where Yahoo! is today, and the kind of services they can offer people in the modern era of the Internet today. Check out this video below that captures the exclusive thoughts of Elisa Steele behind the new Yahoo! marketing campaign.

This Q&A with Elisa Steele is the first in a new series of videos called Yahoo! Yodelcasts, hosted by Nicki Dugan, blog editor for Yahoo!

To stay on top of current events and news about Yahoo! I recommend reading their Yodel Anecdotal blog and subscribing to their RSS Feed. It wouldn’t hurt to pick up a subscription to their YouTube Channel as well.

What are your thoughts about the new Yahoo! and do you think that their new marketing efforts will cause you to switch to using Yahoo! Share your thoughts in the comments below.

GeoCities.com hosts, – what I would call, “a living archive of Internet’s past” -  thousands of pages created by Internet users in the 90′s. These pages, files, pictures, and designs are – what some to believe – historical and valuable. I am one to agree. Many times I search Google and find myself delivered to an old GeoCities.com hosted page that contains the information I desire. All that will come to an end, however, on October 26th, 2009.

Yahoo! is shutting down GeoCities.com (#1, #2, #3, #4) and have warned users that all data will be erased from their servers on October 26th, 2009. As a solution, they suggest to sign up for their paid web hosting services. Additionally, they provide some documentation on how to migrate data over from GeoCities to their new servers.

There is an organization called The Archive Team that was developed to help preserve the data in GeoCities. They feel that even though much of the data consists of low quality pages, there is a large amount of data worth saving. So far they have successfully downloaded hundreds of gigabytes of data and will continue to pull data for as long as they can. Just in case they miss something, the team has a special submission form for people who would like to request to have old GeoCities.com pages indexed. Full details about GeoCities closing is available for those who would like to learn more.

What do you think? Is it worth the energy to try to preserve the data on GeoCities.com? Could Yahoo! have made different decisions to keep GeoCities.com successful? Or, did Yahoo! make a poor decision to purchase GeoCities.com ten years ago? Share your thoughts in the comments below.