Battelle on Architectures of Participation, Google/Yahoo!

John Battelle writes some thoughtful stuff on Google and Yahoo!'s different approaches to content creation/aggregation.

These bipolar debates are always interesting to watch. Reminds me of the Tesco vs Everyone debate on whether online grocery should be run out of stores or out of warehouses, which Tesco won. Advantages I can think of to Yahoo!'s method are relationships (hence, architecture of participation), reflecting your audience's thinking, and being up to date. Advantages of Google's method are scalability, flexibility, and not needing to interact with pesky human beings so much ;). 

Update: see Paid Content for a small roundup of some Yahoo content news.