"Everyone here is now dumber for visiting Yahoo!"

Sometime last fall, Yahoo! revamped their home page. Some of the changes included embedded pop-up, rotation features and tabbed browsing within the page. Never one to take Yahoo! seriously as a news organization given it's use of wire services as the primary news-gathering apparatus, I nevertheless visit the site a few times a day. It's a quick read. Weather, mail and the top ten, up-to-date wire stories are all 'above the fold', as it were.

But a curious thing happened on the way to the forum. Over the last few months (after a silly experiment called 'The 9' failed as a front page tool), the top feature section went from a hodge-podge of serious news mingled with lighter items to extensive American Idol updates mingled with advice-giving. The embedded pop-up features also allowed Yahoo! to plug it more 'personal' items, to be rotated over a few hours, meant to add a more broad-based feel, euphemism for catering to the stupid.

It's no wonder Yahoo! has changed their focus. A recent scan of similarly old news items and their comment (Y! answers) count tell the story. 'Sanjaya advances' generated nearly 15,000 comments while a story on Iran's enrichment of uranium and it's possible weapon-grade status generated 32. I understand. It's a business. In the internet world, traffic count is everything.

American Idol silliness doesn't bother me. Don't watch it. Don't care, though it's nice to see viewership is down. What has become disturbing is the advice-giving.

Check out this little number from an asshat named David Wygant. If you're mildly annoyed/amused/amusingly annoyed by it, check out his archive. It's worth it. He covers the whole spectrum of dating advice; from the obvious to the idiotic to the downright assholish, as if men need any help being an asshole or an idiot or, most importantly, obvious.

It's clear that Lonely Hearts Clubs don't meet in restaurants anyone and have turned to the internet. Just look at eHarmony. But if traffic counts are any indicator of the relative seriousness people are taking Yahoo! Personals and especially David Wygant, thank God I'm married. For that and a thousand other reasons, I just couldn't take the dating world anymore.