Yahoo's page on Nintendo's Wii gaming console pulls together links from the internet behemoth's Delicious bookmarking service, photos from Flickr and articles from Yahoo Answers, all at the domain wii.yahoo.com. Encouraged by the experiment, Yahoo says its rolling out a hundred more fan sites. Sounds transformative? Not so much.

Well, it certainly makes sense to organize the portal around readers' interests rather than Yahoo's abitrary product groups. But the fact remains that these sites have neither independent domain names, nor their own design. It will be hard for them to create an independent following. There's a reason why blog groups, such as Gawker Media or AOL's WIN or TMZ, create titles that can stand alone. Yahoo, if it wants to appeal to fans of the Wii and other brands, and new audiences, should abandon its own name and design standards, and start these sites from scratch.

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