Yahoo pushes news, again

Yahoo has reintroduced downloadable software to stream news and information to people's desktops. Called the Yahoo Ticker, the free application takes the features of My Yahoo--personalized stock quotes, weather data and syndicated feeds of news headlines--and transports them, in the form of a streaming ticker, to the desktop. In a move to compete with Google's search Deskbar, Yahoo also has added a Web search box to the software.

The concept, called "push" technology, was popularized during the dot-com heyday as a way to make over the computer as a personalized portal of news and information, rather than forcing people to surf the Web for the same. But the concept fell out the window with the dot-com crash. In recent years, as the tech economy has rebounded, companies including Sony Pictures Digital and Entertainment Tonight have promoted similar push applications.