OMG HOMAGE? Yahoo's blog


THE ORIGINAL The Omg blog

When Yahoo launched Omg last week, the Internet behemoth made its first foray into the notoriously bitchy and overly crowded celeb gossip arena. An arena so crowded in fact, that there's already a site called Omg, and it is so bitchy that that site's owner is threatening legal action.

A few days after Omg's launch, Frank Griggs, who began blogging at omgblog.com in 2003, accused Yahoo of "direct thievery of my blog's name, punctuation, and color scheme." Stumbling across Omg by accident, Griggs reacted as one would expect. "I was immediately struck by the similarity," he told Radar. "I was just like, 'Oh my god!'"

Similarities do exist in name and punctuation ("omg!" vs. "!!omg!!"), color scheme (white text on black background), and content, but as some vociferous commenters point out, they're not all that similar. Yahoo's site is bolder and slicker, using the black-on-white scheme only in a small spot. And the acronym "omg" and the exclamation point, which has been attached to Yahoo since its beginning, are hardly Griggs's property.

Currently searching for a lawyer to help draft a cease and desist letter, Griggs has received advice regarding trademark infringement. "Basically [the lawyer] said it would be worth pursuing and that I had a good case," Griggs says.

Yahoo, of course, disagrees. "There are a lot of reasons why this a very separate endeavor," says Yahoo spokesperson Carrie Davis. First and foremost, "Omg on Yahoo is not a blog. We aggregate entertainment news, photos, and video from across the Web."

Griggs says that's the response he expected and admits that it could all be a coincidence. But given the fact that his site is the first result of a Google of Omg blog, Griggs is pretty sure that someone at Yahoo saw it and got ... inspired.

"It's just kind of offensive because they're such a big company, with all their money you'd think they'd be able to come up with something original."