Pre-Thanksgiving news from the blogosphere

It’s Thanksgiving time for Americans, but even if you don’t live in the States, you can still be grateful for a lot of things. Here at the YPN Blog, we’re grateful to have your readership, so we thought we’d share our bounty from the blogosphere.

Holding it together
The Yahoo! Search Blog recently announced the launch of the Yahoo! Glue™ beta in the U.S. Glue topic pages help users get to all the information they want with just one click by “gluing” images, videos, articles and more all on one page. Currently, we’re starting with a limited set of topics, but more will be added over time. According to the folks at the Yahoo! Search Blog, “These pages are built using an algorithm that automatically places the most relevant modules on a page, giving you a visually rich, diverse page all about the topic in which you’re interested.”

eBay joins Yahoo! homepage test
Read, set, bid! Yodel Anecdotal announced that Yahoo! has added an eBay application to the “My Applications” dashboard area. According to the blog, “It will provide an ‘eBay Anywhere’ experience, letting people quickly monitor their eBay buying and selling activities, including checking recent bids or getting reminders about auctions that are about to close. They can also as search for and find new eBay items right from within Yahoo.com.” Read more about it here.

Link journalism gets the readers
Our friends at Publishing 2.0 just posted an interesting article about how link journalism drives page views and engagement. They have a compelling analysis on how some publishers provide many links to keep readers involved. We love links—as you can tell by this piece you’re reading now.

Wired kids in the U.K.
American youth may trail other countries in Internet use. Among 12- to 14-year-olds, says a report by the Center for the Digital Future, 100 percent of British youth use the Internet, followed by Israel at 98 percent. The report says 88 percent of Americans of the same age have access to the Internet. So where are the other 12 percent getting their publishing tips?

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Publisher related news bits

With the Holiday season approaching, you’ll soon be swamped with a massive to-do list. We thought we’d give you a selection of publisher-related news and bits for you, so you can have more time for those seemingly never ending holiday tasks.

Does the Internet care about you making money?
Publishing 2.0 has an interesting analysis of how the market and your business model may not actually be actually seeing eye-to-eye.  The post uses the example of the newspaper industry and how it approached the online industry with a sense of entitlement, which may have caused it some obstacles. The post says, “Ask not what the market can do for you, but what you can do for the market.” Read more here.

A new twist for Twittering?
Marketing Vox reported that Twitter may consider charging companies to use its microblogging feed for consumer purposes. Last week Twitter announced that it had surpassed the one billion published tweets mark.  For folks who don’t know, Twitter allows users to publish “microblogs” of up to 140 characters. Read more here. 

Open source video
Do you publish or blog with video? The Creative Commons blog recently posted a story on Kaltura, an open-source platform for video creation. As the blog reports, “Kaltura is a robust platform uncommon among web-apps that includes the ability to annotate, remix, edit, and share video collaboratively over the web.” If you need video but not a big editing package, it might be worthwhile to check it out. 

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

News from the blogosphere for publishers

The election’s over, so it’s time to refocus on some winning tools and services that can help you “change” your site. We also found a tomato that’s far from rotten. Read on…

Building a better blog
Calling all bloggers—the folks at the MyBlogLog Blog recently announced that they are teaming up with Zemanta to make your blogging toolbox more powerful. Zemanta helps you find photos, tags and related links when you’re working on your blog post. Be sure to check out the partnership to bring your blogging to the next level.

Twitter tips
It looks like some major newspapers are finally catching on to the Twitter medium, as reported by the Publishing 2.0 Blog. Newspapers can use Twitter as more than just “another place to dump their content,” says the blog. Instead, “newsrooms should see it as a way to create a whole new dimension of value under their editorial brand.”

The blog also says that many newsrooms are missing a huge point: sharing interesting stuff. “As newsrooms increasingly look to link journalism and news aggregation as a way to create value for their readers, they should look to their Twitter accounts as an easy platform for sharing links.” Read more here.

Top tomato
For the second year in a row, Yahoo! offered a prize to the blogger who mobilized the most readers to donate to DonorsChoose, the charity that lets you directly fulfill wish lists for public school teachers. The Yodel Anecdotal blog recently announced this year’s winner: Sarah Bunting, the blogger behind Tomato Nation. Tomato Nation mobilized 1,162 donors, raising $111,352 and reaching 19,577 kids. Sarah is making good on her promise to tour various Washington D.C. monuments dressed as a tomato while drawing attention to our nation’s public schools.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Publisher-related news and bits from around the blogosphere

As Halloween approaches, we thought we’d compile some news for our publishers, so you can spend more time working on your Halloween costume.

What do you want from me?
A while ago, Yahoo! bought a company called Inquisitor, which makes a cool Safari browser plug-in of the same name. The Inquisitor application, which helps generate auto-completes on search queries and previews results, is now available for Firefox and IE7 and 8 browsers. It can also help to generate more personalized search results. Check out the Yahoo! Search blog for more information.

Any colour you like
Whether you spell it “colors” or “colours,” you now have more options when using different themes and colors to personalize your My Yahoo! page. You can now unleash the true potential of your inner designer and start customizing your page. Check out more information here on how to make your My Yahoo! page more individualistic.

Hey you
Social networking is all the rage these days, and Yahoo! has recently made some upgrades to its user profile application to reflect this trend. The new “universal profile” is still in beta, but it can help you manage your identity, activities, interests and connections across Yahoo!. “Ultimately, our goal is to unify your social experience and connections, not only on Yahoo!, but anywhere you travel across the Web,” says Jim Stoneham, Vice President, Communities, about the new profile format. “Rolling out the new profile today is a just first step, and I look forward to sharing more details with you in the coming months as we ‘light up’ social experiences at Yahoo!”.

The profile enhancement is further, ahem, profiled here.

Have a safe and sane Halloween holiday!

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Photo of Roger Waters performing “Any Colour You Like” courtesy of Eddie Bearman

Recent enhancements to our Content Match product may help publishers increase revenue

Game show host: “Peter Publisher is so rich!”
Audience: “How rich is he?”
Host: “He’s so rich, he lines his bird cage with [blanks]!”

You know that Richard Dawson would have nailed this one, with the answer “hundred-dollar bills.” We like to make matches that involve money, too. While they may not enable you to become as audacious as Peter Publisher, some recent improvements to the systems that match your content to advertisers’ ads can help you increase monetization of your site.

More specifically, we’ve upgraded the matching technology for our Content Match product, which places Yahoo! ads on your sites. Our ad matching systems are designed to take a balanced approach between ad relevance, advertiser ROI and publisher monetization. They attempt to understand what your content means and the intent of your advertisers’ ads. This makes previously hard-to-monetize content a much more viable option for advertisers, thus potentially leading to more revenue for you.

We invite you to learn more about these changes by reading this post on our Yahoo! Search Marketing blog. While you do that, we’re going to take Gene Rayburn’s cool ’70s stick microphone in for routine maintenance.

— Jeff Hecox

New ads reminds users to give Yahoo! Search a try 

We’ve worked really hard to make Yahoo! Search a better experience, with interesting new features (and interesting names, to boot) in the past year like SearchMonkey and Search BOSS. So, naturally, we want people to know about it.

Tens of millions of users choose Yahoo! Search every day. But, says Raj Gossain, VP of Marketing for Yahoo! Search in a blog post today, “We don’t think that’s enough. So today we’re launching an integrated, nationwide, on- and offline marketing campaign to remind the rest of the world (or at least everyone in the United States) that it’s time to give Yahoo! Search a try.”

The campaign will include radio ads and display ads like the one below.

To hear one of our radio ads, read Raj’s blog post.

– The Team

Selected blogosphere tidbits

Time of the season
As we shift into cooler weather and shorter days, Yodel Anecdotal recently announced that Yahoo! is launching a new calendar. The new web-based application features open standards so you can share your schedule with others, and it’s also built for the mobile platform.

News bits
In the online media landscape, the Associated Press plays an important role in the publishing and news coverage. Often the AP is the first to cover a story, then bloggers pick up on the news piece and run with the story. Publishing 2.0 examines the relationship between the AP and the 21st Century news ecosystem.

Extraordinary ideas
The folks at the Groundswell blog recently published a piece on how ordinary marketers can generate extraordinary ideas. Just because these ideas were written with marketers in mind doesn’t mean that publishers can’t use these tips, too. As the popularity of blogs, social networks and wikis grows, it’s good to learn how to best use these technologies.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

New site gives you information on the Yahoo!-Google deal

It’s a pretty good guess you’ve heard opinions on the Yahoo!-Google marketing agreement from just about everybody: your coworkers, your competitors, your daily blog, and — who knows? — maybe even your taxi driver. Which is why we thought we could help you sift through the clutter to the facts.

This week we launched the Yahoo! Search Agreement site, which will help you find out what you need to know about the commercial arrangement announced by Yahoo! and Google in June. We hope the information archived on this site will help visitors understand why the agreement with Google will make Yahoo! a stronger competitor in online advertising and will benefit advertisers, publishers and end users.

Among the items you’ll find there is a blog post from our President, Sue Decker, that busts some myths about the agreement. For example, Sue writes,

[The agreement is] simply a contract that gives Yahoo! the right, but no obligation, to show Google AdSense ads on Yahoo!’s own network. It’s important to note that the agreement is non-exclusive and gives us the option to “backfill” with Google ads if and when we see fit.

You can also view more details of the deal on the site, as well as frequently asked questions and press coverage. With the facts in hand — unfiltered by your workout buddies — we hope you’ll discover how the arrangement might benefit you.

– The Team

Calling all publishers! Today we’re excited to announce the launch of APT from Yahoo!, our new advertising platform. What’s in it for you?  APT from Yahoo! is designed to help publishers access more demand and improve yield from their inventory, while simplifying ad management. We’ll keep you posted on the opportunities for Yahoo! Publisher Network publishers to participate in the platform.

In the meantime, our CEO Jerry Yang explains more about the vision of this new product in the following excerpt from a Yodel Ancedotal post.

I started dreaming about this day 18 months ago, when I laid out my vision for our board of directors on how Yahoo! could play a unique role in changing the face of online advertising. In fact, Sue and I called it Nirvana at the time – a platform that would be to 2009 what radio was to 1924, TV to 1947, color TV to 1965, and the Internet to 1993.

Sounds like hype, right? We don’t think so. As Sue posted in April, we listened to all of the pain points that our partners shared about the process of buying and selling ads. Would you believe it takes more than 30 manual operational steps to move from ad strategy concept to launching that ad? It involves faxes (!!) and sometimes weeks in proposal processing. Audiences are now distributed across a sea of web sites and are harder to find, understand, and put a value on. Madison Avenue might think it’s a shame Johnny Walker Red doesn’t flow at the office anymore.

APT looks to change all that. It’s simple. It’s open. It’s fast (like minutes vs. days). It provides a new level of control. It offers cross-selling more easily than ever been before. It will provide large amounts of quality inventory. It will help advertisers customize and target their messages more precisely through advanced targeting. And it will drive results. All this from a single online application. No more cobbled together processes or impressions. No more wasted time.

For more about the new platform, read Jerry’s full blog post.

An end of the summer roundup

Ah, the end of the summer… though it’s 90 degrees in Los Angeles and 80 degrees in New York today. But soon the kids will be back to school, the leaves will change colour and folks will break out these strange garments called … sweaters. So, as summer dies down, we thought we’d share this roundup of what’s still hot in the publisher world.

Who’s the boss? You are.
It’s been two months since Yahoo! Launched Yahoo! Search BOSS and so far we’ve seen some great products created with it. Our colleagues at the Yahoo! Search Blog are spotlighting a few folks who have developed on the new product. Be sure to check out some of the interesting products — maybe you’ll be inspired to a product of your own.

Making mobile waves
Mediaweek recently announced that mobile Internet usage is exhibiting healthy growth in 2008. According to a new report issued by mobile technology vendor Crisp Wireless, the total number of mobile web impressions generated by users surged by 29.4 percent in the second quarter of this year versus the previous quarter.

The mobile publishing and marketing industry is still taking its first steps but it’s worthwhile to check out some of the companies. You might want to check out some of the products and services from Yahoo! Mobile.

The politics of punditry
Our friends at Yahoo! Anecdotal recently published a post about the new and improved General Election Political Dashboard for all your folks following the race to the White House. The dashboard is highly interactive, detailed yet completely easy to use.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications