Now anyone can provide feedback on our network

Like a cross librarian “shushing” noisy students in the book stacks, YahooSarah last week showed how good publishers have gone bad by folding, spindling and even ignoring our Terms and Conditions and our Guidelines, as well as our ad code. But as some of you have pointed out, a few, very “naughty little publishers” continue to ignore the rules and go right on abusing their privileges. Until now, many of you conscientious teacher’s pets who might have wanted to report abuse, have not been able to for lack of an appropriate channel. 

Report abuses

Today, we’re pleased to announce that the blog will now feature a permanent link to our feedback email box that anyone can use, located under “Network Feedback” in the right-hand column. If you, our network’s volunteer hall monitors, catch someone placing images next to ads, splattering ads willy-nilly all over their pages, nicking other sites’ content, or running with scissors, let us know and they’ll be sent to the Virtual Principal’s Office.

We won’t be able to respond to all feedback that we receive but, rest assured, we will be monitoring all submissions and, perhaps, doing show and tell later on.

Email feedback to ypn-feedback(at)cc.yahoo-inc.com or click on the mailto link at right, under “Network Feedback.” Remember, if you’re already in our beta program, you can continue to submit feedback directly.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Vice Principal
 

At the Second Annual BlogHer Conference, San Jose, July 28 and 29, that’s where

Today and Saturday at the Hyatt San Jose, women bloggers from around the world will attend “BlogHer ’06.” Conference sessions will cover blogging basics, good writing techniques, primping your blog, multimedia and political blogging from a female perspective. In addition, Jen Slegg, famed JenSense blogger and guest columnist for us, will be talking turkey about monetization, and Flickr’s Heather Champ will show you how to give your site photographic appeal. Lastly, be sure to look for some of the women of Yahoo! Publisher Network, who will be there to represent.

Attending the conference? Share what you’ve learned, what you liked and what you didn’t by commenting on this post.

Can’t go? Don’t despair. Yahoo!’s own Susan Mernit will attend the conference, and her reports will be posted right here.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

Or, how to win friends and influence people (for free)

Yahoo’s Upcoming.org is a great way share and discover local events online, but can also be a powerful tool for publishers.  On Tuesday, Upcoming.org co-founder, Andy Baio, gave us some quick tips on how to build events into your own site using Upcoming.org. Today Andy finishes off with a dive into creating a group calendar and with some advice on getting out and off the screen and onto the social circuit.

Start a Group Calendar

Finding and adding every relevant local event yourself can be hard work, so why not let the rest of your readers help each other out? You can create an Upcoming Group for your specific website or topic, and open it up to anyone. Whether you moderate the group calendar yourself or grant control to other trusted moderators, Upcoming Groups empower your community to get involved and connect with each other in new ways.

Like your own personal watchlist, you can create a badge for your group events for easy redistribution. Your readers can do the same thing, spreading the word to their own blogs and personal websites.

Meet and Greet
Sometimes, the best way to build a strong community is to get off the computer. Meeting offline deepens the relationship between your readers, which then creates more engagement online.

But sponsoring an event doesn’t need to be a big, expensive ordeal. Just announce a time and place on your site, add it to Upcoming to spread the word, and then buy a couple rounds while you’re there! 

Of course, you may not be able to attend local gatherings outside your city (or country), but you can provide the tools to help your readers self-organize. Just point them to your new Upcoming Group, letting them discuss and decide when and where to meet. When they’ve decided on the details, they can add the event and it will automatically display on the Group badges on your site.

By adding your special event to Upcoming, you’ll also be exposing it a wider audience: the very active Upcoming community.

That’s the basics. I hope it was useful. For a run-down of features and functionality, be sure to view our Quickstart Guide video. If you have any questions, post them in the comments and I’ll do my best to respond.

—Andy Baio, Co-Founder, Upcoming.org

San Jose conference offers learning opportunities for savvy publishers

This season’s Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose, August 7-10, goes way beyond just SEO tactics for search engine marketers. There’ll be plenty of insight for publishers, as well. This should come as no surprise in an environment where nearly everyone has access to cost-effective, easy-to-use, instantaneous publishing tools; and in which nearly every publisher is an advertiser and advertiser a publisher.

This conference’s line-up of Yahoo! cognoscenti includes Dan Boberg, Andrei Broder, Anne Frisbie, Tim Converse, Rajat Mukherjee, David Roth, Jeremy Zawodny and, perhaps, a surprise or two.

SES Yahoo! and publisher-centric highlights include:

Monday, 8/7
Social Search: Up Close With Yahoo  
SEM Via Communities, Wikipedia & Tagging 

Tuesday, 8/8
Writing for Search Engines
Blog & Feed Search SEO
Yahoo!’s New Ad Platform

Wednesday, 8/9
Big Ideas for Small Sites & Small Budgets
Pimp My Site 
     
 

Thursday, 8/10
Meet the Crawlers
Search APIs
Site Clinic 

In addition, Gnomedex champ, Chris Pirillo, will offer up Web 2.0 tips, and Jensense’s Jen Slegg will be on hand to show you how to make virtual mountains out of digital molehills.

Be sure and drop by the Yahoo! booth #101, which will be “personed” by several Yahoo! Publisher Network reps to answer your questions and hand out groovy schwag.      

Tell us about it!

If you do plan to attend, be sure to take good notes, because we’ll be asking you to share the lessons you’ve learned with us and other publishers, right here on the blog. You’ll be able to leave your stories and link to your own or to others’ SES blog posts, podcasts, vidcasts and photos in an SES comments section. 

—The Team

Or, how to win friends and influence people (for free)

As co-founder of Upcoming.org, the events community recently acquired by Yahoo!, I spend time thinking about how people share and discover events and build communities locally, just as you spend your time thinking about developing good content, building strong communities, and optimizing your ads around that activity.

Going back to the BBS era of the 1980s, I’ve been fascinated with the interaction between online and offline groups, which eventually led to the development of Upcoming. Since Upcoming’s launch in September of 2003, it’s become more than a great way to discover and share events online. It’s also a powerful tool for publishers and bloggers to encourage real-life interaction and experiences, which leads to deeper, more powerful engagement online.

Here are a few tips to get you started building your own events community with Upcoming:

Find the Good Stuff
Whatever your size or topic—say, a blog about environmental conservation or a huge discussion forum on the organic food industry—there are events happening every week that will interest your audience. Relevant conferences, meetings, lectures, concerts, workshops and readings are going on all the time. The most powerful thing you can do for your readers is to sort through the noise, find the local events they’ll care about, and feature them on your site. But how?

On Upcoming.org, anyone can add events to be viewed, shared and discussed by the rest of the community. Get started by creating an account and adding the event. To see an example of how to do this, watch this screencast video which will walk you through the process of getting started.

If your site covers a topic already popular on Upcoming.org, such as music or technology, you may find that the events your audience cares about are already on the site. In that case, mark yourself as watching or attending each event, and it’ll be added to your watchlist and ready for redistribution on your own site.

Get a Badge
Now that you’ve joined some events, how do you share it with your readers?

The easiest way is an Upcoming.org badge, a simple widget that instantly displays events on your own site with no programming required. With three clicks, you can customize your badge and receive a little chunk of Javascript to paste into your own site’s template. You can see an example here on the Yahoo! Publisher Network Blog, listed in the sidebar under the “Upcoming.org Events” heading. 

Choose from a stock template or style it yourself to fit the look and feel of your own site. Or, if you want nearly unlimited flexibility and know how to program—or know someone who can—we offer a complete API for deeply integrating events into your own site.

Stay tuned for more Upcoming.org networking tips later this week.

—Andy Baio, Co-Founder, Upcoming.org

So, where’s the money?
 

June balances will be calculated and both check and direct deposit payments will be issued July 25, 2006 to qualified publishers. Please note: In order to receive a payment, you must accrue $100 in your available balance.

—The Management

Getting to Know You

As part of our continuing efforts to identify and respond to your needs, we’re looking for a few good publishers to take part in a pair of research studies. You don’t necessarily have to be in the beta program to qualify for either study, and both studies offer a financial honorarium.

The first study is for non-Yahoo! Publisher Network beta publishers only, and involves focus group interviews in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose (during the SES 2006 conference) or New York City. If you are not part of the Yahoo! Publisher Network and are interested in participating, send us an email with the following information and our folks will get back to you with the details:

• Full name
• Company name
• Primary site URL
• City
• Telephone number
• Email address
• Type of publisher (domain portfolio owner, blog, social network, Directory, e-commerce)
• Primary site page views per month
• List that you are interested in focus groups in the subject line 

(Please note that we will contact you only if participants are needed in your city.)

The second study is an online survey for both Yahoo! Publisher Network beta and non-beta publishers. To participate, simply click here. You’ll be asked a set of questions up-front to see if you qualify.

What’s in it for you, besides a better network to work with? One: It won’t hurt—we’re researching your publishing needs, not pain management therapies. It might even be a little bit fun to learn about the direction of the Yahoo! Publisher Network. Two: Cold, hard cash. Both studies offer a cash honorarium if you qualify.

Your information will be used only for research purposes under Yahoo! Search Marketing’s Privacy Policy.

Thanks for your help.

—Patrick Gunn & the Yahoo! Publisher Network Insights Team

Tips from YahooSarah

Accepting an invitation to be part of the Yahoo! Publisher Network beta is a little like starting to date someone. We try to stay positive, encouraging our publishers to grow with the program and create better experiences for their users while helping them make more money for themselves. We don’t want to act the nag…

But a few very fresh publishers seem to want to take advantage just as we’re getting to know one another. Frankly, it leaves us feeling a little taken for granted. Yahoo! Publisher Network is very much a rules maven—we must abide by certain rules in order to keep up the quality of our Network. Naturally, we understand that Terms & Conditions, can seem lengthy and dull. But it’s vital that every publisher to make the commitment to read and understand them.

To help you out, here’s a little cheat sheet of what NOT to do:

1. Don’t sell beta keys in an online auction, message board or anywhere else (the opposite applies as well: don’t buy beta keys, they won’t work). We gave you that key and for you to go re-gifting it. No re-gifting!
2. Don’t put our ad code on sexually explicit sites. It’s very naughty.
3. Don’t duplicate (*cough* STEAL *cough*) content from other sites. We want to be with someone original.
4. Don’t place images next to ads. It’s dishonest and we want to be in a long term relationship with publishers everyone can trust. People will think those images have to do with the ads, and when they find that the site they’ve been directed to has nothing to do with them, they’ll be pretty miffed.
5. Don’t block the crawler. It keeps us from getting to know one another and is bad for both of us. Honestly, your blocking is not helping.
6. Don’t go nuts with the ads and place them all over every page like they’re your content or something. It looks like you are trying too hard.
7. Don’t manipulate our ad code. We’re flexible and already offer plenty of choices.
8. Don’t send us traffic from Zimbabwe or Ireland. Not that there’s anything wrong with Zimbawe or Ireland, but right now we’re just not ready to make that big, international commitment. We’re working on it, though, so be patient, and good things will come.
9. Don’t use inappropriate ad targeting. If your site is about flowers, it’s not cool to be targeting finance.

It’s OK to get a little frisky once we’ve gotten to know one another, but playing fast and loose with the rules is just not copasetic. So before you make any bold moves that could backfire, take a few minutes to think about it and settle down with a good book, like our Guidelines.

For more info see Product Guidelines for Ads Explained.

I’m glad we had this talk. 

—YahooSarah

Yahoo! Finance brings quotes and news to a web page near you

This week, Yahoo! Finance launched a very cool set of badges into general availability. With small and easily configured doses of code, publishers can harness the power of Yahoo! Finance for their own sites with a badge offering updated, customized stock quotes, charts, and news in a variety of look-and-feel configurations. You can see one in action on the Huffington Post, or try one out for yourself at Yahoo! Finance (or via the secure publisher interface if you’re part of the Beta). It only takes a moment to set one up – I added a badge to my personal blog in just minutes.

The new offering makes it easy, pretty and beneficial for Web publishers to re-publish Yahoo! Finance content, in that end-users can actually interact with the badge in a compelling way without leaving the publisher’s web site. Most importantly, Yahoo! has worked through all of the copyright and licensing issues, so that publishers can re-post this data without having to worry about violating anybody’s copyrights.

While Yahoo! Finance has for some time been offering a fantastically rich set of RSS feeds for news by stock ticker, category, industry sector, subject and so forth, the new badge brings an interesting—and valuable—Web 2.0 element to the market: this enhancement enables Yahoo! content consumers to become content publishers.

In the context of ongoing conversations about the value and myth-vs.-reality of Web 2.0, it may not seem like there’s a whole lot of “secret sauce” going on with each new badge we roll out. But if Web 2.0 is, at least in part, a set of technologies that help content become more and more portable and personalizable, and a set of ideas that encourage that kind of distribution, these are important steps forward. Enabling technology that allows Yahoo to leverage its technology platform, business assets, first-rate content and the broad reach of its audience by extending it—flexibly, prettily and free of charge to the benefit of anyone who wants it—seems pretty compelling to me. 

—Greg Cohn, Sr. Manager, Emerging Publishers

Following up on our request for blog input 

Two weeks ago we asked for suggestions on how we can improve the blog. You told us that and more. Below we give you our feedback on some of your feedback.

Gary asks:
Why not more posts about helping us improve our earnings? We have heard from others already about their success stories (which really does us no good unless they give advice within the column like Shoemoney did). Give us more on ad placement, categories and other strategies. Let us hear more on how to improve our earnings, not just the features YPN puts out.

Good points, Gary. We’re always looking for ways to help you earn more money. Sometimes that’s straight-up optimization tips like ad placement and color matching. Other times it’s helping you build better experiences for your users and offering techniques for driving traffic. We will explore a lot more of these strategies in detail in the months ahead.

Frank asks:
Concerning announcements: What about something like a rollout-plan for other countries then US?

Good question, but here’s the deal: There are some things we just can’t talk about, as much as we’d like to. The reason for this is pretty simple—stuff like this is proprietary strategic business information. If we offered up a solid roll-out plan to the public before all is ready, we’d be tipping our hand to the competition. If you were an auto manufacturer and had plans to debut a new line of cars that ran on air, you wouldn’t phone up the competition across the street and give them the details, would you? It’s a lot like that. Sorry. Believe me, when the time comes for new regional roll-outs, blog readers will be the first to know.

Dkearns asks:
I’d love a discussion of whether Yahoo plans to bring YPN to Yahoo360. It’s impossible to use there now because YPN uses a Javascript widget. I assume the main issue is as with all social networks– the possibility of advertising being tied to inappropriate content. But it would be good to discuss ways to police that kind of problem.

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