The Blog
Your vade mecum for publishing fun and profit
Vade mecum is Latin for “go with me.” Julius Caesar probably said it to his legions before he crossed the Rubicon. In modern English, a vade mecum is a resource that people find so useful that they always carry it around, like a primer, a guidebook or an almanac.
When we built the blog more than five months ago, we built it in the hope that it would become your vade mecum for all things publishing. That’s a pretty lofty goal, and, to be sure, the blog is still a work-in-progress. But we also know from feedback that the blog has come in handy, not only for publishers in the beta program, but also for those in the greater publishing community.
Since we’re adding new readers all the time, we thought it was time to offer a handy reference guide to the blog. Think of it as a sort of “meta-vade mecum,” if we may mix a little Greek into our Latin.
Archives
Let’s start at the top with the Archives. This post marks the 80th since we launched. To help you sift through the oodles of information, we archive each of our posts under one or more subject headings. And recently, we’ve added a “Posts by Subject” feature in the right-hand column to make it easier for you to find the information you need.
Syndication Tools
Moving to the right, you’ll find our Syndication Box, which allows you to add our feed to your My Yahoo! or RSS reader.
Customer Support and Feedback
If you’re in the beta, you can use the Customer Support link to report issues through your secure account interface. Anyone, however, can use the Network Feedback mailto link to report on the quality of the network. Lastly, we always like feedback and suggestions on how we can make the blog more useful. Use the Blog Feedback link and let us know.
Content Services
Just beneath the Poll you’ll find our Content Services link. This is your gateway to much of what Yahoo! has to offer in terms of content, tools, APIs, affiliate programs and more.
Blogrolls
We’ve gathered a list of related blogs to help you stay savvy on everything that’s happening at Yahoo!—and around the publishing and search marketing blogosphere.
Popular Posts and Posts by Subject
Read our most popular and important past posts, or browse our archive by subject.
del.cio.us tags
Our de.icio.us tag cloud enables you to browse, bookmark and share blog articles, as well as articles of note that we’ve saved from around the Web.
Flickr Photos
Like new parents showing off baby pictures, we, too, like to share what’s new. Here you’ll find photos of our Yahoo! team and our friends on campus, at trade events and at other happenings in the publishing community.
Upcoming.org
Find out where Yahoo! Publisher Network is going to be, and save and share event news with friends and associates.
That’s it for now. We’ll keep you informed about new features on the blog an in our network. Until then, as Caesar would have said, valete!
—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor
| Post Comment | categories:: How-to's
August 18th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
It would be nice if the layout worked properly with Opera. The entire right menu gets thrown down underneath all of the content.
It’d be cool if users could submit topics for discussion too, like this one. Getting YPN’s standpoint on issues like that would at the least be very interesting.
August 18th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
The menu you can fix by adjusting line 244 of your CSS file:
#sideBar {
background-color:#f4f4f4;
color:#666666;
float:left;
position:relative;
[z-index:11;
width:196px;
]width:197px;
margin-right:-198px; <—- that one becomes margin-right: -199px;
}
B.
August 19th, 2006 at 8:23 am
Thanks, B. We were not aware of the issues in Opera but will give it a good look.
- M2
August 21st, 2006 at 8:54 pm
The biggest problem with this blog really is that it lacks focus and it’s more like a general, one-way notice board than a blog about YPN. The YPN-related posts with some punch are few and far between.
The YPN staff seem to be detached from day to day involvement on the blog as well. Someone makes a post every few days about something and that’s about the end of YPN’s involvement in that post. It’s pretty rare for someone to come back and address comments, questions, clarify something from the post etc.
Compare that to Jeremy or Matt’s blog and you can see a significant difference in their involvement, people commenting etc. There’s debates, discussions and all that good stuff that pulls people to a blog again and again.
It would be cool is if went like Matt Cutts and called out spammers, then hung around to field questions, provide advice and whatnot.
In YPN’s case that would be TOS violators, and it could be:
- lots of fun for me;
- a much needed learning experience/scare for some of your publishers;
- it’ll show advertisers you do care;
- an authoritive and on-going guide to publishing appropriately and inappropriately.
For instance, imagehosting.us has loads of ads with loads of images next to them.
Unlike all the cheesy myspace layout ones I report this site is a competitor of mine and it’s ranking 2 or 3 spots higher than me in yours and MS’s serps :(.
Please shut down their ypn account so they shut down their site and I move up a spot on your search engine.
They’re violating the T&C anyway with images next to ads, excessive and unrelated advertising - up to 8 blocks on a page - and who goes to an image hosting site to buy a cellphone????
Clearly you’d be doing your advertisers the real favour by terminating their account.
More importantly, you’d be doing me a favour, and perhaps even more importantly you’d be publicly enforcing your TOS for a change.
August 23rd, 2006 at 8:53 am
Hey, Ben,
Thanks for your input. We really appreciate your advice and counsel (hope the Opera trick worked for you). A few points to consider…
Matt Cutts and Jeremy Zowadny’s blogs offer their personal observations about a wide variety of subject matter, from flying gliders to personal computing. Personally, I’d love to put my recent adventures with a rattlesnake on the Yahoo! Publisher Network blog. But, funny as it is, I don’t really think most of our readers would appreciate it and I don’t think that’s the way to build user engagement.
You say that we lack focus. The fact is, Yahoo! has tons of offerings pertinent to publishers and we’re going to continue to showcase them here.
As I’m sure you have noticed, we’re one of the few corporate blogs in this space that allows users to leave comments. It’s an important channel for us to gather feedback. Other corporate blogs seek a one way channel. We, by contrast, want to engage you.
In addition to enabling user commentary, we also encourage user feedback on our network’s quality. If you have an issue with our network’s quality, please use the Network Feedback link provided or email us at: ypn-feedback(at)cc.yahoo-inc(dot)com, and we’ll get to it as soon as we are able. This is simply not the forum for accusing others of wrongdoing. In future, accusatory comments may be deleted.
Thanks again for your interest and keep coming!
—M2, head blogster