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

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.

- M2

#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.

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.