del.icio.us celebrates its birthday by giving you presents

For those of you NorCal publishers and dedicated del.icio.us junkies, the Internet’s premier link collection and sharing service will be celebrating its third birthday at our Sunnyvale, California campus October 3. Everyone’s invited, and there’s going to be truckloads o’ tasty schwag and take-aways.

Be sure to RSVP via Upcoming.org if you plan to attend.

For slightly more info, visit the del.icio.us blog.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

Workshop itinerary posted

It’s time to get your groove on and prepare for Yahoo’s first ever public Hack Day, a 24-hour extravaganza of mash-up madness. If you were considering going but weren’t really sure what was in it for you, Friday’s workshop schedule has been posted over at the Yahoo! Interface blog. There will be lots of stuff for both budding and accomplished publishers. Oh, and it’s free!

The workshops are open to you whether you want to participate in the full 24-hour hacking cycle or not. If want to just come and learn, just go to Upcoming.org and make your desires known.

Still not convinced? In addition to the workshops, the all-night hacking sessions and the fabulous networking opportunities, there will be prize give-aways and cutting edge musical guests, including two old friends, the mash-up DJ duo of Bootie fame, Adrian & the Mysterious D. 

If you’re planning to create and show a project hack, visit the Hack Day web site to request an invite.

And for the latest, look to the Hack Day blog.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

Check’s in the… Well, you get the idea…  

August balances will be calculated and both check and direct deposit payments will be issued Sept. 26, 2006 to qualified publishers. Please note: In order to receive a payment, you must accrue $100 in your available balance.

—The Bank Manager

Publisher Account Interface to experience scheduled maintenance Friday, Sept. 22, from 8:00 p.m. to approximately 1:00 a.m., Pacific Time 

On Friday night, from 8 p.m until about 1:00 a.m., Pacific Time, we’ll be doing a little scheduled maintenance on the secure account interface.  For the duration of this maintenance your account will be unavailable.

This minor bit of monkey business will not impact your account earnings nor the serving of ads to your site.

We apologize for any inconvenience. 

—The Team

Yahoo! opens Hack Day to developers, webmasters and publishers

We’ve written about Hack Days at Yahoo! before. These 24-hour, problem-solving soirees challenge Yahoo! developers to flex their creative muscles, come up with novel ideas, and create hacks that turn thought into action. Yahoo! users often benefit, as today’s Hack Day hacks become tomorrow’s Yahoo! features.

Until now, Yahoo! Hack Days were open only to Yahoos, but that’s about to change. On Sept. 29 and 30, we’re holding our first ever public Hack Day at our Sunnyvale, California campus.

Friday, Sept 29 will include a number of hacking workshops where participants will be able to learn with several of our star engineers, UI gurus and Javascript junkies. In addition, attendees will hear from the folks at Flickr, del.icio.us, Messenger, Maps and Search.
 

Then we’ll start a-hacking, playing through all night until Saturday. Bring your skills, your ideas and, of course, your PJs, and be prepared to share your best stuff. We’ll bring the pizza.

For information on how you can get involved in Hack Day, visit HackDay.org.

Not able to attend Yahoo! Hack Day? No worries. We’re sending our top news hacks to cover the event and will report on all the cool stuff right here on the blog.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Hack

Some publishers to see changes in their ads

We’ve been doing some tinkering under the bonnet recently, so some of you may notice a few changes in your ads. The changes you’re likely to see include the removal of ellipses (…) and truncated words, the inclusion of 40-character titles on certain ad units, and a change in the number of ads displayed on certain ad layouts.

These enhancements have to do with our efforts to upgrade our contextual advertising product, and in the coming weeks will take effect across the entire network. They come in response to your feedback and should, in the long run, help enhance your account performance. We’ll share more details with you as they become available.
 

—Tom Furukawa, Director, Product Management

Flickr be fine bootie for all ye publishers

Ahoy there! Did ye ken that today is the official “Talk Like a Pirate Day?”

What? Never heard of it? That’s surprising, because since the idea came to a couple of regular guys from Oregon way back in the mid-’90s, Talk Like a Pirate Day has become a phenomenon in offices around the world. Every September 19 finds secretaries and execs alike swinging from yard-arms from coast to coast and beyond, talking pirate, walking pirate, dressing pirate and acting pirate. Don’t believe me? Check out the Talk Like a Pirate Day’s Flickr pages.

Talk Like a Pirate Day soon got out of hand after being mentioned in humorist Dave Barry’s column back in 2002, and its founders, Cap’n Slappy (Mark Summers) and Ol’ Chumbucket (John Baur), were forced to enlist a webmaster… er… webwench, that is, to run the movement’s growing web site.

Yesterday I spoke with Pat Kight (aka, piratess Jezebel), about webwenching for this cutting-edge social movement and about using Flickr to enhance her web site’s landlubber (i.e., user) experience.

MICHAEL MATTIS: So…uh… when and why did you become a pirate?

JEZEBEL: Me ol’ mates Chumbucket an’ Cap’n Slappy Shanghai’d me, they did!

They ain’t too technical, y’see, an’ when Our Close Personal Friend and Pulitzer Prize Winner Dave Barry wrote about Talk Like A Pirate Day, they needed a Webwench. Now we get several million visits from the piratical at heart every September.

MATTIS: So what is it about pirates, anyway?

JEZEBEL: As me ol’ mate Cap’n Slappy likes t’say, “Pirates be FUN!” And, well, there’s the rum.

MATTIS: How did you get started with Flickr?

JEZEBEL: Ah, me hearty—I be a long-time fan o’Flickr, since afore it was a part o’ Yahoo! even. Last year, when fan photos threatened t’ scuttle our ship, we moved ‘em there t’ make things easy on us. ‘Cause pirates like the easy way.

MATTIS: How has it helped you on talklikeapirate.com?

JEZEBEL: It saves me time, mate! Instead o’ processin’ photos and hand-craftin’ the pages t’ put ‘em on, I can ship the photos to Flickr, slap on a label or two an’ be back t’ pillagin’ and plunderin’ with me shipmates before ye can say “Jack Sparrow.” And the sets an’ pages look all ship-shape.

MATTIS: What would you say to publishers considering using Flickr?

JEZEBEL: Avast, ye scurvy dogs! Ye don’t know what yer missin’!
 

There you have it, straight from the webwench’s mouth. Flickr’s like buried treasure, and X marks the spot.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Cap’n

Leveraging open source content
 

Editor’s Note: On the Web, content is king. We know that already. We also know that it can be expensive to produce (or acquire) and hard to protect. That’s why some very web-savvy legal eagles from Stanford and Harvard developed Creative Commons (CC), a sort of open-source aggregator for content. CC allows you to use others’ content and share your own, for free, provided you adhere to their straightforward terms and conditions. CC’s Eric Steuer talks about what CC is, how it works, and how publishers can benefit.

A big part of my job at Creative Commons is answering people’s questions: What is Creative Commons? How does it work? Why would I want to use it?

What it is
The basic idea is this: Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding the amount of creative work available for free and legal use by the public. We provide copyright licenses that anyone can use—for free—to let the world know which parts of their copyright they are happy to give up. When you create something—from a photo to a song to a movie—you automatically own an “all rights reserved” copyright to your creativity. Creative Commons licenses are an easy way to refine your copyright so that it’s “some rights reserved.” For instance, if you wrote an article and want people to be able to re-post it on their blog—as long as they don’t alter what you have written and aren’t making money from your work, you could use one type of Creative Commons license. Or if you shot some video footage that you’re happy for people to be able to mash up, sample from, or otherwise remix—even for commercial purposes—you could use a different CC license.

How it works
It’s easy to get a Creative Commons license. You just come to CreativeCommons.org, answer a few questions—like whether you want people to be able to make money from your work, and whether you want people to be able to make derivatives/remixes of your work—and we’ll generate some code that you simply paste onto your Web site to let people know which freedoms you want your work to carry.

One important thing to understand about Creative Commons is that we’re not trying to keep people from being able to make money from their work. Instead, we want people to be able to decide, easily and without having to always involve costly lawyers, how they want their creativity to be accessed and used by the world.

Why you should care
In many cases, CC licenses actually help people profit financially from their work. For instance, say you took a really cool photo of a castle in Edinburgh, then put it on Flickr under a CC license that indicates that people may freely and legally make noncommercial copies of your picture—as long as they always credit you as the photographer, and as long as they understand that if they want to make commercial uses, they must still come to you for permission. Then imagine that a popular blogger who is writing a post about Edinburgh searches Flickr for an image to help illustrate a point she is making—she finds your photo, uses it on her blog, and credits you as the photographer. She happens to use a CC license for her blog in order to enhance its visibility; she knows that many people use Yahoo!’s Creative Commons-restricted content search to find material that is available for free and legal use under certain terms. Finally, imagine that a commercial publisher who is doing research for a book he is putting together about Scotland uses Yahoo! to find relevant information. He lands on the blog post about Edinburgh, sees your outstanding photo, and, deciding that he must have it for his book, contacts you to discuss a commercial licensing deal.

In short, by freeing up your work to be used by people for noncommercial purposes, you’ve made it easier for other people with commercial interests to find your creativity.

Resources

Yahoo! is a terrific ally of CC and has amazing tools that publishers can use to find Creative Commons-licensed content to add to your site:

Add Creative Commons photos from Flickr to your site
Flickr is a hugely popular online photo management and sharing application that lets you browse and search for images published under Creative Commons licenses. Using Flickr, you can find millions of high-quality photos that you can legally use on your site, depending on which CC license they are subject to.

Yahoo! Search: Creative Commons Search
Similarly, Yahoo! Search can help you find text, music, images, and video across the Web offered under Creative Commons licenses. Please follow the individual license restrictions for each piece of content that you find.

—Eric Steuer, Creative Director, Creative Commons

Up-and-coming age group tuned-in, turned on

Top Forrester analyst and blogger, Charlene Li, reports that 24 percent of “Generation Y” reads blogs. Writes Li:

Gen Yers—18- to 26-year-olds who came of age with broadband, cell phones and iPods, among other things—stand apart from older generations because of their hands-on approach to the Web. Marketers trying to anticipate future consumer trends should tune in to Gen Yers.

 

One key data point that stood out for me: 24% of Gen Yers read blogs, which is twice as often as the 12% of Gen Xers (ages 27-40) and three times the 7% of Young Boomers (ages 41-50) that read blogs. So skeptics of blogs should suspend their disbelief and look to at least one bellwether demographic to get an idea of how widespread blog readership can potentially grow in the future… More »

Advertisers exploring the potential value of the long tail, take heed: the Gen Y demographic accounts for 28 percent of the U.S. population alone. Likewise, bloggers and other small- and medium-sized publishers ought to consider taking this tech-smart and affluent group’s wants into account when developing content and community.

For me, personally, there’s good news and bad news in Charlene’s findings. The good news is I can say to the blog skeptics out there: “Take that!” The bad news is finding out that I’m a “Young Boomer.”

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

Editor’s Note: In the first post in our series on good design, Yahoo! interface developer Yu Shan Chuang gives us some tips and tricks on how to help create a consistent user experience using “patterns,” and points us to some great (and free) Yahoo! resources.

Say you have a large web site with lots of functionality and content that has grown organically over time. You might have a team of designers and developers with different team members working on different parts of it.  After a while, you may find that similar challenges crop up in different sections of the site—such as how a menu should function or a page grid should be laid out—but that these are being solved in different and sometimes inconsistent ways, making for a kludgy experience. The result? Your users find the experience irritating, and they click away to a competitor’s site.

To help create a consistent experience across your site, consider using what interaction designers call patterns.

What is a Pattern?
At Yahoo!, we use patterns to help us solve common design problems in a consistent manner. Like software design patterns, our information design patterns, according to IAWiki.net, “describe things that work together and the rules that govern [them].” Basically a pattern is a description and an example of how a given item or group of items (usually called a collection) should work.

A pattern has four basic components:

1. A title or name that describes the solution
2. A statement of the problem
3. A context, which describes the environment in which the problem exists
4. A solution to the problem

Here’s an example of a finished pattern that’s publicly available from the Yahoo! Pattern Library, a site that holds a plethora of patterns that publishers are free to use, provided they follow the terms and conditions:

When would you create a pattern?
As an interaction designer, I see a problem in a particular context. The problem might be, how to page through search results. The context might be paging through these results on a mobile phone. I would then propose a solution for this problem based on existing UI paradigms and interaction models. The solution might be utilizing the physical buttons, or soft keys, to access the previous page and the next page.

If the problem and solution are common occurrences, then I might create a pattern for it. This allows me to share my pattern with other others, promoting consistency.

How and when should you use patterns?
Whenever I encounter a behavioral or information architecture problem I head to the Yahoo! Pattern Library, mentioned above. These patterns have gone through baseline research and peer review, so I’m confident in them. Sometimes my problem won’t be all that similar to the ones in the pattern library, but the patterns I find can provide me with a starting point.

Let’s say you have a site that reviews digital cameras. You might want to use our module tabs pattern to help you sort your data. Putting your entire review on one long scrolling page might be tedious for users to read, so you might consider sorting your review into three tabs. The first might be your rating and give a quick summary of the camera, the second tab might be the review itself, and the third tab might contain the tech specs of the camera. This pattern can help clean up your site and make it look more professional.

Take a look at the Yahoo! Pattern Library and see if we have any solutions to the problems that you face.

Resources:

• Yahoo! Pattern Library
• Yahoo! User Interface Blog

• Yahoo! User Interface Library, which offers publicly available interface code that will work with many of the patterns in the Yahoo! Pattern Library

—Yu Shan Chuang, Interaction Designer, Yahoo! Publisher Network