“None of us is as smart as all of us.”—Japanese proverb 

Nature gravitates towards equilibrium and the online world is no exception to this rule. Just as a search engine gives you organic results on the left hand side of the page, you will also find useful information on the right hand sponsored results.  Both results are important, relevant and getting better everyday and a good user experience balances the two.

Attending two conferences over the past few weeks presented two approaches to successful online publishing; one focused on audience and community, the other on commerce and monetization.

Meetings of minds
I was at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco to talk with new startups that have drawn significant attention (and traffic) and are trying to figure out how to keep their servers from melting down, desperate to cover their hosting bills. Next, I was at the annual WebmasterWorld gathering in Las Vegas called PubCon, where I listened to site owners sharing tips on how to tune their well-oiled monetization machines but are peering over the wall trying to figure out how to get some of the traffic pounding down the doors on the latest and greatest social network site.

There is an opportunity to bring these groups together to learn from each other. As before, balance is important. The most successful sites will balance community and monetization and I hope that the Yahoo! Publisher Network can help make that happen for its members.

As one of the largest community destinations on the Web, Yahoo! is home to many communities and most of them have some kind of badge or feed that you can take advantage of and integrate into your site. We’ve listed many of these tools on our Publisher Services tab in your secure publisher interface as well as on the publicly available Enhance Your Site page. As new services come online we will be updating these sections for you.

The Yahoo! Publisher Network is unique because it focuses on site owners who are integrating Yahoo! services into their sites. They are not only consuming Yahoo! as regular viewers but are also partnered with us to re-distribute our content and services to their audiences.

Tell us what you want
We’ve been thinking about an area where the audience aggregators and the site monetizers can meet, share best practices, and help each other out. As we think through what this area will look like, I’d love to hear your ideas. Would a peer-ranked directory of flash programmers be useful? How about a forum discussing community building guidelines? Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts. As a virtual village well, I hope the Yahoo! Publisher Network will not only be a place to get work done but also be a place for its members to meet each other and share their collective expertise.

—Ian Kennedy, Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Publisher Network

Look for us at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in Chicago, December 4 through 7

Chicago is a great location for the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference, which takes place December 4 through 7 at the Chicago Hilton Hotel. “The City of the Big Shoulders” is ideal for two reasons, one practical, the other historical.

Practically speaking, Chicago is almost smack-dab in the middle of the country, making getting to it from both coasts, the south or the north, a breeze. Historically, Chicago is where America’s industrial revolution really began to build steam and is the birthplace of the skyscraper. It’s the perfect place for search technology’s most innovative minds to gather and share ideas.

And this SES isn’t just for SEMs and SEOs. There will plenty there for the publisher as well. It’s a great place to network and connect with potential partners. And Yahoo! Publisher Network will be there to answer your questions. Just drop by our booth, number 313.

Here’s just a small sampling from the more than 70 panels, workshops and forums that you can benefit from:

Introduction to Search Engine Marketing
A must-attend session for beginners that provides an overview of key concepts.

Search Advertising 101
Learn the basics of paid placement to help drive more users to your site.

Search Engine-Friendly Design
Learn how can you build (from the ground up) a web site that pleases both crawler-based search engines and your visitors.

Link-Building Basics
Learn how to increase traffic to your site by building quality links in an appropriate manner.

Writing For Search Engines
Find out how to write so as to please both search engines and human visitors.

Be our guest
Also, we’re throwing a bash during the show, and if you’re attending SES we want you to drop by. It’ll be on Monday, December 4 from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. at The Enclave, 213 W. Institute Place. Transportation will be available from the Hilton, cocktails and light appetizers will be served, and we’ll have a live band. Be sure to bring your SES badge for admittance.

Come network with us in the city where modernity in the U.S. began.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

Phone support closed Thursday and Friday

Everybody needs something to be thankful for. You know: life, liberty and the pursuit of higher PPC. A day or two off with the family once in awhile is something to be thankful for, too. 

With that in mind, our Customer Support telephones will be offline on Thursday and Friday, November 23 and 24. We will be open on Saturday from 7:00 .a.m. to 4:00 p.m. for phone support, and again on Monday the 27th at our usual business hours. If you have any issues during our downtime, feel free to send us an email and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Cheers, and enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday.

—Yahoo! Publisher Network Customer Support

Teaming up to make search submission easier
 

As a publisher, you know how important it is to get your site crawled by search engines—more crawling equals more visitors which could equal more qualified clicks on your ads. Would you like it if, say, it would be a lot easier for you to provide search engines—and not just ours, mind you—with your content and metadata? Would you like it if there were a single, uniform format for search submissions to search providers? It’s kind of rhetorical question. Many of you have, in fact, told us you want just that.

Which is why Yahoo! Search, along with our friends at Google and Microsoft, is pleased to announce support of Sitemaps 0.90, a common protocol that will make it easier for you to get your pages seen across the Web. To facilitate that, we’re announcing, again in collaboration with our friends from across the aisle, Sitemaps.org. This new site provides details of the current release of the new Sitemaps 0.90 protocol and will include future updates as we continue to collaborate. With the common protocol, you can use a single format to create a catalog of your URLs and to notify major search providers of changes.

For all the details on how to submit your sitemap under the new standard protocol, visit the Yahoo! Search Blog. As always, we love to hear feedback, so visit our Yahoo! Site Explorer forum.

—The Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Publisher Network teams

Promoting quality on a granular level

Building a high-quality network is a top priority at Yahoo! Publisher Network. We’ve offered a plethora of blog posts to help you, the publisher, understand just what that means (like this one, this one, and this one). Ensuring compliance with terms and conditions, especially with regard to ad implementation and content, is a big part how we maintain that quality

With that in mind, we’re happy to unveil a new feature called Compliance Manager. This feature helps you pinpoint problems with the implementation of your Yahoo! ads, or problems with content on the same page as your Yahoo! ads, so that you can correct them—and keep the ads flowing. 

Here’s how it works: If a compliance issue is detected on one of your URLs, you will be notified via email and through an alert in your secure account interface. These will direct you to your new Compliance Manager control panel. The Compliance Manager will inform you of what the issue is so that you have the opportunity to fix it. Once you’ve addressed the issue, you can then go back to the Compliance Manager to submit the remedied URL. We’ll get back to you with a status report, usually within seven business days. 

—Eric Edge, Yahoo! Publisher Network Product Manager

The bad news first
You will not be able to access the Publisher account interface this evening, November 16, 2006, from 6:00 p.m. to approximately midnight, Pacific Time. This should not impact your account earnings, nor the serving of ads to your site.

The silver lining…
We’re pulling the Publisher Center down for those few hours because our gearheads are installing some pretty whiz-bang stuff that should help improve the quality of the network. We’ll tell you about it as soon as it’s done. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, we apologize for any inconvenience.

—The Team

Editor’s Note: In this, the third installment of our series on good design, Yahoo! visual designer Lynn Chang (right) discusses the Web 2.0 style and how to create it to offer your users an experience that will help keep them coming back. 

What is Web 2.0?

In a nutshell, Web 2.0 is where the Web becomes the intersection between people and applications. Web 2.0 services are, in essence, online applications that help you share information and accomplish certain tasks, the way that desktop applications did traditionally—storing and sharing media (Flickr, Yahoo! Video), disseminating information, (WordPress, Typepad, del.icio.us), promoting real-world events (Upcoming.org), etc.

Web 2.0 services are not only changing how we do things, they’re changing the style of the Internet and of the web sites that we encounter. In the Web 2.0 world, the old rules of desktop-based software, which often required 3,000-page manuals to understand, don’t apply. With Web 2.0, simplicity is the key.

Whether your site is a an earth-shaking Web 2.0 app or a site simply designed to help bloggers add bling to their blogs, the following lessons can help make your experience more intuitive and your site more popular, helping to keep users coming back.

The Web 2.0 Style
Web 2.0, as a design style, can make your web site look updated, eye-catching and modern. While there are no official standards for what makes a web site “Web 2.0,” there are certainly a few common characteristics. Web 2.0 design uses larger, bolder fonts and greater contrasts in color for easy user comprehension and navigation. The Web 2.0 style is intended to make completing any task seem easy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Or, how not to annoy your readership!

Jennifer Slegg, of JenSense offers tips on how to help keep your blog neat and clean for a better user experience, longer-term readership and consistent revenues.

I have a huge number of blogs in my RSS reader. But while I may not read all of them daily, at the very least I’ll skim the headlines. But when it comes time to clean house, why do some blogs make the cut, while others I send to RSS exile?

Looks Count
Yes, call me vain, but looks count. You have to be writing some pretty spectacular blog entries for me to keep reading a blog that is supremely ugly, uses a design that breaks in certain browsers, uses a trendy but hard-to-read font face, or uses the “out-of-the-box” blog design with zero customization (if it still says “Just another WordPress blog,” you are on shaky ground). Jeremy Zawodny could change his background to migraine-inducing black, change the logo to some hideous dripping blood goth design, make the text lime green with hot pink links, and I’d still read it. But for some blogger who might post a single gem every other month? RSS exile it goes.

Don’t Hit Me Over the Head with Ads
Yes, we all want to monetize our blogs. But I get easily annoyed when I see the blog entry title, then one (or even two!) 336 x 280 ad units before I see a single word of the actual entry. True, a placement that is in your face may get more clicks initially, but the drop in traffic from annoyed readers dumping your blog will result in lower ad impressions and earnings. If you have your heart set on that placement, change it to a banner instead, and save the large rectangle for the juicy spot after the entry but before the comments.

Use RSS Ads Smartly
If you use RSS ads, give the entire entry in the RSS feed, and not just a snippet. Or better yet, offer me a choice of either an ad-supported full entry feed or an ad-free snippet-only feed.

Write Regularly
We are all guilty of allowing a week or two go between entries. Sometimes there is nothing newsworthy to report, or we are busy with clients (or vacations!) But once you allow a couple weeks to go by without an entry, people start to wonder if maybe your blog has joined the thousands of other defunct blogs cluttering the net. So have a few entries ready to go for times when life interferes. And if you know you are going to be busy, have a few entries set to future publish every few days while you are away to give the illusion of an active blog even if you are really at Disneyland.

While some of these tips seem obvious, trust me when I say that many a blog has gone to RSS exile because they commit one, two, or yes, even all of these faux pas. So do some housecleaning to get your blog ready for the holiday season, and ensure that your blog doesn’t get exiled the next time a reader decides which blogs are worthy enough to make the cut, and which ones will end up on the RSS cutting room floor.

—Jennifer Slegg

Come network with us in the city by the bay

David Filo, Barry Diller, Vint Cerf, Jeff Bezos, John Battelle, Stewart Butterfield, Caterina Fake, Jason Calacanis. Those are just a few of the big guns who will be speaking at this week’s Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, November 7 through 9 at the Palace Hotel. This conference promises be a veritable who’s who of the intellects creating the next generation Internet.

So in between your obligatory cable car ride and your bay cruise to Alcatraz, look for our “pod,” or mini-booth, at the show and come say hello. In addition, we’ve got a special panel just for you, featuring our own Josh Meyers, Sr. Director of Yahoo! Publisher Network and GM of Domain Match, and Valla Vakili, Creative Director of Yahoo! Studios. They’ll be talking about the recent product launches, enhancements and acquisitions that can help you be a better publisher.

Party, ‘Frisco-style
Plus, if you’re a registered attendee of Web 2.0, we cordially welcome you to the Tuesday evening cocktail reception where the Yahootinis are on us. 

If you’re not going to be there, let us now what you want to hear about in the comments section.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

Editor’s Note: Creating an interesting blog can help drive traffic and offers a casual way for publishers to communicate with their users. This week, Jeremy Zawodny, Yahoo’s official Troublemaker and a much read blogger, offers tips on writing a compelling blog. Next week, Jen Slegg of Jensense discusses blogger faux pas.

A while ago Michael Mattis asked me if I could write up a few blogging tips for the Yahoo! Publisher Network blog. That seemed like an easy thing to do. I blog all the time. And since I have more than a few dozen readers, I’m probably doing something right at least some of the time.

But when it came time to do it, I couldn’t. It was like school all over again. I’d stare at the blank window wondering what I should write. The cursor would blink. And blink. I’d stare for a little while before getting distracted or giving up and postponing it until a future date. I was not inspired.

Write when the spirit moves you
It wasn’t until some time later, at a Yahoo-internal blogging event that I started to figure out what I might want to say. The initial inspiration came after I had the chance to stand in front of an audience of my peers and explain what I thought about corporate blogging at Yahoo.

As is so often the case, it was obvious in retrospect.

Forced writing often shows. I threw away my first attempts because they just didn’t feel right. I was doing it to make Michael happy, rather than because I thought I had something to say.

Write what matters
I’ve often joked with people about my complete inability to predict which of my blog posts will resonate with anyone, attract comments, and generally be popular for at least a few minutes. I had never considered that asking for scotch recommendations would generate dozens of responses in less than a day. And dried fruit too?

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my “surprisingly popular” blog posts had something in common. They all mattered to me and I assumed that they mattered only to me–or a very small group at most.

Sure, it’s fun to add your two cents to whatever this week’s big blogosphere storm happens to be. But ultimately, unless it’s something you really care about, it doesn’t matter.

Write as you think
One of the dumbest things you can say when attempting to photograph people is “okay everyone… act normal!” The act of telling them to do so makes it nearly impossible for them to comply. It’s as if Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle applies to humans and sub-atomic particles equally well.

It’s tempting to write blog posts a few days in advance and hold off on publication so that you can spend some time reviewing. Tweaking words. Editing. Revising. Over-thinking.

That’s all well and good if you’re the kind of person who does that in other parts of life, too. Some people are detail-oriented meticulous planners who can spend a lot of time trying to get things just right. They’re often quiet during long meetings, speaking up only at the very end once they’ve digested and re-digested everything that’s been said.

I’m not one of those people. I tend to speak, think, and write on the fly. I program that way, too. I’d rather start with something imperfect and work out my exact thinking (or the right algorithm) in real time.

The great thing about blogging is that the technology and medium work well for both ends of the spectrum. Don’t let the fact that you’re “publishing to the world” hold you back from potentially making a fool of yourself.

—Jeremy Zawodny, Troublemaker