“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