Publisher news bits from the blogosphere

Earlier this week, Yahoo! announced a partnership with HP and Intel to create a “global, multi-datacenter research testbed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education.” What’s cloud computing? Well, we had to look it up, too, but the simple way to describe it is as a way for customers to tap into computing resources that can be anywhere, and only pay for what they use.

“Here at Yahoo!, we believe in open and collaborative research as the best way toward building the next generation of the Web,” says Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research. “As part of our dynamic Academic Relations program, we’re teaming up with academia, as well as other companies and governments across the globe, to invest in and pool together the large-scale computers that will let researchers conduct truly breakthrough work on cloud computing and data storage systems.”

We’ll keep you updated as we learn more about the cloud computing project.

Picnik basket
Are you a big shutterbug, or use a lot of photos from Flickr on your site? The Flickr blog recently announced they are working with the folks at Picnik on a nifty tool. Starting today, you can send a batch of uploaded pictures to Picnik for editing, crop and edit, and then save everything to your photostream.

MyBlogLog overhauled
Calling all bloggers out there: Please report to the new MyBlogLog site and dig their new redesign. The sleek and clean design still has all the features you’ve come to know and love, but check out the New with Me feature, which now runs down the center of the page. Profiles in the past were pretty static, but now they become a dynamic representation of your current activity.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications