Pre-Thanksgiving news from the blogosphere

It’s Thanksgiving time for Americans, but even if you don’t live in the States, you can still be grateful for a lot of things. Here at the YPN Blog, we’re grateful to have your readership, so we thought we’d share our bounty from the blogosphere.

Holding it together
The Yahoo! Search Blog recently announced the launch of the Yahoo! Glue™ beta in the U.S. Glue topic pages help users get to all the information they want with just one click by “gluing” images, videos, articles and more all on one page. Currently, we’re starting with a limited set of topics, but more will be added over time. According to the folks at the Yahoo! Search Blog, “These pages are built using an algorithm that automatically places the most relevant modules on a page, giving you a visually rich, diverse page all about the topic in which you’re interested.”

eBay joins Yahoo! homepage test
Read, set, bid! Yodel Anecdotal announced that Yahoo! has added an eBay application to the “My Applications” dashboard area. According to the blog, “It will provide an ‘eBay Anywhere’ experience, letting people quickly monitor their eBay buying and selling activities, including checking recent bids or getting reminders about auctions that are about to close. They can also as search for and find new eBay items right from within Yahoo.com.” Read more about it here.

Link journalism gets the readers
Our friends at Publishing 2.0 just posted an interesting article about how link journalism drives page views and engagement. They have a compelling analysis on how some publishers provide many links to keep readers involved. We love links—as you can tell by this piece you’re reading now.

Wired kids in the U.K.
American youth may trail other countries in Internet use. Among 12- to 14-year-olds, says a report by the Center for the Digital Future, 100 percent of British youth use the Internet, followed by Israel at 98 percent. The report says 88 percent of Americans of the same age have access to the Internet. So where are the other 12 percent getting their publishing tips?

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Publisher related news bits

With the Holiday season approaching, you’ll soon be swamped with a massive to-do list. We thought we’d give you a selection of publisher-related news and bits for you, so you can have more time for those seemingly never ending holiday tasks.

Does the Internet care about you making money?
Publishing 2.0 has an interesting analysis of how the market and your business model may not actually be actually seeing eye-to-eye.  The post uses the example of the newspaper industry and how it approached the online industry with a sense of entitlement, which may have caused it some obstacles. The post says, “Ask not what the market can do for you, but what you can do for the market.” Read more here.

A new twist for Twittering?
Marketing Vox reported that Twitter may consider charging companies to use its microblogging feed for consumer purposes. Last week Twitter announced that it had surpassed the one billion published tweets mark.  For folks who don’t know, Twitter allows users to publish “microblogs” of up to 140 characters. Read more here. 

Open source video
Do you publish or blog with video? The Creative Commons blog recently posted a story on Kaltura, an open-source platform for video creation. As the blog reports, “Kaltura is a robust platform uncommon among web-apps that includes the ability to annotate, remix, edit, and share video collaboratively over the web.” If you need video but not a big editing package, it might be worthwhile to check it out. 

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

News from the blogosphere for publishers

The election’s over, so it’s time to refocus on some winning tools and services that can help you “change” your site. We also found a tomato that’s far from rotten. Read on…

Building a better blog
Calling all bloggers—the folks at the MyBlogLog Blog recently announced that they are teaming up with Zemanta to make your blogging toolbox more powerful. Zemanta helps you find photos, tags and related links when you’re working on your blog post. Be sure to check out the partnership to bring your blogging to the next level.

Twitter tips
It looks like some major newspapers are finally catching on to the Twitter medium, as reported by the Publishing 2.0 Blog. Newspapers can use Twitter as more than just “another place to dump their content,” says the blog. Instead, “newsrooms should see it as a way to create a whole new dimension of value under their editorial brand.”

The blog also says that many newsrooms are missing a huge point: sharing interesting stuff. “As newsrooms increasingly look to link journalism and news aggregation as a way to create value for their readers, they should look to their Twitter accounts as an easy platform for sharing links.” Read more here.

Top tomato
For the second year in a row, Yahoo! offered a prize to the blogger who mobilized the most readers to donate to DonorsChoose, the charity that lets you directly fulfill wish lists for public school teachers. The Yodel Anecdotal blog recently announced this year’s winner: Sarah Bunting, the blogger behind Tomato Nation. Tomato Nation mobilized 1,162 donors, raising $111,352 and reaching 19,577 kids. Sarah is making good on her promise to tour various Washington D.C. monuments dressed as a tomato while drawing attention to our nation’s public schools.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications