…and other tidbits  from the blogosphere

I really wanted to start off this roundup with a clip from the recent visit of Food Network’s “Dinner: Impossible” to Yahoo!, but it doesn’t exist yet in video form on the Web—which, in my mind, is the same as not existing at all. So you’ll have to settle for reruns and wondering what a salmon cupcake really tastes like. Oh, and these publisher-focused morsels…

Mmm…Delicious
The Yahoo! Search blog digs into new features for Search BOSS, our search platform that lets you customize Yahoo! Search for your content pages. In particular, they like BOSS’s integration with Delicious social bookmarks to help deliver even more relevant results.Over on the Developer Network blog, they show you how to build a module that uses your page content to generate a list of Yahoo! results, re-ranked by their popularity on Delicious. I don’t pretend to understand that code-y stuff there. But I hope that you do, because if used properly, it could help you generate more relevant content to go with the content that your readers are already reading.

Social media sucks
If you ask one of my less-social colleagues, the reason why social media “sucks” is because it’s a “waste of time.” (And here I thought that was the point.) But Josh Bernoff writes on Forrester Research’s Groundswell blog that social media disappoints advertisers because they’re treating it like, well, media. “Media is something you can advertise in, in most cases. While you can advertise in social networks, that is the least interesting use for them,” he says. When businesses start treating social networks as something other than media, they can start to capitalize on them.

…but you’re still using it
Speaking of social—um, whatever you want to call it: Marketing Vox reports on a Harris Interactive poll, saying that “over half of Americans (51%) do not use Twitter or participate in either of the two largest social networking sites—MySpace and Facebook.” That seems like a curious spin. Doesn’t that also mean that pretty much half of Americans are on those sites? The poll also says that, despite the hype, just 5% of Americans are using Twitter.

Wait…those were flops?
The folks who run the human-powered directory that gave Yahoo! its start (and is still going strong) pull together interesting tidbits throughout the week. I loved their piece on products that didn’t quite take off. But then again, I loved Crystal Pepsi.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Giving power to the Purple—our colleagues have churned out some cool stuff lately

Everyone should be allowed to toot their own horns once in a while. For us this is especially true, if those sounds represent products and services that could help, or be of interest to, our publishers.

In recent weeks, some of our fellow Yahoos have taken the lid off of several exciting projects, and we thought we’d share the good news…

Thanking the monkey
The Yahoo! Developer Network just introduced an enhancement to SearchMonkey, our open search platform. The new feature, as described here in the Yahoo! Search blog, enables site owners and developers to embed flash video, games and documents directly into Yahoo! Search results. Publishers can just add a few lines of code to their embedded item, the Yahoo! webcrawler will pick it up, and your listings in Yahoo! SERPs will go bananas with eye-catching images.

The best of the Web, made for TV
You might think that accessing the Internet via a television screen has been tried and failed—and you’d be right. But this is something different: Yahoo!’s TV Widgets is now being built into sets from manufacturers like Samsung and others, enabling users to interact with their favorite Web services while they watch TV. We believe that this intelligent integration is what was lacking from previous attempts at marrying television and the Web. TV Widgets picked up several “Best of CES” awards in January—tune into the details here.

New Demo Targeting and Dayparting
If you do any type of pay-per-click advertising, this is going to be welcome news: Yahoo! Search Marketing just introduced several major enhancements to our Sponsored Search product, including ad scheduling, a dayparting tool for setting the display of ads at different times and days across an entire week; and bid adjustments, which lets you specify a premium bid amount for desired demographic groups and audiences. Take a short hop over to the YSM blog for more details.

Another print newspaper bites the dust
Finally, because there’s still some news outside of Yahoo!, here’s one non-purple item: An interesting article on the continuing struggles of the print media industry. Almost daily, large traditional print publishers are moving resources to their online operations. For Web publishers, does this engender a bit of smugness and pride that you were here first; or cause fear, as you may be faced with a higher level of competition from deep-pocketed corporations?

Yahoo! is helping newspapers make this transition through our APT product serving the Newspaper Consortium, but the continuing exodus of printed papers begs another question: With what will future generations line bird cages and wrap fish?

— Jeff Hecox