New Huffington Post YAP app shows the value of Yahoo! OpenID

When it comes to online news innovation, you’ve got to love the “HuffPost,” as the influential news and commentary site’s followers like to call it. The HuffPost (a.k.a., The Huffington Post) just introduced a new app that lets users read top HuffPo articles without having to leave their Yahoo! homepage.

With this groovy little widget, it now takes just one click to scan the most popular HuffPo stories, preview what’s latest from its bloggers, and flip through the dozens of sections. It’s impossible to do that without several articles grabbing your attention and inspiring you to comment.

“I’m excited about the new app we’ve developed for Yahoo!” says the HuffPo’s founder and political activist, Arianna Huffington. “Over 260 million people use Yahoo! email accounts and 550 million people visit Yahoo! every month—and now they can keep up with The Huffington Post without having to leave their Yahoo! homepage, simply by adding our new app.”

Yahoo! OpenID opens up a world of social media to promote your brand
Once your thoughts have been provoked, the HuffPost also has you covered there. The site accepts Yahoo! OpenID, a core element of the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) platform. Your regular, familiar Yahoo! sign-in now works on HuffPost Social News and links it all together with Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, and the rest of your online social network—depending on the permission level you set.

Any publisher can have its own app for people to use on the Yahoo! homepage and in their My Yahoo! accounts. It’s officially known as a Yahoo! Application Platform app, but you can refer to it by the much friendlier “YAP app”—Hey, Yahoo! developers do. It’s an open environment, so you can build a YAP app yourself. Any YAP app. There’s no business deal involved, just a straightforward approval process. You can read all about it in the YDN YAP documentation. Creating a YAP app is a smart, cost effective business move for any publication wanting to get its message, its brand, and its advertisers in front of users.

For more on how you can use Yahoo! OpenID and Yahoo!’s social distribution platform on your site to create social media buzz, check out the quickstart guide.

—Chris Marlowe

It’s been a busy month here at the YPN Blog, and we’re sure you have also had many things going on. That’s why we thought it would be helpful to give you a short sampling of posts from around the blogosphere.

First off, the folks at MyBlogLog announced that they recently added a script for folks who want to use twitter with their MyBlogLog. Now folks can stay updated with you while you’re on the go!

Do you have a company blog that you have been ignoring? Well, stop ignoring it, and read Jennifer Slegg’s great article on why corporate blogs fail.

For folks who are feeling bombarded by all the information and content streams available today, you might want to read Publishing 2.0’s article on the web conservation movement. The basic premise is producing quality content and not just throwing up stuff on the web because you can.  As a publisher you want to make sure that visitors find your site information relevant and helpful.

Calling all you shutterbugs using Flickr on your sites! The Flickrblog has released this nifty “Share This” button.

Though not exactly a new announcement, it doesn’t hurt to remind you of all the many and powerful publisher tools available in your account.

– The YPN Team

Announcing the new Tagometer from del.icio.us

Those clever mash-up meisters over at del.icio.us—the social bookmarking website where the world collects its favorites—have been at it again. This time they’ve come up with a widget called the Tagometer that you can use to enhance your site, help drive relevant traffic and hook up with others of like interests. And, it’s free.

Like the static del.icio.us badge, the new widget includes a button inviting readers to bookmark your page on del.icio.us. The Tagometer takes it a step further, however, offering an up-to-date ticker of those who’ve already bookmarked the page, plus a list of the top tags.

Your users can click on the ticker to see more detail: who bookmarked your page, when they did it, and how they tagged it.

For more info, check out the del.icio.us blog.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor