News and notes of interest to members of our Publisher Network

There are still about three weeks to go until June 21, but in my book, Memorial Day signaled the beginning of summer. And if like me you’re in the midst of reading a 1,000+-page paperback, you may need those extra days just to finish it before the leaves start changing in the fall.

To provide a much quicker bite of what’s going on in the online publishing world, we’ve compiled a handful of recent news items below. You should be able to digest these while the charcoal is getting hot during your next cookout. Enjoy…

Pretty as a (legal) picture
Looking for a photo to add to one of your site’s pages? Sure, you can probably find what you seek somewhere on the Web, but can you reuse it for commercial purposes? A new Creative Commons license filter in Yahoo! Image Search makes it easy to find a pic that’s compelling and won’t get you in trouble with the authorities.

Link-building like a pro
Eric Enge at Search Engine Watch offers an interesting and informative article on planning and executing a link-building campaign. Among his advice: Publish great content (or tools) on your site, and avoid publishing “me too” type of content. Says Enge: “Plan on publishing stuff that establishes your organization as a leader in its market.”

Turns out they will pay to read
While many newspapers struggle to keep customers paying for a print version while offering the same product online for free, two smaller dailies have found that what might seem counter-intuitive actually seems to work. According to this article by AP writer Michael Liedtke, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the Idaho Falls Post-Register are now restricting their online content to paying subscribers—with surprising results. Says the publisher of the Post-Register: “To just give [our content] all away on a Web site is completely and blindly idiotic.”

Fee-based services to supplement ad revenue?
In a related article, The New York Times examines how websites are looking beyond hosting ads to keep afloat in these challenging economic times. Some of the solutions include: a restaurant reservation site that gets a dollar for every diner seated at its clients’ tables, and an online golf game site that charges small amounts for premium virtual putters and greens fees.

— Jeff Hecox

Photo courtesy Norby on Flickr.

Various items of interest to the publishing community

The YPN blog staff has been away awhile, celebrating all of the recent holidays (especially Festivus, although I must admit I had a harder time than usual getting the aluminum pole back into the attic). Once we returned to HQ, we came across a few tidbits that we wanted to share with readers. Consider it our belated Festivus gift to you…

Three SEM Tips for Big Media Sites
Erik Dafforn’s article from ClickZ offers three excellent suggestions to help larger content publishers continue their traffic growth, including what they can do to increase visibility and properly utilize the assets they’ve spent years developing. Daffron is the EVP of the Cleveland-based SEO firm Intrapromote, so when he says “Get your content indexed rapidly,” publishers should ask, “How fast?”.

Post-PubCon Report
The Yahoo! Store Blog published a post last week from frequent contributor Rob Snell, the author of Starting a Yahoo! Business for Dummies. Snell provides a recap of the November PubCon show in Vegas, as well as his entire 77-slide deck on how to make more money from your online store. Whether you’re using a Yahoo! Store or flying solo, his tips are nails and can be applied to any online retail site.

Use Caution When Growing Your Site
From Search Engine Watch, Eric Enge checks in with an article that warns of the perils of rapidly expanding the size of your site to gain search volume from the long tail of search. The pitfalls if you ignore this advice? Poor user experience, lack of incoming links and low rankings from search engines.

Internet Overtakes Newspapers as News Outlet
There’s no question we all saw this coming, but now it’s a reality: The Internet has surpassed all other media—except television—as an outlet for national and international news. According to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 40% of respondents say they get most of their news about national and international issues from the Internet, up from 24% in September 2007. And for the first time, more people say they rely mostly on the Internet for news than on those black-and-white dinosaurs that I used to toss into my customers’ hedges circa 1981.

What Font are You?
Finally, a fun little quiz to close out our round-up. In conjunction with the PBS film “Helvetica,” a program that takes a unique view of post-World War II graphic design, you can take a short personality quiz that purports to find your inner typeface. My font is supposedly “Contrary.” I beg to differ!

Got any grievances you’d like to air as we begin ’09? Feel free to share them in the Comments section below.

— Jeff Hecox

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

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

Publisher-related news and bits from around the blogosphere

As Halloween approaches, we thought we’d compile some news for our publishers, so you can spend more time working on your Halloween costume.

What do you want from me?
A while ago, Yahoo! bought a company called Inquisitor, which makes a cool Safari browser plug-in of the same name. The Inquisitor application, which helps generate auto-completes on search queries and previews results, is now available for Firefox and IE7 and 8 browsers. It can also help to generate more personalized search results. Check out the Yahoo! Search blog for more information.

Any colour you like
Whether you spell it “colors” or “colours,” you now have more options when using different themes and colors to personalize your My Yahoo! page. You can now unleash the true potential of your inner designer and start customizing your page. Check out more information here on how to make your My Yahoo! page more individualistic.

Hey you
Social networking is all the rage these days, and Yahoo! has recently made some upgrades to its user profile application to reflect this trend. The new “universal profile” is still in beta, but it can help you manage your identity, activities, interests and connections across Yahoo!. “Ultimately, our goal is to unify your social experience and connections, not only on Yahoo!, but anywhere you travel across the Web,” says Jim Stoneham, Vice President, Communities, about the new profile format. “Rolling out the new profile today is a just first step, and I look forward to sharing more details with you in the coming months as we ‘light up’ social experiences at Yahoo!”.

The profile enhancement is further, ahem, profiled here.

Have a safe and sane Halloween holiday!

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Photo of Roger Waters performing “Any Colour You Like” courtesy of Eddie Bearman

Selected blogosphere tidbits

Time of the season
As we shift into cooler weather and shorter days, Yodel Anecdotal recently announced that Yahoo! is launching a new calendar. The new web-based application features open standards so you can share your schedule with others, and it’s also built for the mobile platform.

News bits
In the online media landscape, the Associated Press plays an important role in the publishing and news coverage. Often the AP is the first to cover a story, then bloggers pick up on the news piece and run with the story. Publishing 2.0 examines the relationship between the AP and the 21st Century news ecosystem.

Extraordinary ideas
The folks at the Groundswell blog recently published a piece on how ordinary marketers can generate extraordinary ideas. Just because these ideas were written with marketers in mind doesn’t mean that publishers can’t use these tips, too. As the popularity of blogs, social networks and wikis grows, it’s good to learn how to best use these technologies.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

An end of the summer roundup

Ah, the end of the summer… though it’s 90 degrees in Los Angeles and 80 degrees in New York today. But soon the kids will be back to school, the leaves will change colour and folks will break out these strange garments called … sweaters. So, as summer dies down, we thought we’d share this roundup of what’s still hot in the publisher world.

Who’s the boss? You are.
It’s been two months since Yahoo! Launched Yahoo! Search BOSS and so far we’ve seen some great products created with it. Our colleagues at the Yahoo! Search Blog are spotlighting a few folks who have developed on the new product. Be sure to check out some of the interesting products — maybe you’ll be inspired to a product of your own.

Making mobile waves
Mediaweek recently announced that mobile Internet usage is exhibiting healthy growth in 2008. According to a new report issued by mobile technology vendor Crisp Wireless, the total number of mobile web impressions generated by users surged by 29.4 percent in the second quarter of this year versus the previous quarter.

The mobile publishing and marketing industry is still taking its first steps but it’s worthwhile to check out some of the companies. You might want to check out some of the products and services from Yahoo! Mobile.

The politics of punditry
Our friends at Yahoo! Anecdotal recently published a post about the new and improved General Election Political Dashboard for all your folks following the race to the White House. The dashboard is highly interactive, detailed yet completely easy to use.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

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

Selected publisher-related tidbits from the blogosphere

Are you a publisher who is constantly looking for the right image to post on your site? Well, we may not know what the best image is, but we can steer you to some free ones. The folks on the Flickr blog recently announced that Flickr is teaming up with Getty Images to create a collection of royalty-free, rights-ready and rights-managed photographs.

“Team Flickr has long wanted to create a way to make it easier for those who use photos as a part of their daily business to do so in a way that respects the talent and rights of our members,” say our Flickr colleagues on their blog. They also created helpful FAQs about the royalty-free collection and how to use it.

7 Habits of Highly Effective Publishers
Rebecca Sullivan on the RightMedia Blog recently posted some tips for effective publishing. “I have helped publishers from dozens of countries, with very different backgrounds, and with very different sites, and I’ve learned one thing: they’re not that different after all,” Sullivan writes. “There are some behaviors that are shared by many of our most successful publishers, so I’d like to present you with some of their best ideas, so you can use them and maybe even make lots of money.”

Mapping Your Peeps
The Groups Labs team recently launched the People Map Beta. If you’re a Yahoo! Group owner or a moderator, you can map members of your particular group.  They just have to complete a short information form that puts them on the map. You already know where they are in terms of common interests, but now you can see where they are physically.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

A Mid-Summer’s News Catch-Up

Our colleagues at the Right Media Blog recently posted an article about the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and their efforts to broaden the coalition of publishers on the web. According to the IAB’s post “Small Publishers Unite! You Have Nothing To Save But Your Business,” the IAB is trying to “mobilize to stop politicians from unfairly and inappropriately regulating digital advertising.” Check it out for yourself.

Picture This
The Creative Commons Blog posted an article on how to help distinguish between Creative Commons, the public domain and all-rights-reserved images you may use on your site. Recently, some reporters from mainstream newspapers were confused about where certain images fell under, and as a result, there was some trouble. Many publishers use all three types of images, so it might be good for you to review.

Sounding Social
With so many free online radio stations and different music players, it’s a little daunting at times keeping up with the technology. Chris Lindsay of Yahoo!’s The Spark blog does a great job reviewing some of the many social music networks in the article “The Rise of the Social Music Networks.”

Private Matters
Some of you specialty publishers also participate on Yahoo! Groups, and their blog recently posted some tips on what privacy controls you have. It’s great info on how to control who can join your group, who can find your group, or who can see your group messages.

Just the Facts, Please
Many of us routinely use Wikipedia as our main source for facts, definitions and quick answers. A very informative piece in its own right, DistanceDegrees.com’s “Lose Your Wikipedia Crutch: 100 Places to Go for Good Answers Online” opens our eyes to a whole bunch of great places to get answers. Yahoo! Answers is one of the top Question and Answers sites mentioned. Of course, if you’d asked us that, we would have told you.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications