Yahoo! takes on Blogger…
Thursday, January 19th, 2006 at 3:23 pm by Anik Singal
This month (January) magazine issue is (in my opinion) amazing - Helen Montgomery (the Cheif Editor) has really out-done herself this time. The magazine should be out any day now, so look for it.
Just to give you a feeling on what we’ll be discussing, there is a HUGE segment dedicated to spying on Yahoo and how their business model is changing (and maybe even becoming more affiliate marketing friendly).
To “tease” on what’s to come in a day or two - here is just an excerpt from the main article called “eYe on Yahoo!”
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Like that venerable old stand-by Blogger.com, Yahoo!360° allows users to create their own blogs. But that’s where the resemblance ends. Yahoo!360° has clearly learned from the popularity of the infinitely flexible WordPress and the innovative hosted application TypePad.
While Yahoo!360°’s blogging features are primitive in some respects - like Blogger it doesn’t support categories - marketers should keep a close eye on it for its innovations in connectivity and collaboration. One of the smartest - and potentially most powerful - moves made by Yahoo!360° is the ability to hook your blog into the community of Yahoo! Messenger users. With one simple setting, you can allow anyone who views your Yahoo!360° blog to send you an instant message. That means with one click, marketers can build instant trust with blog readers/potential customers.
What’s even more exciting - though also open to potential abuse - is the Yahoo!360° mailbox. Users can specify whether they want to receive messages from everyone in Yahoo!360°, everyone they’re connected to, or only people in specific categories.
It’s obvious that users who leave their Yahoo!360° mailbox settings as open as possible are bound to be inundated with spam. But it’s also obvious that this feature opens the door to developing targeted niche communities who can communicate via email without the need for autoresponders - and without exposing their non-Yahoo! email addresses.
Yahoo!360° has also developed one of the simplest and fastest blog interfaces. Posts are instantaneous. Wondering whether your Yahoo! 360° RSS feed will get distributed across the Yahoo! networks? Or how to ping your Yahoo360° blog? To get the latest, dig into Yahoo!’s RSS Publisher FAQ at http://publisher.Yahoo.com/help.php.
And if you’re tired of being tied to your PC, Yahoo!360° also supports Moblogging - sending photos and posts to your blog from your mobile phone. Photo sharing and filtering (selecting which groups can see content) are also easy to enable.
The upshot for affiliates? Now’s the time to start business blogging on Yahoo!360° - while the service is young, the good URLs are still available,
and you have the opportunity to let your blog mature naturally within the Yahoo! index. Check it out at http://360.yahoo.com .
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