Yahoo’s User-Driven Efforts

A good story on the opening-up efforts of Yahoo, in developing and using user-generated content, and becoming open to, well, open-APIs.

Its social search and tagging efort, MyWeb, has seen tepid growth in the number of pages saved (about 300,000) and tags applied (fewer than 90,000)…Del.icio.us, by contrast, has 10 million saved pages and half a million tags.

On the open-advertising side, the company has big hope with Yahoo Publisher Network. YPN serves up ads to small websites and blogs, much like Google Adsense. The difference is that YPN lets websites tag themselves, Flickr-style, so as to get more relevant ads in return. In the long run, thanks to YPN, Yahoo content will become more nomadic.

Schneider, the VP in charge of Yahoo’s developer network wants YPN to syndicate reviews, ratings, and Flickr feeds. He is even considering opening up an API to YPN itself so users can experiment with building their own creative advertising systems. In theory, someone could figure out how to deliver audio and video ads via YPN.

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