Content Management Matters ™

Yahoo continues its foray in the world of openness with the release of Yahoo BOSS: Build Your Own Search Service. This is the second announcement -- the first being Yahoo SearchMonkey -- that is part of their new directive called Yahoo!Open Strategy, or Y!OS and a move they hope will take away a bit of Google's strong-hold on the search market.

Web forms are the one thing that consistently stand between the customer and the product, as well as between companies and their profits. If the web form proves successful, the customer receives his product and the company, their money. Yet, if the form isn't successful, the company can bet that they have not only lost revenue, but a customer as well.

Thanks to a new book published by Rosenfeld Media, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, author and Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc. Luke Wroblewski lays out the basic principles needed to apply toward the right design solutions for your web forms.

Zoho really wants people to try out their applications. They have opened the doors to users with Google and Yahoo accounts to access Zoho applications without having to create a new username/password. Is this Zoho's step towards the OpenID? Or a ploy to steal Google Apps users away?

The open social party is apparently the place to be. Even old Microsoft just announced LiveMesh). Now Yahoo, who's Flickr photo sharing site is the second most popular used API on the web, has rolled out a limited preview to the developer platform they announced in February called SearchMonkey.

NewsTools2008 takes place April 30-May 3 at the yahoo! Conference Center in Sunnyvale, California If you're a Drupal programmer, user-experience expert, social-network innovator, or web 2.0 entrepreneur, you're invited! The topic of the event is "Technology and the New Ecology of News: How will technology innovation support journalism and participatory democracy?" It's billed as an event in which journalism's ideals will meet Silicon Valley's tools in a three-day, conceptual mashup. Groovy.

Online advertising is a huge business, that's a no brainer. But those of us who have dealt with the inner workings of the online ad world know that there is much room for improvement in the management department. Purchasing, selling and managing impressions alone can take weeks of time, when they really probably shouldn't.

But cheer up, young publisher, Yahoo! wants to help. To the cynics, Yahoo! also wants to increase its perceived value to force Microsoft to raise its bid to purchase it, but that's for another article.

Anyway, Yahoo! is moving forward with plans to release their new ad management system, dubbed AMP!. It's a web-based, online advertising management platform that they say will simplify the process of creating, buying, and selling ads online.

The other day, colleagues and I made a list of of things that sound bad but aren't -- such as Jawbreakers and Chunky Monkey. But now I've started making a list of things that sound good but aren't. Topping the list are sites catered toward women.

Don't get me wrong, women rock. And what makes us so visibly cool is that we have diverse interests, moods and yes, emotions. But that doesn't mean we can't handle weeding through the Internet to find what we seek, whether it be the weather, a great pair of shoes or gasp! --news.

However, Yahoo! begs to differ. They think that the gentler sex are easily distracted by all the choices available to us on the magical Web that we need a one-stop shop offering content from women's magazines and blogs with a "distinctive voice" .

Why else would they launch Shine?

Continuing in their efforts to revolutionize the global mobile ecosystem, Yahoo! has announced its newest invention – Yahoo! onePlace, a mobile content management system that will let you stay informed about the things you care about (or are required to care about).

Is this an attempt to tie us even tighter to our mobile devices causing an even more continuously connected world that can’t live without the Internet? Shoot, guess it’s time to bring my CrackBerry out of storage – just when my shrink said I was cured.

The OpenID initiative garners an enormous boost (to the tune of 248 million identities) as the addition of Yahoo! brings the dream of 'one person, one password' a big step closer.

Starting January 30th, Yahoo! members will be able to use their Yahoo! identities to sign in to user services at other OpenID 2.0 Web resources.

Yahoo! is to open up its mobile platform to developers in a desperate bid to steal a march on Google on the Mobile Web.

The move was announced at the CES in Las Vegas and is just one of a number of Mobile Web initiatives launched by the beleaguered company, which sees Mobile as the medium-term battlefield where the war with Google will be won or lost.

As recently confirmed by the prolific Arrington, Google is slated to acquire FeedBurner in a US$ 100 million deal.

This is yet another wise move by big G, one that puts the company once again a step ahead of Yahoo, and in the fantastic position of being able to monetize the 700,000+ Web feeds currently managed by FeedBurner.

Open Source CMS aficionados, clear out March 22-23 on your calendar because the Open Source Content Management System Summit is being held at Yahoo's Sunnyvale, California Campus.

As are most things Open Source, the conference is free.

Senator Ted Stevens wasn't far from the truth when he called the internet a "series of tubes." If he'd said pipes instead, he probably would have gotten far less of a crucifixion -- that is, if it's possible for one crucifixion to be less unpleasant than another.

With content floating around in so many varied forms (blogs, wikis, news, niche information), there have got to be better ways to organize all that info we're streaming aside from the current process of choice: standard RSS feed readers and browsers. While convenient, RSS readers don't allow for much data structuring and have a limited framework for manipulation.