Boost Your Blog with Yahoo! Shortcuts for WordPress (Beta)
Date : 2007 12 13 Category : Yahoo Yahoo! Search BlogWriting a good blog post is more than just putting words on paper. It's also about rounding out ideas, opinions and thoughts with content that supports your statements -- be it maps, pictures or links. And sometimes, the hassle of digging up that supporting content is the most painful part. So, to help bloggers address these pain points, we built Yahoo! Shortcuts for Wordpress -- a technology that sits in the background and finds and offers content to help build out your post in real-time. Shortcuts lift the burden of finding additional content and integrating it into your posts so that you can focus on the meat -- the writing.
So, how does it work? Simply download the Yahoo! Shortcuts plug-in and as your typing it will begin to find terms in your post such as company names and tickers, locations, news and product names -- and, with no additional effort, integrates a roll-over or preview badge into your post. For example, "Crater Lake" brings up a map of Crater Lake to answer the "where the heck is that" question and "Citigroup" calls up a dynamic finance chart of the company's stock performance. The product Shortcut (e.g. Nintendo Wii) displays the latest product reviews and price comparisons from retailers across the web via Yahoo! Shopping.
And, because a picture is worth a thousand words we didn't stop there. While these days it is popular to release new features every half hour or so, we decided to hold the product and dive deeper to offer images, as well. Now, under Creative Commons licensing, we'll recommend Flickr images based on the key themes of your post, with proper attribution to the original author of the picture included. For a complete list of Shortcuts available, check out this site.
All of these capabilities are built on the premise of giving the publisher control -- you can decide whether to keep or reject the recommended content and how it is visually presented. To see these controls in action watch this short tutorial.
You can learn more about it at Yodel Anecdotal . And if you're one of the first 500 bloggers to install and use the plug-in we'll send you one of these cool t-shirts.
We'll continue to roll-out new versions to provide an open environment for developers to create their own modules for content within and outside of the Yahoo! network. So, stay tuned for future updates. If you have some ideas on which platforms to support next, let us know in the comments below.
Ariel Seidman & Luke Wroblewski Yahoo! Search