web2

Yahoo Must Love WordPress

YahooShortcutsLogo

By now, you’ve probably heard or seen the mention of the new WordPress exclusive, Yahoo! Shortcuts. Yahoo shortcuts is a WordPress plugin that provides shortcuts to relevant material as you compose your blog post. Simply speaking, the Yahoo Shortcuts is an easy way to tap into the numerous sources of data that make up the Yahoo! network of websites.

There are two ways to display shortcuts to your readers. The first way shows readers certain blue dotted, underlined, terms that show the related content once the mouse cursor is hovered over them. The second way is to present the relevant content as a badge or image embedded into the actual post.

As A Link Or As A Badge

Looking at the way the relevant content is displayed reminds me a lot of how Kontera works. Kontera is a form of in text advertising. As far as I know, Yahoo is not making any money from any of the products that might be displayed on your blog.

One of the negative things about this plugin is it’s size. The plugin folder is comprised of 110 files. I suppose the reason for so many files is so the plugin can support the various shortcuts provided by Yahoo.

In concept, I think the idea works. But it’s my own opinion that these relevant images, text, financial quotes, products, ect do a good job of distracting the reader from your content. I’m one of those individuals that when I see something cool, I click on it. I keep clicking on things until I realize, how off track I’ve become. Then I go back to where I started except now, I’ve lost an hour of time. Don’t you just hate that?

One last thing I wanted to mention about the Yahoo Shortcuts. The shortcuts keep in tact the attribution information for things such as Flickr photos and you will automatically be given credit as the author of the image if it’s used inside of a blog post. If the blog author messes with the shortcut and deletes that attribution, they are actually breaking the Yahoo ShortCuts Terms Of Service and you should report them to Yahoo.

If you would like to see how the plugin works, check out this demo video that Yahoo! created. If you want to download the plugin and give it a try, download it from here.

Jaiku Launches Channels Feature

Jaiku LogoAs reported by Mashable Jaiku has finally added the ability for users to create their own channels. Users are limited to creating only three channels, with each channel being publicly viewable upon creation.

 

Channel administrators will be able to give their channel a unique avatar, short description, add feeds to the channel, and will also be able to slightly change the presentation of the channel. In the future, Jaiku users will be able to create private channels, allowing you to communicate with only those people you have invited into your group.

I’m still bummed out by the fact that Jaiku has failed to fix the problem of too many users being displayed on the right hand sidebar when your inside a channel. For instance, try going into the Twit channel and making a quick post, it becomes anything but quick. The sidebar should be handles in a way so that only a maximum of 20-30 people are displayed at one time with the option of seeing more friends. Hopefully this will be in Jaiku’s next update.

Jeffro2pt0 Channel Now On Jaiku

At any rate, I have created a channel on Jaiku called Jeffro2pt0 which will be the focus of discussions related to anything dealing with Web 2.0 If you are a Jaiku user and are interested in Web2.0 please be sure to stop by and join the channel http://jaiku.com/channel/Jeffro2pt0