yahoo

Yahoo Interviews Matt Mullenweg

Yahoo had the opportunity to have a conversation with Matt Mullenweg when he stopped by to talk with Yahoo! bloggers about the current and future state of WordPress. Some of the topics that were covered in the interview:

  • Turning 24
  • Surprising uses of WordPress
  • The next big WordPress release (new features)
  • Scaling Automattic and WordPress.com
  • bbPress (Automattic’s message board software)
  • PHP4 vs. PHP5
  • PHP vs. other languages for web development

Some interesting things that I picked up from the interview are as follows:

  • Lots of websites are using the core of WordPress for other applications.
  • 2.5 is going to be the largest release since 1.2
  • Lots of things that WordPress users were used to have been reworked.
  • WordPress is going for an even more slimlined, simplified user experience.
  • Automattic still employs 18 people. 14 of those 18 people deal with coding.
  • WordPress.com is still growing by leaps and bounds. WordPress.com seems to be hosting a number of savvy or high trafficked blogs.
  • Talkpress will indeed be a hosted version of BB Press. It will be looked at as an experiment that might or might not be successful. BB Press will reach 1.0 this year.
  • 2.5 won’t contain database changes, it will mostly deal with the use intgerface.
  • PHP 4 compatibility with WordPress will not be broken anytime in the near future.

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.

MyBlogLog Avatars Failing To Display

MyBlogLog LogoFrom the looks of it, some of the avatars on MyBlogLog that are being hosted on http://civrf.yahoo.com are not displaying. I don’t know if CIVRF is one of many of the Yahoo servers but apparently, the darn thing is offline taking anyone’s avatar that is hosted on the machine with it.

I’ve been browsing around the MyBlogLog Blog and the MBL community and no one seems to have mentioned it or at least, no one seems to be talking about it. The images began disappearing starting yesterday. Is this happening to anyone else?

Is IM That Big Of A Threat?

In response to S.M. Schrama’s post on IM Forms A Security Risk To Companies I too believe that, IM should not be stopped on a corporate network. I think the company in question should definitely put together a list of guidelines for using an IM protocol on a corporate network but it shouldn’t be banned. If Pownce is a sign of the future in instant messaging, I don’t think we will have to worry about malicious code attacks via the IM protocol.