Boost Your Blog with Yahoo! Shortcuts for WordPress (Beta)
- Posted December 13th, 2007 at 5:00 am by Yahoo! Search
- Categories: Search
Writing 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
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This is a very cool plugin, well done!!!
It’d be great if you developed something similar for leading CMS such as Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, etc.
Thank you!
And don’t forget Movable Type. (ugh, welcome to the world of incompatible plugins!)
My guess is that Yahoo Term Extraction is the backbone of the plugin?
At the risk of being banned from the Yahoo directory ;) how is this any different than the horrible SNAP pages plugin which slows down the blog with horrible mouse over popups?
It seems to benefit Yahoo more than the bloggers, unless you are just a splogger trying to get more outbound links into Yahoo..
I have downloaded and have a test run on it, it works charm!!
ps3szene:
Yes– at the core, a variation of the Term Extraction Service is the backbone.
Thanks,
-Ariel Seidman
Yahoo! Search
I am trying to test-run the plugin, but unfortunately, when the plugin attempts to contact Yahoo to search the post, I keep getting the following error: “The Yahoo shortcuts plugin is having difficulty contacting Yahoo”
Any idea what the problem might be, and whether it is on my end or Yahoo’s?
why just US for free T-shirt? Lol, it would be cool if offered internationally
I am looking for a way to synchronize among my blogs. I want to post an article on one blog which will be updated automatically to another blog. Any thought?
How would international webmasters benefit? Yahoo! only benefits US people when it comes to earning from sponsored programs.
Is there any gains to webmasters?
This Yahoo! Shortcuts is great and the Short Tutorial is also informative. but the sad thing is it is only for wordpress blog. it should be compatible with all the blogs.
Hey,
I see it bit differently…..as its more beneficail to Yahoo more than the bloggers.
Let me tell you one of the best thing you can do with it. Prepare a revenue program for Yahoo and Blogger. Means,the blogger who install this plugin, will get into revenue sharing progem with Yhaoo and when ever the user from the blog clicks on the link and goes to yahoo, Yhaoo paid few amount to the blogger. This way the blogger will rally make few money and Yhaoo will also be positive side.
How’s that ?????
Srv
With a small tweak, you can open many yahoo messengers
How can I turn this feature off? It is very annoying to be reading an article and have some unwanted pop-up interrupt you. Is there any way to turn this annoying feature off?
How about languages other than US English? Will it work?
I will try this one and give you my feedback.
I want to turn this annoying Y! shortcut. I curse whoever made it
If you turn off Javascript, Y! shortcuts won’t come up, at least for me. Keep in mind other websites may utilize it differently than Yahoo and their pages won’t display properly unless Javascript is turned on.
IE 7: Tools -> Internet Options.. -> Security -> Custom level -> Scripting -> Disable. Close all IE browser an re-open it.
Firefox: Tools -> Options… -> Content. Un-echeck Enable Javascript.
Does the security settings affect it as wont work on my machine.
will it become available for all format of blog other than wordpress?
If you turn off Javascript, Y! shortcuts won’t come up, at least for me
How can I turn this feature off? It is very annoying to be reading an article and have some unwanted pop-up interrupt you. Is there any way to turn this annoying feature off?
Wonderful shortcuts that I’d not known. Thanks to sharing.