It looks like Yahoo! has launched its response to the Ask! Answers WordPress plugin, and raises the bar with their own WordPress plugin.
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.
This plugin, which is still in Beta, will actually find supporting information for the content of your post and allow you to choose what you’d like to include ranging from maps, pictures, or links. Yes, you read that correctly. The plugin will offer up maps of areas you blog about courtesy of Yahoo! maps, Creative Commons pictures that fit the theme of your post culled from Flickr, or links to a Yahoo! search.
Actually, truth be told, Yahoo! Shortcuts can actually do a bit more than just grab maps, pictures, and links, to include pulling up financial data and stock listings or product reviews with current pricing. Ask may have come out first and did a smart thing by aligning themselves with Automattic, but the Yahoo! Shortcuts plugin is a lot more dynamic and may ultimately prove to be a lot more useful to the blogger.
As a bonus, if you’re one of the first 500 bloggers to download and install the plugin, they’ll send you a free t-shirt. Of course, this also helps Yahoo! to strengthen their brand at the same time (not just the t-shirt, the plugin too).
If you’re curious and want to try it out, they offer a short video tutorial to get you started.
Anytime a “content provider” can make the job of small business easier, that is a good thing. One of the greatest challenges I face with many small web based businesses is the constant creation of original content for their market. The WordPress blog is perfect for this task. Anytime quality free content can be supplied at the push of a button, well that just makes my argument that much easier.
It can be hard to convince many business owners that they need to be blogging on a regular basis when they see that no one really comments on their blog. Many do not understand that the blog provides information for a regular visitor who will share what he finds when it is relevant. That visitor is Googlebot. Yahoo’s free content, through this plugin, should make blogging a little easier for many who need a little push to stay on track.
I like it.
# December 18th, 2007
Yahoo! isn’t providing free content as many people would assume you mean from your comment, Terry.
Yahoo! is merely providing supplemental content for your blog entry — i.e. images, maps, and links to other resources.
It’s still up to you (or the small business owner) to write the blog entry and come up with your own original content.
Just wanted to clarify.
~ Teli
# December 18th, 2007
Yes, I understand. However, the one thing most “business bloggers” hate the most is a blank page offering no motivation. I know it can be hard to write and I have years of experience writing content for the web. Hopefully, this new feature from Yahoo will help with the motivation.
# December 18th, 2007
Hi,
This is something that is very helpful. Looking forward to more information from you. Keep your blogs coming. Thank you!
Warmly,
Kathering
# January 26th, 2008