DoctoRevenue

…and other tidbits  from the blogosphere

I really wanted to start off this roundup with a clip from the recent visit of Food Network’s “Dinner: Impossible” to Yahoo!, but it doesn’t exist yet in video form on the Web—which, in my mind, is the same as not existing at all. So you’ll have to settle for reruns and wondering what a salmon cupcake really tastes like. Oh, and these publisher-focused morsels…

Mmm…Delicious
The Yahoo! Search blog digs into new features for Search BOSS, our search platform that lets you customize Yahoo! Search for your content pages. In particular, they like BOSS’s integration with Delicious social bookmarks to help deliver even more relevant results.Over on the Developer Network blog, they show you how to build a module that uses your page content to generate a list of Yahoo! results, re-ranked by their popularity on Delicious. I don’t pretend to understand that code-y stuff there. But I hope that you do, because if used properly, it could help you generate more relevant content to go with the content that your readers are already reading.

Social media sucks
If you ask one of my less-social colleagues, the reason why social media “sucks” is because it’s a “waste of time.” (And here I thought that was the point.) But Josh Bernoff writes on Forrester Research’s Groundswell blog that social media disappoints advertisers because they’re treating it like, well, media. “Media is something you can advertise in, in most cases. While you can advertise in social networks, that is the least interesting use for them,” he says. When businesses start treating social networks as something other than media, they can start to capitalize on them.

…but you’re still using it
Speaking of social—um, whatever you want to call it: Marketing Vox reports on a Harris Interactive poll, saying that “over half of Americans (51%) do not use Twitter or participate in either of the two largest social networking sites—MySpace and Facebook.” That seems like a curious spin. Doesn’t that also mean that pretty much half of Americans are on those sites? The poll also says that, despite the hype, just 5% of Americans are using Twitter.

Wait…those were flops?
The folks who run the human-powered directory that gave Yahoo! its start (and is still going strong) pull together interesting tidbits throughout the week. I loved their piece on products that didn’t quite take off. But then again, I loved Crystal Pepsi.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor