Yahoo has announced its plans to purchase Associated Content, with hopes to boost its content creation, reports BusinessWeek. Ultimately this may be a good move for Yahoo, particularly as it looks to expand on its portal, content delivery and the generation of revenue around these mechanisms. As much trouble as Yahoo has faced over the past few years, it’s ability to deliver content and create a relatively easy way to communicate around that content has remained intact.

Looking to revive interest in advertisers, Yahoo’s upcoming acquisition of Associated Content means that the web company will be able to better target readers with personalized content recommendations combined with custom delivery methods. It’s a great bundle for advertisements to be wrapped in, especially as Yahoo and other portal systems look to increase the ways in which they reach out to consumers.

The growing interest in personalized web information is partly due to the growing mobile industry, which has re-purposed much of the web for better use while on the go. This is wonderful for marketers, as it enables better targeting for ads. As an extension of what Yahoo has already been doing on the web and mobile fronts for years now, anything added to the process will be a perk that both Yahoo and Associated Content can take advantage of.

Which is where the Associated Content’s format comes into play. As a large freelance community, Associated Content represents a new business format for creating, sharing and distributing content across web channels. A concept that has been slowly gaining traction and integration points with traditional news delivery methods can now be leverage for Yahoo’s purposes.

From advertising to increased content available on its site, there is a great deal that Yahoo can do in order to make good use of its latest addition to its family. As Yahoo still struggles to regain top spots for search and advertising, the buying of Associated Content will help the company better compete with AOL and Demand Media, both of which are vying for similar positions when it comes to making the most of an existing web portal service.

Google has acquired Picnik, the Seattle-based photo-editing app that lives in the cloud. I always sort of thought of Picnik as Photoshop Elements that I could access from anywhere.

I’m a bit surprised by this news, as I feel like I’ve seen Picnik everywhere in the last year, including BlogHer and CES. In fact, one of those recyclable shopping bags with a big Picnik logo is sitting right next to me.

My first thought when I heard Picnik was acquired by Google was, “What about Yahoo?”  Picnik is integrated into Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing app, where it offers online photo editing inside the Flickr wrapper. I use it all the time, actually. So this is interesting cross-contamination between Google and Yahoo. Obviously Google is hoping to really ramp up Picasa, and as Picasa shares so seamlessly with the other Google tools, this makes sense. If everyone I know (and several years worth of photos) wasn’t already on Flickr, I’d probably move to Picasa.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the Picnik blog post on the matter sounds more happy than sad.

What does this mean for Picnik? It means we can think BIG. Google processes petabytes of data every day, and with their worldwide infrastructure and world-class team, it is truly the best home we could have found. Under the Google roof we’ll reach more people than ever before, impacting more lives and making more photos more awesome.

What does this mean for you Picnikers? Nothing is changing right away, but Picnik now has more potential than ever before. The team that built Picnik from the grass up will continue making advanced and powerful photo-editing easier, more intuitive and more fun, so stay tuned to hear about all the cool new stuff we’re working on.

The Official Google blog also reiterates that nothing is changing. In particular, they address the Yahoo/Flickr question without mentioning it by name, saying that they’ll support “all existing Picnik partners.”

We’re not announcing any significant changes to Picnik today, though we’ll be working hard on integration and new features. As well, we’d like to continue supporting all existing Picnik partners so that users will continue to be able to add their photos from other photo sharing sites, make edits in the cloud and then save and share to all relevant networks.

__

Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

I was sad today when I realized it was the last day for Geocities.

Geocities was started in 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner. By early 1996, I had my own home page on Geocities. In an excellent LA Times article, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian states that he “lost my HTML virginity with Geocities.” Me too. All my HTML experimentation happened there.

GeoCities was created so that everyone could have their own little piece of the web for free. When I think back on it, we really didn’t get much space – at least not by today’s standards when 2 GB or more of storage can be yours for free. But back then it was perfect for the small HTML pages we were creating.

GeoCities was divided into neighborhoods. Ohanian’s pages were apparently located in “Silicon Valley.” My pages were mostly located in “Athens.” If I recall correctly, Athens was the place for writers and artists. I had several web sites, spread out across several cities and with several themes, including Celtic poetry, Halloween, Princess Diana, and an online grammar superhero named Grammar Girl. My Grammar Girl site was written up in the USA Today back in 1998. (There’s another, better, Grammar Girl on the Web these days.) Scarily, the Princess Diana page screenshot they’re showing in the LA Times article could have been my own site. I’m not kidding.

I remember my first encounter with online flirting happened via GeoCities. I was involved in the online community of moderators – Community Leaders. I think I helped “patrol” Athens. There was another guy, Adam from Canada, who was also a moderator, who was the object of my flirting. We had message boards and chat rooms we used as moderators, and Geocities gifted us with occasional gift certificates and t-shirts. It was my first experience with an online community. I also see that period as somewhat prescient. Geocities was created on user-generated content, and policed by the users themselves.

By the end of 1998, HTML was evolving and so were my own web design skills. I’d moved on to my own web site hosted out on Dreamhost and while I hadn’t yet abandoned my Geocities accounts, I’d certainly neglected them a bit. It’s about the same time that, according to Wikipedia, Geocities introduced the dreaded watermark.

The watermark, much like an onscreen graphic on some television channels, was a transparent floating GIF which used JavaScript to stay on the bottom right side of the browser screen. Many users felt the watermark interfered with the design of their website and threatened to move their web pages elsewhere. The watermark also had cross-browser issues. GeoCities claimed in a press release that the company had received upbeat feedback regarding the watermark.

I hated that watermark and it didn’t take long, thereafter, for me to break entirely with Geocities and move on and up. I still had my files locally and at the time, it hadn’t even occurred to me to actually take my sites down. They probably remained out on Geocities, abandoned, for quite some time. Yahoo! purchased Geocities in 1999. It should have been a brilliant purchase. But, aside from eventually removing the “city system,” Yahoo! just let Geocities stagnate.

Losing Geocities is, in a way, the end of an era. So many people learned their basic HTML skills on Geocities. Giving each of us our own little piece of the Web back then was brilliant. I updated so often that, in retrospect, I was pretty close to blogging without realizing it. I learned about basic design and I even started to learn what would drive people to my web site. Because of Geocities, I was out in front of a lot of my peers, listing my web sites on my business cards and hosting my resume online.  Learning HTML with Geocities, on my ex-boyfriend’s computer, kept me sane during some turbulent periods back then. It also sparked my own interest and love of technology, which has only grown since then.

My early 20s were a bit of a mess, as were my web sites with their bad graphics and blink tags. But that was a phase I had to go through, and a phase our current Web had to go through as well.

Rest in peace, Geocities. We’ll miss you, and thank you.

__

Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

How-to content by pros and members that can make some cash by writing content from home.

eHow is one of the most well known how-to resource on the web. Its mission is to offer realistic solutions for everyday questions – from how to organize your desk to how to prevent global warming. With a database of more than 300,000 professionally written and editorially directed articles, more than 100,000 how-to videos, and a rapidly growing library of member-contributed articles, eHow caters to an audience of people who seek practical knowledge.

he eHow community is one where users are educating and learning from each other. Community members write their own how-to articles with easy-to-use publishing tools that let them share their knowledge through text, images and video. They can write and publish articles on their topic of choice and, through their Writer’s Compensation Program, automatically earn extra cash. eHow members can also interact with each other through a robust set of social media tools.

Questions from our Twiistup panel:

Brian Solis: I love the idea about socializing resource communities. How are people finding out about eHow and what’s the incentive for them to contribute content?

eHow: eHow: About 27 million unique visitors come to eHow every month (Google Analytics).  The majority of those are from searching topics like “How to Boil Water” and our articles show up at the top of their search results.  But we are also finding that a growing number of people are coming to us via direct navigation.  This information, combined with our growing number of registered members (now at 300,000), lead us to believe that more and more people are telling their friends and family about eHow as a place to not only find information, but share their personal knowledge and make money.

TechZulu: How did you manage to get users to submit content when you first started the company?

eHow: Great question. When we acquired eHow.com, it was a decade old and hadn’t been touched in many years.  It had thousands of professional articles and a few million visitors.  First our development team rebuilt the site, with social media tools that allow people to create profiles, publish articles and make money.  Then a couple community managers, who are also editors, started to cultivate the few folks that had found the site.  We guided them through the process. They gave us feedback and we iterated our tools to make them better.  They told their friends and colleagues.  And it grew, and grew to hundreds of thousands of people – many making hundreds of dollars a month – contributing to the site.

Brian Solis: How is eHow planning on reaching more people to boost/share the valuable content within the community? It seems that sites like Yahoo Answers are among the first results when people naturally search for information.

eHow: We are just coming off a year of explosive growth, almost 1000% YOY (Dec. 07 total compared to Dec. 08), and with the current economic climate, we have seen the number of articles written by our community increase 128% since last July.  We have some great tools on the site that can help our members to write compelling articles and make money.  Our editorial team specifically requests titles that can be “checked out” and written.  In addition, our community has set up groups to support each other and share tips on writing and socializing their articles.

For more info on Twiistup 5 and the other ShowOffs, be sure to visit the main site.

Connect with Brian on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pownce, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Jaiku or Facebook

by Brian Solis

Happy New Year!

Comscore released its list revealing the top Social Networks and Social Media properties for 2008 (note, these numbers to not include December traffic). Google’s Blogger.com blogging platform is clearly dominating, however Facebook continues its meteoric rise and appears on track to imminently earn the number one spot. Myspace appears to have leveled off a bit, but is still in third place. WordPress comes in at a close fourth, demonstrating the continued growth of its blogging network. Windows Lvie Spaces and Yahoo! Geocities trail in a distant fifth and sixth place, however, Flickr shows a strong position at number seven. Scribd deserves a mention as it continues to grow as a premier social network for the sharing and discovery of documents.

Total Unique Visitors (000) as of November 2008

1. Blogger – 221,503

2. Facebook – 200,189

3. MySpace – 126,168

4. WordPress – 113,661

5. Windows Live Spaces – 86,760

6. Yahoo! Geocities – 69,159

7. Flickr – 63,866

8. Hi5 – 58,069

9. Orkut – 46,446

10. Six Apart Sites – 45,606

11. Baidu Space – 40,276

12. Friendster – 31,325

13. 56.com – 29,171

14. Webs.com – 24,230

15. Bebo – 24,149

16. Scribd – 23,524

17. Lycos Tripod – 23,350

18. Tagged.com – 22,300

19. Imeem – 21,889

20. Netlog.com – 21,1777

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pownce, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Jaiku or Facebook

By Alison McNeill

The bub.blicio.us crew was on hand at the latest Startup2Startup dinner in Palo Alto, hosted by Dave McClure. The night’s speaker was Naval Ravikant, an experienced entrepreneur and startup investor, and occasional contributor on the Venture Hacks blog (which he co-founded).

Previously he was a co-founder or investor at Genoa Corp (acquired by Finisar), Epinions.com (IPO via Shopping.com), Chainn, Hive7, and Vast.com; also an advisor to Bix.com, iPivot, and XFire, among others.

Here guest reporter, Leonard Speiser of Yahoo!, asked Naval a few questions about his experiences as an entrepreneur and investor and his advice for startups.

by Michelle Lentz

Yahoo! has launched the redesigned, speedier delicious, the original (and probably still the best) social bookmarking site. For me, perhaps the best thing to come out of this re-launch is the new URL: delicious.com. I can’t even explain how often I got the old del.icio.us wrong. (The old URL, and your old login, still work.)

Easy typing aside, there are definitely some other upgrades to the site:

Speed: We’ve moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable. You may not have noticed, but the old backend was getting creaky under the load of five million users.

Search: We’ve completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they’re very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another public user’s bookmarks, or your social network. Now it’s easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.

Design: Finally, we’ve updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our
goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we’re hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn.

When you visit the new Delicious, you’ll need to log in again to reset your cookie.

–
Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.

By Alex Ho 

At noon PDT today, Yahoo will be releasing its new email domains at “ymail” and “rocketmail”. This will give a chance for people to create more email accounts to diversify your spam into different mailboxes! According to comScore Inc, Yahoo is the email market leader with 266 million users worldwide. I think “ymail” will be a good alternative but I am not sure if people would choose “rocketmail”. You can get your new emails at http://mail.yahoo.com by clicking on the new account link.