Yahoo 360

Occasionally I will cover subjects that don’t relate to product placement … but .. Product Placement is really all about branding and getting more people into your shop and selling more stuff! So here goes …. Yahoo & MSN are typically late bloomers when it comes to new trends on the Internet. They tend to sit back .. see what is working and then go out and create a ‘better version’. The Blogging craze is a perfect example. I’ve reported here several times about product placement within blogs — a trend that we will see much more of over the next 24 months. When Google purchased Blogger.com/Blogspot a while back, it was a jump ahead — it took the largest player out of the field and instantly provided Google a new content source to place their advertising platform (Ad Words). Looking back on this move — I don’t believe their IPO would have been as successful without it. What did Yahoo and MSN do — nothing .. they just sat back and waited. Waited for the movement to build and put large teams of developers to work. During this same time frame, Yahoo purchased the only competitor to Adwords .. Overture, thereby giving them their own self-service Ad Network. MSN was the first to react .. they revamped their search engine and recently launched ‘MSN SPACES’ .. a pseudo blogging system. Personally .. it needs a lot of work. There is not much flexibility in the building of the blog and you are very limited in what can be added. YAHOO’s been very smart. They own the Yahoo/Overture self-serve Ad Network and are about to release a more direct competitor to Ad Words. When it comes out .. it could (and probably will) threaten Google’s significant income base from their base of independent publishers. Last week – Yahoo made another significant move .. this time in the world of Blogs — they launched ‘Yahoo 360′. I can’t tell you much about it .. except they ‘borrowed’ the ‘beta’ idea from Google and did a similar style launch as Gmail — only the invited could play. Well Damn — I wanted my 360 Invite — what was I to do? Enter 360invites.com and my good friend Lex. Just like the 100′s of communities devoted to providing those less fortunate with a Gmail address – 360invites.com can help you get a Yahoo 360 Invite. Took me all of 15 minutes! Check it out and tell him Jeff sent you!