Yahoo! Style Guide
Do you like my new blog redesign for Me Too You? I love it, if I say so myself. It was inspired in part by the Yahoo! Style Guide. Thanks Yahoo! And it was also inspired by the fact that I’ve been meaning to redesign my blog for quite some time now and I am currently “on vacation” (sort of, which means, I am living in another place, with a little less email, but still with my computer and my to do list) and had a little blog play time on my hands.
Here’s the button. Pretty, right?
MeTooYouBlog.com
This week I have been in Newfoundland (photos coming soon, promise!), but I will tell you about how I came to possess the Yahoo! Style Guide…
Two Fridays ago found me driving to the Yahoo! campus, about 20 minutes away from my house. I live in Silicon Valley and have worked at my share of tech start-ups and behemoths alike, so I don’t think twice about heading into a Silicon Valley tech giant.
On this day, it was to attend the Yahoo! Motherboard Summit: “The Mother of All Conferences.”
This conference was different than any other conference I have attended. Perhaps it was most similar to a day I spent at eBay in the Spring (except that at eBay there were maybe 15 of us and at Yahoo! there were about 60). Being invited to a corporate campus to learn about the company and for the company to learn from you is a pretty interesting experience. It is not like a “regular” blogging conference, where you are approached by different sponsors all day and all night long. Make no mistake, there was a sponsor. It was Yahoo! But there is a certain undivided (or less divided?) attention. And with this group, many of us knowing each other for a long time now, there is a certain camaraderie already in existence. We are seeing old friends, meeting some IRL (“in real life”) for the first time, soaking in the opportunity to catch up and get to know each other on a deeper level in a fairly intimate environment.
They executed this event in a pretty fantastic way. I learned a lot. About Flickr, Yahoo! Shine, the Yahoo Style Guide, Internet Safety….a lot was covered in one day.
You might ask why Yahoo! has a Motherboard and why it wants to have a summit. I know….some of us on the Yahoo! Motherboard have wondered that ourselves.
Some background:
I was invited to be one of the 17 founding members of the Yahoo! Motherboard a couple of years ago, through Yahoo!’s affiliation with Silicon Valley Moms Blog. It was supposed to function as a way for Yahoo! to get feedback from moms with influence on new projects and initiatives within Yahoo! That apparently turned out to be difficult to do in practice, so they…used the network. As many companies as doing which have products and services applicable to moms and families, in my estimation, Yahoo! is trying to engage with mom bloggers/influencers and to get their messages out in this “grass-roots” manner. In other words, instead of (or in addition to) taking out an ad that says “Yahoo! has Internet security products for your family – check it out,” they get the message to us, the mom influencers, and we in turn take it to our network.
This was the first time (apart from the odd meetup for drinks at various mom blogger conferences) that the bulk of us got together…and that Yahoo! organized a conference, just for us. There are about 80 or so mom bloggers on the Yahoo! Motherboard and I think about 60 of us made it to the conference. Yahoo! flew in the majority of bloggers and put them up at the Four Seasons in Palo Alto. Ah yes, they know how to pamper mom bloggers, Yahoo! does. (Clarification: I did not stay at the Four Seasons in Palo Alto courtesy of Yahoo! since I was local, but they did feed me scrumptious poolside drinks/dinner on Thursday night, as well as food and cupcakes all day long on Friday, and would have fed me dinner on Friday evening as well if I hadn’t had to leave to host 8 children at my house for a sleepover that night).
It was wonderful to see so many long time blogging friends (many, most?, of them from SV Moms Group network) in one place. And for it to be intimate.
The top two things I learned related to my blog redesign:
- Flickr is very cool. A lot cooler than I thought before. I had an account that I used long ago, but then abandoned for Picasa and Facebook. I have recently come back a bit to Flickr – even before this summit at Yahoo! – because I find it to be easy to upload photos and to pot them on my blog. Easier than downloading a photo to Picasa, then searching for it to upload it to the blog. I tend to use it on trips a lot. I am also pretty impressed with Flickr’s easy to understand and use privacy settings. I post many photos on Facebook, but with the privacy settings ever-evolving on Facebook, it can be harder to control what gets out there. I’m going to continue playing with Flickr (Yahoo! gave me a free Pro account for a year) and see what I think.
- The Yahoo! Style Guide is a must read for anyone in the content business. As a result of reading Chapters 1-3, I redesigned my blog, Me Too You, yesterday. It has very practical tips you can use right away. It even covers intellectual property law, something everyone should know a little bit about. (My disclaimer as an attorney: I have not read the IP chapter yet, so can’t endorse this and would never suggest that reading a book can replace a lawyer’s advice for a specific situation.)
Thanks to Yahoo! for the wonderful summit. I look forward to continuing to connect with the members of the Yahoo! Motherboard for a long time to come.
Disclosure: Yahoo! paid for my food and drinks on Thursday and Friday of the Yahoo! Motherboard Summit, gave me a free copy of the Yahoo! Style Guide and a free Flickr Pro account for one year. I was not obligated to post about Yahoo!, but when I do, all opinions are my own.
