From the video: “There is of course the small variety, which sounds like a duck on speed, or the whaling of a terribly ill child. [..] there is simply no excuse.”

Yahoo, Inc is shutting down the Yahoo Publisher Network on April 30th, 2010. YPN was created and used as an alternative to Google AdSense, but never took off. While YPN did offer some advantages over AdSense, webmasters were reluctant to use the service as many faults rendered it unusable, such as excluding clicks from users outside of the USA. Strangely enough, YPN never offered tools to locate a users IP, and demanded publishers employ their own scripts to ensure the ads were only shown to visitors inside the US.

Yahoo gave May 31, 2010 as the last payment date and suggested publishers sign up with competing service Chitika.

Full email below:

Dear Publisher,

Yahoo! continuously evaluates and prioritizes our products and services, in alignment with business goals and our continued commitment to deliver the best consumer and advertiser experiences. After conducting an extensive review of the Yahoo! Publisher Network beta program, we have decided to close the program effective April 30, 2010. We expect to deliver final publisher payments for the month ending April 30, 2010 to publishers no later than May 31, 2010. All publishers eligible for 1099s for the 2010 tax year will have those mailed by January 31, 2011.

Because our content will no longer be delivered to your ad unit spaces after April 30, 2010, we recommend removing all YPN ad code from your pages by that date.

For the opportunity to continue earning revenue, we suggest using Chitika, a leading advertising network that syndicates Yahoo! Content Match and Sponsored Search ads. Chitika has set up a special process for YPNO beta publishers to participate in its platform. Click here for more information.

We thank you for your participation in the Yahoo! Publisher Network beta. If you have any questions regarding this announcement, please contact our Support Team at (866) 785-2636, Monday through Friday from 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. PDT.
Sincerely,

Your Partners at Yahoo!

Robert Robert is going to get sued sued, big time.

Digg.com is a “social media” website which maintains tens of millions of unique visitors every month. Digg is based out of San Fransisco, with Kevin Rose as the CEO.

Update 1:57PM: Digg.com is up and running with no Safebrowsing issue.

On March 3, 2010, someone at MediaTemple found that a number of sites on their network were compromised for SEO proposes through a WordPress exploit that may have piggy-backed on some faults within the GridServer infrastructure. A full eight days later, the (MT) engineers finished testing and confirmed that all malicious material was removed from the system. The official (MT) support blog stated that around 400 websites were effected, and that “normal visitors” would not notice anything unusual from the exploit. As of Wednesday, March 10, (MT) has restored email services and are continuing to monitor the situation.

Unfortunately (MT) is not known for their reliability or speed – both in page loading times and in response to incidences like this.

Edit: It took 26 seconds just to publish this blog post. That is unacceptable, and please pardon the limited downtime as we switch hosts.

So which one of these office spaces look most like your current workplace? Let us know in the comments!

This weeks theme is based slightly on the official WordPress.org design. After comparing the background image and colors, go a bit deeper and look at the rounded corners, shaded gradients and clear, well-thought out lines. We’d be honored if you used this as your default theme on your blog, but as always, we encourage exploring a variety of templates which you can find on great sites like the WebBlog Tools Collection website.

Download the theme now (67.5KB), or check out a live demo.

We’ve had a lot of positive feedback on last weeks theme, and will always consider all feedback and criticism, which will be used to make the next theme even better. During the summer, we plan to branch out into releasing WordPress plugins as well, but until then we will continue showcasing the innovative and time-saving plugins that are already available.

Thanks for reading, and please let us know what you think!

Flowers and Plants

Nothing says Spring like large, colorful, blooming flowers. From the basic hand-drawn elements to the most detailed vector art, these brushes make great website headers and logos.

Foliage and Grass

Green grass and empty meadows became a design trend a few years ago, and we’re starting to see signs of it returning once more – and for good reason. Putting grass art in your blog footer gives depth to the overall theme, by connecting the bottom of the page with ground, and the header with the sky. It may sound crazy, but check out some of the spring related themes and see for yourself.

Clouds, Sky and Sunlight

There’s not a cloud in the sky, unless you use one of these excellent cloud brushes found on DeviantArt. Imagine using the cartoon cloud brush on your business card.

Animals and Objects

Click on the screenshot for a static demonstration.

UnFocus Green is free of charge, and you can download it from us here. Once it becomes available on the other WordPress sites, we’ll update with a more complete set of download links.

The Corporate Shrill

These worthless accounts may project a real, human voice within a large, faceless corporation, but make no mistake: These types of Tweeters are being paid to promote their company on Twitter with little to no disclosure. They use Twitter search to catch any conversation taking place about the company that pays their wages, and have no disregard for regularly disrupting a conversation just because you’ve mentioned them. Follow them once, and you’re bound to see that the friendly customer service rep has quickly turned into the boring, obvious corporate shrill.

The Lazy Internet Marketer

Gain one-thousand new Twitter followers while simultaneously losing weight, overnight! Guaranteed! Bogus claims of tricks and guides to acquire internet wealth has plagued the internet since the age of dial-up, and since Google (and the other search engines) has made incredible progress on mitigating lots of scams through intelligent algorithmic exclusions, thousands of lazy internet marketers took their ‘business’ to Twitter in 2009. Until Twitter follows Google’s no-spam route by filtering these messages and user from the fire-hose stream, users like you can simple unfollow – and in extreme cases, block – these marketers from contacting you.

The Spammer

Spam and internet marketing seemingly go hand in hand, but the root of Twitter spam is the over usage of the trending topics and retweet feature. Is it OK to retweet Bill Gates, or NASA? Sure, but think twice about relaying Robert Scoble’s views on latest techno-gadget. The same reluctance to repost should follow over to the trending topic area; some users take to combining several of the days topics into one tweet, which offers no valuable insight into the very interesting sandwich Miley Cyrus had for lunch.

The LinkBot

The only human aspect of this type of Twitter is that, at one point, a human would eventually block them.

The Black Hole of Negativity

Blogs gave uninteresting people an outlet to express their thoughts on life, the universe, and everything else. Thankfully the truly insane will never figure out how to publish a blog post, give up and continue to use MySpace. However, for those who regularly use Twitter, we are likely to see the downward spiral of negative thoughts, broken relationships and people with nothing better to do but to bring others down. Nobody needs to read about things like this on a daily basis.

The Attention Hog

Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore and Rainn Wilson. Enough said.

The News and Media

Breaking news on Twitter will always be reported first by someone who experienced the event; not a journalist/anchor who heard about it over, well.. Twitter. Media outlets such as CNN and Fox show incredibly short snippets with a URL that links to the full story, which was entirely the point of creating RSS and feedreaders, but then again you do support your favorite news source by following them on Twitter.

Bonus!

The Clueless Twitter User

QuantCast reports that in December 2009, Twitter had roughly 23.6 million unique visitors hit the home page. That’s quite a bit of traffic, and while nobody outside of Twitter, Inc. know the amount of real users, you can’t spend a few minutes browsing around someones friendlist without finding a few who have tried the service and left. Possible reasons include getting overwhelmed by the above type of users, sprinkled with the occasional passerby who just wants to check out the hype, and then leave. Fortunately the Clueless Twitter User doesn’t directly impact your stream by themselves, but overall they have possibly degraded the quality of service noticed during peak usage times. Then again, it’s safe to place all the blame on Robert Scoble.

I’m going to try my hand at offering a weekly written critique of both comics that are primarily syndicated in newspapers, and some of the decent projects that are not. I will shy away from covering popular online comics such as XKCD, mostly because many people have already shared their thoughts, and those people are much smarter than I am.

So watch for that coming sometime soon. Also, since this is a news post: I am the single maintainer of Unfocus, and I know there are a few remaining 404 pages floating around. I am working on that but I’ve already posted a few filler articles, which I feel have dampened the spirit of the site. In other news, I’m a bit jaded that my letter to Bill has gone unanswered, and overthrown by various popular blogs which chose to simply rewrite the article, blend in some SEO and take the glory for originality. Stay classy, you SEO people.