Yahoo! is aparently having some problems with their ad system. It’s been reported that their site is currently down and has been down for the past 3 days.

After a weekend upgrade, Yahoo’s search engine ad system first slowed to a crawl, and then went belly up on Monday, preventing marketers from making changes to their campaigns, accessing their accounts and in many cases, even having their ads run at all. Yahoo support representatives are telling clients that they themselves can’t access their accounts and have no idea when the problem - now in its third day - will be fixed.

This has to be a problem, a costly one both for them and for their advertisers. I wonder if it may cause some advertisers to switch back to their alternatives.

SEO Weblog points out for a list of MSNBC’s news sources, crawled to provide news to both MSN news and MSNBC’s news.

If you are not yet on the list, do not underestimate your blog and submit your feed here for inclusion. I cannot even imagine how much traffic one can get being mentioned on one of these sources.

An interesting post made by Thirty Stories Up named 7 Mistakes for your First Week Blogging lists some of the most common mistakes made by bloggers during their first week of blogging.
It lists:

Day 1: Don’t launch until you have a theme
Day 2: Don’t skip entries
Day 3: Don’t obsess over your stats
Day 4: Proofread!
Day 5: Make your own header image
Day 6: Don’t get overambitious
Day 7: Don’t give up!

This post got very popular (first page of Digg) and is claimed to have gotten over 8000 hits. As of today (4 days later) it has 62 comments, some agree with his points, others disagree.
My only objection to the whole idea, besides the fact that these points make sense, is that this guy has been blogging for 20 days total (at the day of the post). He didn’t even set-up any categories on that blog (above post is under “uncategorized”), therefore, I do not see how he can suggests to others as to what mistakes not to make…

Okay, to the title of this blog is slightly misleading, I am not a Pro-Blogger, not yet at least, nor do I claim to be, not yet at least. However, I am taking my first steps in a long journey to being a Pro-Blogger.

About me:
I started my web career 5 years ago (in 2000), I taught myself everything I needed, from basic HTML, and site marketing, and later-on CSS, PHP and SEO. I even did it for profit (and still do) as a webmaster / developer / seo.

What qualify me as a newbie?
So I am not exactly a newbie, but to be honest, besides knowing how to upload the WordPress script into my server, I have no adventage over someone else. Okay, I lied, I also have something I can write about and talk about for ages, but doesn’t everyone have that?

Why would I want to blog?

• Because it looks cool, it is the cool thing to do, and everyone does it…
• I think it will greatly improve the way I express myself in writing, and the process that goes from developing an idea to eventually writing about it.
• It will force me to read and learn more about my fields of interest, and therefore, help me professionally.
• Lastly, it may, eventually, be another source of income for me.

That is a bit about myself and my motive to get into blogging. I will soon post my gameplan to getting my blogging venture going.

Earlier this week WebmasterRadio featured an interview with Jan of JanSense.com which covered Adsense and the new YPN network.

Darren, posted about the show and includes a bit of pointers named during the show:

• Jen said that EPC (earnings per click) is higher than Adsense - probably due to lack of publishers at present.
• Both CTR and Relevancy of Ads have increased in the past few days.
• YPN Seem to be hand reviewing sites that are on the network at this stage which will be good for attracting advertisers as only best sites will have the ads. This is a great selling point for YPN and will distinguish itself from Adsense which is sadly getting a reputation for having a lot of Scraper sites as publishers.
• Between the YPN and Adsense they have pretty comparable in earnings potential - but YPN could well be pulling ahead in the last few days.
• Seems to be more corporation ads and less Mom and Pop type ads on YPN (perhaps explaining the higher EPC also?).
• YPN is a little slower in getting ads up on new pages than Adsense - but its early days.
• YPN doesn’t have any alternate ad serving yet which is a big disadvantage - so you get Public Service Ads or Blank spots on your site.

Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc. had announced yesterday that the blog software, which he had developed especially for the Weblogs Inc. network is going on the market.

BlogSmith LLC is to be headed by Gordon Gold, President of Rising Tide Studios/Silicon Alley Reporter and the founder of UPOC and will compete directly against Six Apart in targeting corporate blogging accounts.

They already have one, rather large, client named Razor Magazing but I think that the way to catching up with Six Apart is still long.

Blogger had just introduces a new plugin and toolbar for MSWord, allowing bloggers to blog directly from MSWord.

Now you can use Blogger right within Microsoft® Word. Just download and install the Blogger for Word add-in and a Blogger toolbar will be added to Word allowing you to:

* Publish to your blog
* Save drafts
* Edit posts

Now, blogger has a pretty friendly interface as well as very simple to use. So why bother? A couple of reasons I can definately see is spell checker, saving drafts, and above all a familiar interface wich everyone knows and no need to bother with a new one.

I installed it and gave it a shot. Seems pretty cool so far. The only problem is that the conversion of text into html lacks big time, as it uses words’ built in feature. That is, that you can see a lot of irrelevant clutter as far as html goes, but if you are just starting out, you may find this tool very useful. Bottom line, it gets the job done…