Yahoo to launch style guide for Web content
Yahoo |
Yahoo is publishing a style guide for written content online with the aptly titled “The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World.” The book is the search engine company’s attempt at offering a comprehensive manual for online writers and content developers the same way the Associated Press‘ AP Stylebook has done for print journalism.
“The growth of online communication is only accelerating,” said Chris Barr, Yahoo’s senior editorial director on the official release, “but there hasn’t been a comprehensive manual of online editorial best practices to guide writers and editors. As the volume of Internet content grows and people become increasingly dependent upon clear and concise content, Yahoo is pleased to be able to share these principles for writing for an online audience that we have amassed over the course of our 15-year history.”
To complete the book, Barr led a team of editors as they brought out Yahoo’s in-house style guide and revised it to accommodate modern concepts. The result is an authoritative guide that includes the usual writing style issues on grammar and punctuation as well as a thick layering of online content development best practices and issues like SEO, content creation for disabled users and for the mobile platform, among others.
As many online marketers, content developers and SEO experts have stressed again and again, content is king. And indeed it is and consistently posted content certainly contributes to a Web site’s ranking and popularity and an online campaign’s success.
To say that the online language is dynamic is such an understatement. Every few months, we see new words bubbling up from social networking sites and online services, each with their own set of usage rules in relation with traditional language.
It becomes easy to lose track of the new additions to the online lexicon so it’s good to see someone trying to set standards, even more so when it’s one of the Web’s biggest content creators. However, as with the nature of the Internet, every online news site or blog usually follow their own set of style rules so it remains to be seen whether The Yahoo Style Guide actually gets some traction from the online communities.
“The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World” is slated for a July 6 release both in print and in digital format for the Kindle and the iPad.
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RSpears @ June 29, 2010
