Yahoo Shortcuts for Wordpress is a new Wordpress plugin from Yahoo that automatically adds shortcuts to Yahoo content to your posts.

I’m experimenting with it here for the first time, and as I’m typing this post, the plugin is searching through what I’m writing to find interesting and relevant content. There’s a short demo of how it works on the Yahoo site.

I’m in two minds about this. It’s undoubtedly very cool, but by using it I’m effectively sending my traffic to Yahoo – and doing it free of charge. For those of us trying to make money from blogging, it’s probably not particularly useful – at least not until Yahoo allows people to make money by using the plugin. (And judging by their performance in this area in the past, I doubt that will ever happen.)

But one of the most interesting features of this plugin is that it can automatically search for and insert relevant Flickr images into your post, complete with full attribution. Adding photos to your post can dramatically improve its appearance, so I may keep using the plugin just for that functionality.

The plugin makes extensive use of dynamic HTML and AJAX to find relevant content as you’re typing, and it also edits the text of your post to insert the links. I find that a little distracting and disconcerting as I’m used to having full control over the HTML as I type.

It’s certainly a plugin worth downloading and playing with, and I think I’ll probably end up using it on another blog, but so far the minor annoyances outweigh its usefulness on Money Blogger.

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