Jim posted about Yahoo! Shortcuts, and while the WordPress plugin sounds cool (it claims to scan a blog post and automagically find links to blog posts, flickr photos, and other sources of info), I'm not sure how well it'll translate into real life. It looks like it scans the blog entry as you're writing it, and when done it'll run some code to insert stuff into the post before publishing.
I'm wondering if this is like StructuredBlogging with some automated lookups. How does the output look? Is this something worth using? How accurate is the logic for finding relevant links and photos? I'm just going to leave this post however Yahoo! Shortcuts generates it, as an example. And maybe to get the free t-shirt...
Jim raises a very important point - is this just a tool to embed content from Yahoo! endeavors? Will we be able to add other sources? Automatic lookups of Wikipedia pages? IMDB lookups? Or, is this just a tool to increase the Google Juice of Yahoo! properties?
So far, it looks like it just inserts hyperlinks around some predefined keywords, and points them to Yahoo! search pages. Not very useful, and something I find very annoying on the big sites that use this strategy. A link should point to a page, not a generic query. Anyone can do a search for a keyword without having these blasted hyperlinks inserted all over the place, with their annoying pop-in preview windows. Ick.
Update: wtf? looks like it uses javascript to embed the links and content. so the content doesn't really exist, and the links don't really mean anything from the perspective of search engines etc... this isn't an intelligent structured blogging at all, it's a javascript insertion. don't like that one bit... And for some reason it's adding the span tag several times for some of the identified keywords. Think I'll be disabling this plugin. It'd be pretty cool if they released the cool CC Flickr photo finder as a separate plugin, perhaps with a more fully-featured Flickr photo inserter function...