It looks as if starting today Yahoo is going to begin linking to blogs and other media sites from its homepage instead of simply utilizing Yahoo properties and large sites that have content deals with the company. This is great news because while Yahoo won't be able to show everything (they'll have some standards in place), they will be able to provide a much broader picture of stories and provide much more relevance to their readers.

The ramifications for the blogs included should be huge as well. I know that a few months ago this site was indirectly linked to from the Yahoo homepage as the #1 result of the top story (there was a 'Find out more' link right under the headline), and that alone brought in thousands of visitors from all over the world in just a couple hours - and this was at about 3 o'clock in the morning. I would imagine that a midday actual link from the Yahoo homepage would make even the rush of frontpage Digg traffic look small.

From Yahoo:

Yahoo! will select outside content from a wide variety of sites across the Internet (large and small, with sufficient traffic management capabilities), that have unique or exclusive content which will be programmed alongside our usual links to related Yahoo! content.

Since the sites to be included are selected by human editors at Yahoo, there will be no gaming this system.

It's good to see Yahoo opening up a bit to the community they are very much a part of. It's a win-win for everyone.

[photo by flickr user Franco Folini]