Yahoo has published its own style guide for content creators to write "effectively for the web." In fact, Yahoo goes so far as to call the guide "The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World".
"The growth of online communication is only accelerating," says Yahoo Senior Editorial Director Chris Barr. "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."
Yahoo says its core team of editors revisited the company’s own in-house guide, and addressed new concepts for online writing, while re-examining old ones to come up with this new guide. The guide addresses grammar and punctuation, site accessibility, minimizing legal risk, writing for an international audience, and even improving search rank.
Arianna Huffington, Co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post says, "Yahoo!’s editors have given the rules of the writing road a smart and timely reboot."
It will be interesting to see how widely this guide is actually adopted by online content creators. Yahoo has recently increased its interest in online content creation with the acquisition of Associated Content.
Yahoo says the guide should appeal to journalists, bloggers, writers, technical writers, editors, students, professors, web developers, designers, information architects, mobile content creators, small and medium-sized businesses, ad agencies, PR agencies, direct marketing organizations, and newspapers. It can be found at styleguide.yahoo.com. The book comes out July 6th, but the site has a decent amount of resources itself.