Today when I went to Yahoo!’s intranet website, I saw two big things. My first glance always goes up to the stock info, and after that it was a miracle I saw anything else (we are up quite a bit today). What actually turned out to be more interesting was a new policy for bloggers at Yahoo!.

I saw the link and groaned. “uh-oh, here goes my nice, newly formed blog!” was pretty much my gut reaction. While this plainly illustrates my positive outlook on life, I had some reason to be worried given Google’s over-reaction to one of their bloggers. With trepidation I clicked the link and read the two page document.

Our policy boils down to this:

• Don’t disclose privileged information.
• Be aware of your legal liabilities when putting anything on the web.
• Check your facts, and verify your claims with the relevant Yahoo!s when talking about a product.
• When making statements, either positive or negative, that we provide context and back up our arguments so that non-Yahoo!s will have a clue of what we are talking about.
• Bring in PR when approached by media about Yahoo!-related posts.

This is an enlightened policy! I am very proud that the company I work for respects my rights to say what I want in my personal space. Even the guidelines above were clearly described as “not being rules, so it’s not possible to break them.” My own decisions on how to talk about Yahoo! here have actually been far more cautious than these guidelines.

Yay for Yahoo!

To see other Yahoo! reactions to the new policy, see Jeremy, JR, Russ,