I’m sitting in a Hilton hotel room in Eugene, Oregon, having flown in this evening to spend tomorrow with the some of the super folks at Right Media’s Direct Media Exchange, who will eventually become the newest members of the Yahoo! publisher-focused family. I met the team here last week in preparation for today’s announcement, and now I’m back to lend in-person support post-announcement of the planned acquisition.

For my full thoughts on what this could mean for Yahoo! and Right Media, check out my post on the Yahoo! Publisher Network blog, which should appear on Monday morning. (UPDATE: The YPN Blog post is now up and live here).

For now, I just want to say the following: Massive congratulations to everyone at Right Media, and especially to the Direct Media Exchange team, who share the Yahoo! Publisher Network team’s dedication and drive to help publishers of all sizes realize the full value of publishing. Pat, Cam, Pete, Travis, Brad, Jerri, Michael, Shane, Leland, Becca, Juliana, Vincent, Joseph, Luke, Edward, Chuck, Ellie, Eric, Trent, Alexander, Brian, Brandon and Jon (and if I missed anyone, I’m really sorry!), all of us at Yahoo! Publisher Network look forward to working with you and combining efforts in order to really make a difference in the online self-publishing landscape. Your enthusiam for the difference you are making in the online publishing world blew me away last week (check it out, they even recently had a Hack Day!). I look forward to working with each of you!

Happy Earth Day to everyone. This is a quick note to any of you who are still subscribed to my greatly neglected blog (you certainly have noticed that I’ve yet to even update my theme from the default K2 design since migrating to Wordpress nearly two months ago…and I promise that there will be more activity on this blog in the near future, but thanks for still staying tuned in the meantime).

But on to more important topics with a quick but fun post. As mentioned, today is Earth Day, and about 35 minutes ago I closed an auction on eBay for a beautiful Anaheim-based 1985 Mercedes-Benz 300D, the Turbo Diesel variety. Consider this my birthday present to our planet…and here’s why:

I bought this slick ride with the plan to convert it to run on vegetable oil.

Lovecraft Biofuels, which is right down the street from my house, can do the conversion for less than $1000 all-in. For those of you not hip to the vegetable oil movement, any diesel car can be converted with minimal cost to enable it to run on any combination of diesel, biodiesel, clean/straight vegetable oil (svo) or waste vegetable oil (wvo). Clean veggie oil can be obtained in bulk at places like Costco or Sam’s Club and supposedly works out to about $3 a gallon (as long as you have the arm strength to lug about 100 lbs of oil to the parking lot once a week or so). Or, even better, there are people who will deliver waste vegetable oil (which can be collected for free from restaurants anywhere) to your house in bulk for about $2 a gallon! The great thing about the vegetable oil conversion is that the exhaust is nearly 100% biodegradable. And (supposedly!) the car won’t really lose any power or torque after the transition.

I’ll keep you posted with updates about the conversion process and my experiences obtaining oil. In the meantime, here’s my cherry new ride!

Exterior (Pearl Black)

Interior (Cherry Red!)

10 Steps to get Traffic from Yahoo Answers

This article outlines some productive ways to get involved with the Yahoo! Answers community as a means of driving traffic to your blog.