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Mystery of the Yahoo Sock Monkey on YPN Blog

Mystery of the Yahoo Sock Monkey on YPN Blog

The Yahoo Publisher Network launched their YPN Blog today which will serve as a question & answer, feedback, information, and innovation forum for site publishers using the YPN Contextual Advertising program (still in invite only BETA). The blog is run via WordPress, which is more community oriented than Movable Type, which Yahoo Search uses for their YSearchBlog.

I gave their blog a run through today, registered, left some comments, and began thinking of content I can contribute to the YPN Blog, as Yahoo Publisher Network is open to contributions of YPN tips and experiences. They are also going to be running a weekly Publisher Spotlight which showcases sites running YPN products and picks the brains of those site owners a bit (I’m also guessing that those site owners will receive priceless feedback via the commenting features on the YPNBlog).

The YPN Blog also features a group photo shot ofthe YPN team.

The photo is all nice and sweet, and lends a big amount of faces to the Yahoo Publisher Network staff (which after running through the Flick shots of many staff members I’m surprised to see a good amount of them are entrepreneurial web publishers, which lends a big amount of credibility to the future of YPN).

This YPN ‘behind the scenes’ video also really adds some personality to the entire Yahoo Publisher Network project, and I recommend viewing (if I was Yahoo I would’ve uploaded it on YouTube and not just added a video file to the blog).

But I also noticed something amiss in the photo. First being that on the YPN Blog Jeremy Zawodny is listed as a contributing voice, but is not in the photo (sure, Jeremy doesn’t work within YPN but has now been promoted to the Yahoo! Troublemaking Divison) nor is Kristen Wareham, who oversees the public relations of the YPN department and probably was behind the camera.

But what about this Sock Monkey?:

What exactly is the role of this Sock Monkey on the YPN staff? Is it a mascot? An engineer? Sure, Google has its pigeons, but does Yahoo now have the YPN Sock Monkey?

My first conspiracy theory on the origin of the YPN Sock Monkey was that it was an obvious replacement for Jeremy in the photo shoot. As Zawodny was probably out flying somewhere or exercising, and could not make it over to the YPN offices.

But then again, if I were to replace Jeremy with a Sock Monkey, I would choose this monkey (courtesy of Sockit2me.com):

And for Kristen maybe this sock monkey from SockIt2Me :

So, if the sock monkey is not a group photo replacement for Jeremy or Kristen, I must ask again. What is the role of the Mysterious Sock Monkey?


While making this tongue & cheek post, I was looking at some Sock Monkey resources online and will be buying one for my nephew this summer. While searching for Sock Monkey info I also found:

Sock Monkey Origin Theory

For an estimated twenty thousand years, sock monkeys and humans have existed in a symbiotic relationship with one another. This relationship began with the monkey’s favorite food, lint, which was produced in vast quantities in the prehistoric dryers of humans.

Lured by the lint, hungry sock monkeys began to wander into laundry rooms. Humans did not like lint, so they encouraged the monkeys to stay.

Slowly over thousands of years they adapted to living in our homes. The monkeys have lost their ability to hunt and can no longer live in the wild. Their ferocious lint grabbing claws have now atrophied into plush little stumps. In fact, today’s sock monkeys rarely even move.

And Sock Monkeys Save The World From The Y2K Computer Crisis

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SEJ STAFF Loren Baker Founder at Foundation Digital

Loren Baker is the Founder of SEJ, an Advisor at Alpha Brand Media and runs Foundation Digital, a digital marketing ...

Mystery of the Yahoo Sock Monkey on YPN Blog

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