Yahoo! Launches their new contextual advertising program for blogs and other small publishers, a la Google AdSense. Look out for those ads marked with a ‘Y!’ in this example.

The program will be called the Yahoo! Publisher Network. Silicon Valley Watcher independently confirms that YPN is Yahoo!’s response to Google AdSense.

Also, in conjunction with YPN, Yahoo! may release a set of ‘publishing tools’ which should refer to its own freely hosted blog service to tie in with the contextual ads. Watch out, Blogger. Yahoo! may have the perfect arsenal.