A bunch of folks have been pinging me about Gawker’s Yahoo! deal and my thoughts. My thoughts are: excellent!!! Great for bloggers, great for Yahoo, and most of all great for consumers.

We’re psyched that Scott Moore at Yahoo News understands and values blogs… it’s no surprise to me, as I’m friends with a bunch of Yahoo folks including Scott, Don Loeb, Toby Coppel, and Criag Forman. All brilliant folks, and we love working with them.

In fact, one of my conditions on doing the deal with AOL was that I would be able to form whatever partnerships I wanted to–including with Yahoo, Microsoft and Google! AOL is all about making our services as open as possible–just like Yahoo.

We’ve proudly kept our My Yahoo! links all over our service. We’ve got an amazing deal with Don and his team at MyYahoo and we’ve been working on getting our blogs integrated into Yahoo News and Yahoo News Search for a long time. Heck, we’re going to run Yahoo Publisher Network on Weblogs, Inc. as well–why not?

I agree with Scott 100% when he says to Rafat “at this point, we’re not in the mode of acquiring blog content. We would rather work with as many as we can.” I mean, Yahoo is doing HotZone and “acquiring” bloggers to a certain extent, but all of the news services should be open and fair.

The more comprehensive the various news services are–AOL’s, Yahoo’s, Google’s and Microsoft’s–the better it is for consumers. Gawker blogs will always have a place on AOL (at least if I have anything to do with it). This is the age of coopetition after all.