Yahoo! Web Hosting and Yahoo! Geocities accounts can now use the Yahoo! 360° basic blogging tool as a new site tool.

The tools provided for implementing a Y! 360° blog to your site are really bullet-proof while still flexible. Posts are ready to accept comments (with anti-bot CAPTCHA verification - nice!) and you can quickly enable an RSS feed and include an "Add to My Yahoo!" button.

Existing Y! 360° users will notice almost 90 really nice blog templates that are entirely different from the ones offered from the Y! 360° property. And the templates from the Y! 360° property are not offered with the new implementation. That's probably because they're designed to include the linkages to Y! Photos, Flickr, Reviews, Y! Groups, Friends, etc. These segments are not included (yet?) in the new implementation.

Power users will note that the blog's CSS file is made accessible to you (editable?). That's the extent of tweakability.  This is, plain and simple, a basic blogging tool. It's not ment to be overhauled by the user. If you want that level of design and layout customization look to Yahoo! Web Hosting's optional, at no additional cost, WordPad and MovableType blogging platforms.

There's probably more that I missed as I quickly tooled around both the Web Hosting and Geocities implementation of this. Feel free to leave comments here to point out anything I've missed.

UPDATE: (5/11/06 20:17)

After further time spent I have noticed a couple unique aspects to having your Y! 360 blog via Geocities and/or Y! Web Hosting...

1) The blog contents are shared between Y! 360 (360.yahoo.com), Geocities and Web Hosting. That is, if you post to one, it's going to show up on any other implementation of your Y! 360° blog. You can see this at my Hosted blog, my Geocities blog and my Y! 360° blog. You'll notice that separate templates can be used for each.

2) At Y! 360°, only those signed into a Y! ID could leave comments. That's not the case if they access your blog at Y! Web Hosting or Geocities. As a result your Y! 360° comments will now show "Anonymous" commenters if they accessed your blog from any other location (Hosting or Geocities).