There was a great post on TechCrunch today about how the redesign of Yahoo has helped push up the time spent on the homepage by 20 percent. But what I found interesting wasn’t so much the effect of the tweaks Yahoo made as the quantification of their success afterward. Specifically, the idea of PageYield.

The whole focus of the redesign, and across Yahoo in general, says Bhat is to increase what he calls PageYield. The yield of a page on Yahoo is measure of how engaged consumers are with that page. (As opposed to PageRank, which is how Google scores pages on the Web in its search results). PageYield is a measure of how much time is spent on each Yahoo page and how many pageviews it gets, but also how much downstream traffic the page generates, and how often people come back.

So often when we look at building websites, we’re focussed on metrics like page views and unique visitors and time on site. But I think this concept of PageYield gets to the heart of what a website really should be aiming to do: get users to interact with it. A great page on a news site gets users to read an article, play a video, make a comment, and share to Facebook or Twitter. If the user just skims the page and moves on, so what? Sure, both count as page views and eyeballs, but if the engaged user is infinitely better.

And not just from a usability standpoint. It also makes sense if your website has an ad-supported business model. If they’re engaged with everything on the page, it follows that they’re far more engaged with advertisements, too.

November is shaping up to have a slew of big hyperlocal events. After launching InJersey and attempting to pilot Gannett NJ’s efforts in this arena, I’m going to try to make to all of these. Of course, given that it seems there’s a new event every few days, it’ll be challenging. At some point next month, I’m going to have to actually try to work.

Anyway, here are the biggies on my list:

• Nov. 9 – New Media Women Entrepreneurs, Washington D.C.: A day-long gathering of blockbuster speakers, all of them women, and almost all of them working on hyperlocal news sites. Although I may not be able to make it to D.C. for the event, I’d particularly love to hear Debbie Galant, of Baristanet.com, and Lisa Williams, of Placeblogger.com.

• Nov. 11 – Hypercamp, NYC: This is one I absolutely won’t miss. I’ve been working with Jeff Jarvis and his team at CUNY (“New Business Models for News”) to set up a day-long event devoted to how to improve the quality of hyperlocal news sites, and also how to monetize them once they’re built. Should be an amazing lineup of speakers, including Jarvis himself.

• Nov. 14-15 – WordCamp NYC: While not technically hyperlocal, since InJersey is all built on WordPress MU and BuddyPress, as are most of the blog-based hyperlocal sites out there, this is going to be a very important event for me. It’s arguably the biggest and best WordCamp event outside of the San Fran one.

• Nov. 18 – Citizen Journalism Conference, Monmouth U, West Long Branch, NJ: I’m scheduled to speak at this free half-day event being put on by the Citizens Campaign, a non-profit aiming to help promote citizen journalism and civic engagement. My panel’s discussion: “The New Media Climate: How the internet is transforming journalism and its impact on local government & politics.”

Should be a wild couple weeks. If you’re planning to go to any of these as well, drop me an email and let me know.

Despite suffering from a nasty two-day-old fever, I managed to drag myself out of bed and up to East Brunswick today for a live video chat about social networking — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all that good stuff. We even managed to get a few questions about hyperlocal blogs, which I suspect may have come from my wonderful, softball-lobbing, InJersey-loving colleagues.

Loren Fisher, the editor for MyCentralJersey.com, interviewed me, and we used LiveStream‘s Procaster app in order to do the video/screencast switching. Enjoy!