Guillaume Belfiore

Yahoo is developing technology to help publishers personalize their websites, in much the same way that it helps them to populate their sites with ads, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said on Tuesday.

“We’re looking at helping people manage their content,” Bartz said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, during a keynote appearance in which she was interviewed on stage by conference co-chairman John Battelle.

When Battelle asked her if the content management service she was describing existed as a product already, she answered that it doesn’t. Once it’s ready, Yahoo will be able to help Web publishers with both ads and content, she said.

The “content optimization” tool would focus on helping publishers personalize their content offerings and target it better for their site visitors, a process that requires automation, algorithms and data crunching at a scale that can’t be done manually, she said.

Yahoo, one Web behemoth, plans to add three new blogs to its growing family on Monday. Yahoo’s network expansion was born from a 7-month-old venture called The Upshot. For this blog covering breaking news and analysis, Yahoo recruited several seasoned journalists.

The new properties will live under The Upshot brand, but each take their own names — The Ticket for politics, The Lookout for national affairs, and The Cutline for media industry coverage.

At the helm of the project is Andrew Golis, a 27-year-old who came from Talking Points Memo, an online-only news network. There, Golis helped steer a rocket ship of a news startup at a time when there was little assurance that the Web needed or wanted another news source. Now, here he is again, helping to launch another news brand.