Planet Yahoo!

Tech Thursday - CSS3 please, Trojans via USB, IBM visualization engine and Mosaic source code

2010-03-11T12:21:01+00:00

It is tech Thursday and here is a random pick of cool technical links from our bookmarks collection:

The difference between article, div and section - semantic HTML5 info
CSS3 Please is an interactive demo of CSS3 features with live rendering
The graph of the water consumption in Edmonton during the Canada vs US Olympics hockey final is interesting. Guess when the advertising breaks occured.
USB battery chargers can contain Trojans - another reminder that hardware is as suspicious as software when it comes to security
Many eyes is a visualization engine by IBM.
Pure CSS3 speech bubbles is a CSS include to turn any DIV into a speech bubble without any images
Twitter Quiz is built 100% in YUI and allows you to post little multiple choice quizzes on Twitter
If you want to re-live the birth moments of the web, you can now download NCSA mosaic on GitHub
Jonathan Snook explains the ins and outs of background-position-x
What the JavaScript RegEx engine got wrong and how to fix it has some very good information how to avoid frustration when you come from Perl or PHP to JavaScript

The Spark: Bad Boys and Bad Television

2010-03-11T08:01:00+00:00

"Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!" It's like watching
a train wreck: you can't pull away.
(Photo by Daniel DiMarco)

On March 11, 1989, "COPS" debuted on Fox in all its tacky glory, bringing pot dens and streetwalkers into America's living rooms. Packed full of drunken brawls and high-speed chases, "COPS" is the longest-running reality show on television -- unless you count C-SPAN (and really, only political nerds are dorky enough to consider Senate proceedings reality programming*). In honor of "COPS's" 21st birthday, here's our salute to some of television's classiest (and trashiest) guilty pleasures.

steal their daughters' girlfriends

little-person Klan members

The Jerry Springer Show

Slightly

evidence

Dog the Bounty Hunter

America's Most Wanted

Maury

Ricki Lake

The Montel Williams Show

baby-daddy drama

out-of-control teens

hoochie-mama makeovers

Of course, in prime time, there's "Jersey Shore," "The Bachelor," "Millionaire Matchmaker," "The Real World," "Big Brother," "The Real Housewives of (Insert Here)," and an endless stream of reality television to satisfy even the most ravenous of TV viewers. With so much outlandish behavior filling up the airwaves, it's enough to make anyone wonder why an enthusiastic acceptance speech gets our knickers in a bunch and this does not.

*Author of this article may or may not be a political nerd.

Suggested Sites...

Reality TV World - news and forums about your favorite reality programs.
Reality Blurred - blog about current reality TV news.
Guilty Pleasures - shows so bad, they're actually good.
Best Guilty Pleasures of 2009 - reviews of some of the most fun shows to watch from last season.
EW's Guilty Pleasures - Entertainment Weekly's list of guilty pleasure television shows to love.

Directory categories: Reality Television, Law Enforcement Shows, Talk Shows, Talk Show Hosts, Soap Operas

Archived under: 1990s, Crime, Entertainment, Law Enforcement, Reality TV, TV, Talk Show Hosts

Lifetime bans from International Cricket

2010-03-11T03:04:28+00:00

The Pakistan Cricket Board has taken the task of disciplining their players for recent infighting during Pakistan’s tour of Autralia, rather seriously; issuing lifetime bans from international Cricket for former captains, Younus Khan and Mohammad Yousuf.

It is reported they were charged with bringing the game into disrepute over their bickering and attitudes, which in turn affected the entire team and their performance. Other players have been issued with fines and bans ranging from six months to a year.

Speaking to the Cricinfo website, the PCB’s legal adviser Taffazul Rizvi explained the ramifications for Khan and Yousuf.

“They will not be part of any Pakistan team in any format from here on,” he said, adding that the PCB had stopped short of imposing a so-called life ban.

“A life ban means they cannot play domestic cricket or any other similar cricket, but we are not stopping them from that. They can play domestic cricket or county cricket here and abroad.”

Source: Yahoo!7 Sports News

We’d like to know your thoughts on this controversial move by the PCB:

Is the banning of Mohammad Yousuf and Younus Khan from playing for Pakistan for life, a fitting penalty?

Leave a comment below or on the question above!

Kate
Community Manager

Farewell Corey Haim

2010-03-11T02:52:50+00:00

This morning’s headlines brought news of the passing of Hollywood actor, Corey Haim. Aged 38, it is suspected he died from an overdose after a long battle with substance abuse.

Corey rose to fame in the 1980’s alongside actors such as River Phoenix, Corey Feldman and Kiefer Sutherland; the heartthrob of millions. He is best known for his films “The Lost Boys” and “Lucas”, but has starred in countless TV shows, movies and specials in a career spanning almost 20 years.

He has a number of projects currently in post-production and recently returned to fame with fellow actor Corey Feldman in their TV series, “The Two Coreys”.

What is your favourite TV show or movie starring Corey Haim?

What’s your favourite role played by Corey? Leave a comment below or answer on the question above!

Kate
Community Manager

"Mad Men" Madness

2010-03-11T02:14:01+00:00

by Claudine Zap

Just in time for the next season of the hit AMC show, it's "Mad Men" Ken and Barbie. That's right, you can play out all your favorite scenes that break down the picture-perfect marriage of Don and Betty Draper, or reimagine the workplace flirtation of ad man Roger Sterling and the curvy office manager, Joan Holloway. Martinis and cigarettes not included. What are: girdles, pearls, and overcoats.

The collectors' items are clearly not for the tweener set, who would probably find all that adult stuff boring in the soap opera of a show. The '60s-era drama covers issues like divorce, adultery, drinking, and sexual harassment — and that's just a typical episode. As the New York Times reports, the toy line is part of the premium-priced "Barbie Fashion Model Collection." With a suggested retail price of $74.95 each, you can practically see the unopened toys tucked out of a child's reach.

The dolls' launch will be timed with the premiere of the show's fourth season in July. Fans are already looking on the Web for when to watch. Increases on "mad men tv series" are up 500% in the last week. People want to know about the "mad men season 4 premiere," "mad men's red-headed actress" (that would be Christina Hendricks), "cast of mad men," and "mad men merchandise." Aside from playing with the coolly iconic figures, you yourself can dress the part in a Brooks Brothers "Mad Men" edition suit.

The toy company Mattel said the appeal for a "Mad Men collection was the carefully constructed time-capsule of the early 1960s, also the time when Barbie was first introduced to the world. We can admit that Betty Draper is a ringer for Barbie but also represents, as one culture professor notes, "the wife who lives in her dream house whose soul is eaten away." And scene.

In the YUI 3 Gallery: Matt Snider’s Number Module

2010-03-11T01:45:06+00:00

About the author: Matt Snider is the lead frontend engineer for Mint.com (now a part of Intuit), where he makes extensive use of YUI in the presentation layer. He is also the author of a popular blog on JavaScript. Matt contributed the YUI 2 Storage Utility to YUI and is an active community member; you can see his presentation from YUICONF 2009 on YUI Theater.

Natively, JavaScript has a very limited set of functions for working with numbers located on the global Math object. Mostly these functions are for working with exponents, trigonometry, and rounding. And while these functions are needed and efficient, the Math API has remained unchanged for years, and probably won’t be improved anytime in the near future. So it is up to the developers of JavaScript libraries to create and maintain a component for working with numbers.

The Number component in the YUI 3 Gallery, derived from work originally used on Mint.com, aims to fill in missing number-related functionality. It provides a light-weight set of static functions for working with numbers. The Number component weighs in at about 1.8kb after minification and before gzip; it’s supported by all A-grade browsers.

One of the features in Number that I use the most is the format() function, which injects a formatted number into a string by evaluating the format of the placeholder number in the string. (Note: This is similar to the formatting support Y.DataType.Number currently provides, but rolls up the separate configuration properties which Y.DataType.Number.format accepts into a single formatting pattern string.) The function works with all symbols, but it formats numbers according to the English standard. Here are a few example of how to use format() from its unit test:

var n = 1111.11,
	formatDollars = "$0,0.00'" // use comma and decimal when formatting
	formatPercent = "0.00%", // use decimal when formatting
	formatRound = "0,000", // use comma when formatting
	formatText = "Please add the $0,0.00 to my tab!";

Y.Assert.areEqual("$1,111.11", Y.Number.format(n, formatDollars));
Y.Assert.areEqual("1111.11%", Y.Number.format(n, formatPercent));
Y.Assert.areEqual("1,111", Y.Number.format(n, formatRound));
Y.Assert.areEqual("Please add the $1,111.11 to my tab!", Y.Number.format(n, formatText));

Other useful functions include:

random(): provides an easy API for getting random whole numbers;
isBetween()/isNotBetween(): simplifies the evaluation of number ranges;
radian()/degrees(): when working with the Math trigonometry functions (such as Math.cos()), which expect radians instead of degrees, both radian() and degrees() are useful for converting values.

To use the Number Gallery component, first include the script:

<script
src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/combo?3.0.0/build/yui/yui-min.js&
gallery-2010.02.22-22/build/gallery-number/gallery-number-min.js"></script>

Then include 'gallery-number' in your use() function, to get the following functions:

YUI().use('gallery-number', function(Y) {
	Y.Number = {
		degrees(number),
		format(number, format),
		getPrecision(number),
		isNotBetween(number, number, number, boolean),
		isBetween(number, number, number, boolean),
		isPrime(number),
		radians(number),
		random(number, number),
		roundToPrecision(number, number)
	};
});

These functions were modeled after the native Math functions and, like the Math functions, the functions on Y.Number return NaN if the value provided is not a number. If you would like to contribute to the development of or require new features added to Number, please leave a message on the Forum.

Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Update

2010-03-10T23:58:26+00:00

The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.

To share your thoughts on this latest update, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Dan Rampton
Program Manager, Yahoo! Search

An Epic Lawsuit Looms

2010-03-10T22:49:00+00:00

by Mike Krumboltz

Toyota's ongoing safety troubles with its vehicles have led to deaths, injuries, and an incalculable amount of bad press. Now, it looks like the embattled car company will be facing class action lawsuits that could cost the company a staggering $3 billion.

These lawsuits aren't from those who were injured or from the relatives of drivers who lost their lives. Rather they come from Toyota owners whose cars have lost a significant amount of value due to the company's high profile problems.

In the past Toyotas were known for their high resale-value. Nowadays, not so much. A buzzy article from Yahoo! News explains that at least 89 class-action lawsuits have been filed. Toyota drivers have contended that the company knew about the safety issues but "concealed them from buyers."

Kelley Blue Book, a guide that lists values for new and used cars, has listed the resale value for recalled Toyotas "by an average of 3.5%." If every Toyota owner was able to sue the company for this decrease in value, well, Toyota could be looking at a serious problem.

Ad News and Views from Around the Web

2010-03-10T22:24:28+00:00

Yahoo’s March Madness hoop dreams; recession brand lessons; data’s not everything; 2010 looking up, and more

Calling all bracketologists
March brings with it green beer, spring flowers and, of course, three weeks of hoops hysteria in the form of the NCAA college basketball tournament. This year’s Yahoo! Sports March Madness line-up is stronger than ever, beginning with our seasoned veteran, Tourney Pick ‘Em. The contest pits Yahoo! users against each other and the “experts,” with cash prizes of up to a million dollars on the line. Something new and cool for this year’s tournament is “Predictalot,” an experimental app from the brainiacs at Yahoo! Labs: Predictalot enables fans to make all types of prestidigitations, then assigns odds and lets users buy and sell them like stocks. Yahoo! has also created a dedicated mobile site just for your tournament picks, as well as a new web show, “Bracket Madness Live.” Picking begins this Sunday after the match-ups are announced, and the usual bracket-busting begins Thursday, March 18.

JWT’s top ten lessons recession brand lessons
Those JWT guys sure are into their “top tens.” The global agency spent a year surveying brand and consumer response to the recession, and came up with ten key brand lessons for surviving a downturn. And then they put them all in a book, which you can download for bupkis—well, in exchange for the usual name/rank/serial number data, anyway.

It’s not all about the data?
Yep, that’s what Dax Hamman says in AdExchanger.com’s Displaying Search column. Hamman, the VP of Display Media at iCrossing, says that “Search and analytics data has helped define media programs for some time…Data is essential to this evolution in media.” But, he also says, “As an industry we must remember that we are talking to real people, not just pixels, and real people will always respond better to something that is visually exciting, has sizzling copy or simply makes them say ‘wow’.” In short, creativity’s still king, kids.

High Standards
It may still seem like the Wild West when it comes to digital advertising but, rest assured, the frontier days are over. Today we have high standards, as ClickZ’s Hollis Thomases explains.

2010 looking up for marketing execs
According to a recent survey of more than 400 North American marketing execs performed by the research firm Frost & Sullivan, marketing execs are viewing the glass as at least half full. Budgets remain flat, staffing and processes remain an issue, and the biggest challenge remains the global recession. But, nevertheless, marketers are finding that life can be so sweet on the sunny side of the street.

— Michael Mattis

(Hoops image by Ryan Fung via Flickr, CC 2.0)

Idol Talk: Seems Like Old Times. Really Old.

2010-03-10T20:44:01+00:00

by Vera H-C Chan

Was there a calculated generational appeal happening on "American Idol" during the ladies' round? Tuesday night's repertoire included crusty classics from the Animals, Fleetwood Mac, Carole Bayer Sager, Patsy Cline, and even one Charlie Chaplin-penned ditty.

The strategy's not necessarily bad, aside from the risk of being compared to the original. After all, the "Idol" core Search audience are ladies in their late 20s through the 50s. As we've seen in tracking the numbers, whoever the ladies like usually wins the season.

Below, we list the top 8 ladies according to their performance in Yahoo! search.

Top 8 Female "American Idol" Contestants on Yahoo!, Tuesday night performance

Crystal Bowersox. The sympathy vote and her assured performance of "Give Me One Reason" (1988) continue to put the dreadlocked mom in the lead. But as "Idol" trackers know (and judge Cowell keeps forgetting), being dubbed the frontrunner can be a curse. (Recall the premature love showered on Danny Gokey, Michael Johns and Melinda Doolittle.)

Siobhan Magnus. If the note heard 'round the reality TV world didn't do it, then her acappella lead-in to "House of the Rising Sun" (1964) cemented the Massachusetts contender as the "unique" and "unlikely" one to look out for (except for judge Cowell, who longed for another glass-shattering "moment").

Didi Benami. Trembling at the precipice two weeks in a row, she improved this week with the Fleetwood Mac number "Rhiannon" (1976). Sticking with Stevie Nicks (a la "Landslide" from Top 20 week) can eventually pay off.

Lacey Brown. Working the Betty-Boop eyes, Brown pumped some vim and vigor into "The Story" (2007), which Judge Randy dubbed a "boring" song (but not Brown's rendition). Her improvement and her underdog status may have helped boost Brown's following.

Katelyn Epperly. Her keyboard shrunk from grand to stand-up, but her plastic take on "I Feel the Earth Move Under My Feet" (1971) left the panel unmoved. However, never underestimate an Iowa girl's Midwestern appeal.

Katie Stevens. The full-throated 17-year-old had the most youthful song with "Breakaway" (2004). a tune from Idol alum Kelly Clarkson. However, judges saw an identity crisis.

Lilly Scott. Among the panelists' favorite, she updated "I Fall to Pieces" (1961) but judge Cowell worried about her risk. Another thing to worry about: For voters who rely on Tivo, her telephone code was cut off at the highlight recap.

Paige Miles. The singer went somber with "Smile" (1936) and got a universal kiss of death from the judges. Once again dead-last in Web curiosity, the Florida girl may be singing the classic as her encore song.

Consumer Recalls & Peace of Mind

2010-03-10T19:29:45+00:00

Child safety seats. Toyota cars. Pringles potato chips. All three have been the subject of recent recalls because of concerns about consumer safety. But if you hadn’t watched the news to learn about the Pringles recall, how would you know whether the snacks in your pantry might make you sick?

Fortunately you can subscribe to feeds from various consumer watchdogs and monitor them on your My Yahoo! page. Here are some good examples to consider:

The Food and Drug Administration — Recalls/Safety Alerts: This information from the U.S. government keeps you current on a wide range of possible food safety issues.
Safercar.gov — Vehicle Recalls: This roundup from the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration includes announcements about specific car models and components that may have safety concerns.
Justia’s Auto Recalls Homepage: You can actually browse and select an RSS feed that is specific to your vehicle’s manufacturer by going directly to the website.
Household Product-Related Recalls: This feed from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission covers possible safety issues on everything from window shades to tea kettles.

You can also explore the sites above for specific recall updates on drugs, dietary supplements, or children’s products, among others. Subscribing to any of the above feeds will make it much easier to keep tabs on safety information for everyone in your household.

Apps mentioned in this post:

Add Food and Drug Administration — Recalls/Safety Alerts
Add Safercar.gov — Vehicle Recalls
Add Justia’s Auto recalls Homepage
Add Household Product-Related Recalls

Tom
- My Yahoo! Editorial

Michelle Obama's Gown, Gabourey Sidibe's New Role, Census Jobs: What's the Buzz

2010-03-10T18:57:04+00:00

by Claudine Zap

Our top picks from the day's hottest searches.

Census jobs (Searches increased by +655%). Out of work? The government is hiring 700,000 door-to-door census takers this summer.
Gabourey Sidibe (+264%). The Oscar-nominated actress has a new job: A recurring role on the new show "The Big C," starring Laura Linney.
Vote for the Worst (+256%). A new season of "American Idol" means strategies to game the system have begun.
Asperger's Syndrome (+233%). The drama "Parenthood" featured a 13-year-old character with the symdrome.
Michelle Obama (+219%). The first lady's inaugural ball gown made its museum debut.

Searching on the Two Coreys

2010-03-10T18:42:32+00:00

by Mike Krumboltz

There was always something tragic about Corey Haim, even before he died Wednesday at the age of 38. A cautionary tale of the highest order, he reached career heights at a young age, only to see his success undone by addiction.

It was impossible to talk about one Corey without mentioning the other. The day after troubled actor Mr. Haim died at 38, Web searches on his former costar and friend Corey Feldman immediately soared into the stratosphere.

The two Coreys, as they were commonly known, had starred in a slew of films together. Nearly every one of their efforts experienced a boom in the buzz following Haim's death. During their '80s heyday, the pair co-starred in hits like "The Lost Boys," "License to Drive," and "Dream a Little Dream."

As the years went by and their star power faded, the two remained good friends, as well as collaborators. Throughout the '90s, the Coreys starred in several films, albeit films of a markedly lower quality. Efforts included "Blown Away" (an "erotic thriller" costarring Nicole Eggert), "Dream a Little Dream 2," and "National Lampoon's Last Resort."

More recently, two two Coreys appeared in an A&E reality series, appropriately titled "The Two Coreys." The program focused on their quest for work as well as their friendship and bond. The show ran for two seasons, and gave viewers an inside look at the sometimes difficult, sometimes humiliating life of a former child star.

After Mr. Haim's death hit the news wires, Feldman released a statement. In part it read: "This is a tragic loss of a wonderful, beautiful, tormented soul, who will always be my brother, family, and best friend. We must all take this as a lesson in how we treat the people we share this world with while they are still here to make a difference."

Other celebrities tweeted their thoughts on the actor's untimely passing. Haim's former girlfriend Alyssa Milano wrote: "Just woke up to the sad, sad news that Corey Haim passed away. RIP sweet boy." Christina Applegate, Melissa Joan Hart, Ashton Kutcher, comedian Sinbad, and director Kevin Smith also posted their condolences.

Follow Buzz Log on Twitter.

YQL code samples: YQL is easy to use

2010-03-10T18:34:11+00:00

YQL is easy to use. How easy? Check out these three examples:

1) Fetch Twitter search results using YQL + JSONP + a simple JavaScript handler function

Feed readers, see the code on Github.

Run this query in the YQL console:
select * from json where url="http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=puppy"

Note: You could also use YQL’s community table for Twitter search

2) Scrape content off the World Wildlife Fund site and pass it back to a jQuery handler

Feed readers, see the code on Github.

Run the YQL query in the console:
select * from html where url=”http://www.worldwildlife.org/sites/photos/galleries.html” and xpath=’//div[@class=”narrativeText”]/h4|//ul[@id=”speciesList”]’

Note: instead of running all this on the page, you might consider using YQL execute to generate your HTML on Yahoo! servers and pass it back to the handler for insertion into the page. You could also create an adhoc API that leans on Yahoo!'s cache to reduce WWF's bandwidth costs.

3) Convert XML to JSON in your sleep

This script instructs YQL to fetch the “UN News Centre - Top Stories” RSS feed and return it as JSON, and then drops the data on the page using YUI.

Feed readers, see the code on Github.

Run this query in the YQL console:
select * from rss where url=’http://www.un.org/apps/news/rss/rss_top.asp’

Erik Eldridge (@erikeldridge)
Yahoo! Developer Network

Yahoo! Sports’ “Tourney Pick’em” Goes Mobile

2010-03-10T17:37:43+00:00

Remember having to print out your March college basketball tournament bracket to carry around in your pocket and then having to check off which picks you chose correctly and incorrectly? Or how it was 10 times worse if you managed the office pool and had to do it for everyone? Well now there’s no reason to worry about that – your phone will do the work for you.

As millions of college basketball fans feverishly keep an eye on the latest matchups, scores and team standings they’ll be able to get live updates as they happen with the new mobile Tourney Pick’em site, available at http://m.yahoo.com/tourneypickem.

Getting started is easy. Just fill out your bracket for Tourney Pick’em on your PC starting on March 14, then pick your teams and compete with your friends to see who has the best bracket. When you track your brackets on your phone, you’ll be able to see live scores and a quick view of your teams’ standings along with how your score measures up to your friend’s.

Also, with integration into the mobile College Basketball site, you’ll be able to get all the news, expert analysis, blogs and tons of Yahoo! Sports content to keep you informed on the tournament results.

The site is available across over 2,000 different phones, so be sure to sign up for Tourney Pick’em on your PC so you can get all your tournament updates on the go too!

Check out what Yahoo! Sports Analyst Greg Anthony has to say about using Yahoo! to keep up with the NCAA Championship Tournament on your PC and mobile device.

Carl Teeple
North America product lead, mobile media products

2010 Yahoo! Sports Tourney Pick’em Offers the Thrill of Victory Across Multiple Experiences

2010-03-10T17:03:26+00:00

March is here, which means college basketball tournament time, one of my favorite times of the year, when even the mildest of fans start keeping up with every single game. When the Virginia Techs and the Daytons are crossing their fingers every single week that they stay inside that coveted bubble. When Facebook and Twitter status updates explode every time a top-10 team gets stunned or a star player makes an amazing dunk.

Facebook and Twitter—those sure weren’t around when I was playing in the Championship game 20 years ago against Duke. I’ll never forget the thrill of that victory, all the memories from the entire season, playing alongside Stacey Augmon and Larry Johnson—broken jaw and all.

I’m not on the court anymore, but that’s one of the beautiful things about the NCAA Championship Tournament: With every correct pick, every upset we call, every favorite team that advances, we (the fans) get to share in the thrill. One million dollars certainly doesn’t hurt, either—which is what Yahoo! is offering one lucky fan for submitting the perfect bracket. No perfect bracket in the end? No problem. The best bracket in the KFC- sponsored Yahoo! Sports Tourney Pick ‘em contest wins $10,000 (just ask Michael Lemon—he’s been enjoying his winnings from last year), and there’s even a second-chance contest from TIAA-CREF for the majority of us that must reluctantly accept our busted brackets.

Starting today, on-the-go fans will have access to a great new mobile experience for staying on top of their bracket selections. Yahoo! has created a mobile site where fans can play the Yahoo! Sports Tourney Pick’em game right on their mobile device at m.yahoo.com/tourneypickem. In addition, they’ll be able to get live scoring, game stats, updated schedules, news, and expert analysis from the Yahoo! Sports editorial team.

And it’s even easier these days to get your friends involved (and we all know the real satisfaction comes in beating that one friend who is so sure he’s going win) with Facebook and Twitter integration. Plus, you can be a die-hard fan without having to invest all the time and research. Yahoo!’s Bracket Wizard and Scenario Generator help fans with those quick decisions and allow them to see at a glance which teams to cheer for along the way to ensure that big W.

One of the perks of being a member of the Yahoo! Sports team is that I get to pitch in and offer my best (and presumably spot-on) advice to the masses. For those last-minute updates, fans can tune in to Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Bracket Live, a live and interactive web-show from the folks who brought you the Emmy®–nominated Yahoo! Fantasy Football Live. Tune in on March 17 as Jason King, Brad Evans, Larry Beil and I give you a final rundown on all the immediate updates affecting your teams. Viewers can even send us their bracket, and there’s a chance we’ll help you out with it on our show.

I know you guys are as excited about the next few weeks as I am. If you haven’t already, you better get in the game soon. Tip-off is only 8 days away, and it can’t get here soon enough!

-Greg Anthony, Yahoo! Sports College Basketball Analyst

Flickr on Black

2010-03-10T15:35:04+00:00

Take a look at 3 Flickr viewers, each of which displays Flickr photos “on black”, offers continuous scrolling, and allows you to authenticate with your Flickr account to comment or favorite to enhance your Flickr experience. Of course, each app is showing photos that are hosted on Flickr, with attribution and links back to the photo pages on Flickr.

Fluidr presents photos quickly and seamlessly. It even includes some EXIF data, the description and geodata as a map right next to the photo. Our favorite feature? Surprise! It gives you a random selection from one of the 4 billion photos in the Flickrverse. It couldn’t be easier to discover something new.

Darckr delights in its wealth of photo viewing options, from being able to see photos large to creating a skinnable background. We enjoy the ease of which you quickly add links to your photo’s descriptions to view them on black in Darckr. You can even quickly catch-up on your contact’s recent uploads with comment boxes built right into the page and one-click commenting on multiple photos.

Flickriver is a classic. Alex continually updates this application, adding new features which are sure to delight. Besides excellent and uncluttered browsing, you can also get a dynamic badge to display on your profile or website, showing off your own or your group’s photos. We really enjoy pulling up random selections from groups to find hidden gems buried in the pool. The map integration is stellar; search for a place and the map appears at the top of the page.

Learn more about the App Garden in our FAQ.

Photos by spieri_sf, Warriorwriter, anda74, Abizeleth, dog ma and iceman9294.

Applications by haelio, Laurent Henocque and iosart.

Advanced search changes

2010-03-10T10:12:53+00:00

Following our changes to the Search experience on Answers last week we received a lot of feedback from you, the community, around the changes we had made.

We’ve reacted to your feedback to make changes that now allow you to add parameters to the URL, which will enable you to sort the search results to your preference. In order to do this, here are the parameters you would need to add:
&orderby=+date (to sort by most recent)
&orderby=-date (to sort by oldest)
For example a search for `dogs` gives this URL: http://answers.yahoo.com/search/search_result?p=dogs

If you want to sort search results by the most recent, simply add `&orderby=+date` to the end of the URL: http://answers.yahoo.com/search/search_result?p=dogs&orderby=+date
We will look to add these filters within the page itself over the coming months.

In addition, we have noticed that search terms within quotation marks (“ and “) were returning no results. A few code tweaks later and hey presto – results have now returned!

Further changes

Last but not least, we’ve also taken this opportunity to fix some other bugs on the site:
- For Internet Explorer users we’ve fixed the layout issue on the Ask/Answer/Discover banner.
- We have also made changes to content deletion. Previously, when you deleted your question or answer, it was still showing in the public view of your profile page. From now on when you delete a question or answer, it will be entirely removed from your public profile page

Keep the feedback coming!

The Spark: Saint Bix of Davenport

2010-03-10T08:01:00+00:00

The 21-year-old Bix, on
the verge of everything:
good and bad

On March 10, 1903, Bismark and Agatha Beiderbecke welcomed a baby boy, Leon Bismark, into their home in Davenport, Iowa. As the boy grew, he soon became known as "Bix."

In those years, every home had a Victrola stocked with every kind of music: opera, popular, country, and, beginning in 1917, a new musical genre called "jazz." It was this jazz, particularly the records by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, that young Bix loved -- even teaching himself to play the cornet. Davenport being a river town, Bix supplemented his musical education by listening to the bands working on the riverboats that traveled the Mississippi. He may or may not have met Louis Armstrong in those days: Armstrong claimed the two men met then, but some scholars disagree.

Bix's love affair with music was permanent. He formed a band in high school, and when it began to interfere with his studies, his parents moved him to a boarding school near Chicago. It proved to be a mistake: he spent more nights in Chicago speakeasies than in his dorm, and was expelled.

Bix soon joined the Wolverine Orchestra, playing cornet by night and taking piano lessons by day, specializing in the impressionistic music of composer Eastwood Lane, whose work would inform both Beiderbecke's playing and composing. In 1924, Bix and the Wolverines made a recording of "Jazz Me Blues" that proved electrifying. Nothing like Beiderbecke's cornet had ever been heard before -- not even from the pioneering Armstrong.

Beiderbecke spent the next few years shuttling between Jean Goldkette's band and freelancing, turning out such classic sides as "Singin' the Blues," "I'm Coming, Virginia," and "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans." Goldkette's band went bust in 1927, though, and its best players were quickly gobbled up by Paul Whiteman, the "King of Jazz," for his own orchestra.

Bix completed his musical education in the Whiteman band. Whiteman demanded a high level of musicianship, and while Beiderbecke sometimes struggled to keep up with the complicated arrangements (he was a mediocre sight-reader), it was in his solos that he shined, literally stopping audiences from dancing as they listened to him play.

Unfortunately, such a success story has a tragic ending. Bix was a chronic alcoholic, whose drinking frequently got out of hand: His 1929 stint in rehab kept him from appearing with the rest of the band in the film "King of Jazz," a loss that haunts jazz fans (his only appearance on film is a brief snippet where he can barely be seen). His drinking may have been exacerbated by his parents' disinterest in his career. On one occasion, he returned home to Davenport to find that all the records he had sent to his parents were carefully stacked in a closet -- all unopened.

His drinking continued to get out of hand, to the point where even the supportive Whiteman had to fire him, and he died of either pneumonia or, more likely, delirium tremens, in 1931, at the age of 28.

In the decades since, Bix's life has grown into legend. His boyhood home is on the National Register of Historic Places, numerous jazz festivals are dedicated to his music (including the big annual one in Davenport), and his recordings are collected and re-collected -- including records on which it's not even certain he appeared. His premature death and prodigious talent make jazz fans long for what might have been, and made him jazz's first martyr.

Suggested Sites...

Bix Beiderbecke.com - music, biography, and scholarly research about Bix.
Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Society - information about the annual jazz festival and doings in Davenport.
Wikipedia: Bix Beiderbecke - facts and legends about Bix.
Red Hot Jazz: Leon "Bix" Beiderbecke - discography and links to sound files.
Jazz: Bix Beiderbecke - from Ken Burns' PBS documentary, with biography and audio commentaries.

Directory categories: Bix Beiderbecke, Jazz, Paul Whiteman, Jazz Cornetists, Davenport, Iowa

Archived under: 1920s, Biographies, Birthdays, Bix Beiderbecke, Composers, Entertainment, Gadgets, Jazz, Music, Musicians, Nostalgia, Vintage

A tasty discount for Web Directions @Media 2010

2010-03-10T06:17:53+00:00

I'm pretty excited about heading back to Blighty for Web Directions @media. I've been living in the U.S of A for a couple of years but there isn't anything quite like the Big Smoke. So if you are in London on June 10th-11th why not join me for an amazing line up of speakers?

Our friends, John and Maxine, from Web Directions have kindly given YDN a discount code, "Yahoo", that you can use to get 50 quid off the ticket price. The conference will cover a huge range of the hot topics including:

HTML5 for web designers
CSS3
Server-side JavaScript <--- yours truly
HTML5 for web application developers
Geo enabling your web sites and applications
JavaScript testing
Designing for the web with grid systems
Building native mobile apps with web technologies
Improving your sites' performance

So what are you waiting for? Sign up today and we'll have a pint when I get there.

Web Directions @media
Southbank Centre, June 10 + 11
Just £449+VAT with YDN discount code: Yahoo

Tom Hughes-Croucher (@sh1mmer)
YDN's #1 British Expat

Delicious ‘bookmark’ option in Yahoo! Messenger

2010-03-10T03:47:25+00:00

As you know, people from all over the world use Delicious. Although our interface is still English-only (thinking about new languages for the roadmap but nothing concrete yet), you’ll see that our bookmarks, tags and comments appear in many different languages.

Today, we have a brief note to our Australian users that sign into Delicious with a Yahoo! account.

You guys have been selected for a dry-run of the initial integration of Delicious and Yahoo! Messenger. If you move your mouse cursor over any link in your conversation window you’ll see the Delicious logo appear. Click that and we’ll open a ‘Save’ window for you.

Now you can easily save links to review later without interrupting your instant message conversations. Yah!

What about the rest of us? Once we gather some data, have a few cups of coffee, cram in some Foosball action and ensure we have enough machines to handle the traffic, we’ll enable the feature for other English versions of Yahoo! Messenger.

What else are we working on? We can’t tell you, it’s a secret. :p

Advanced search update

2010-03-10T03:41:02+00:00

Following our changes to the Search experience on Answers last week we received a lot of feedback from you, the community, around the changes we had made.

Advanced search changes

&orderby=+date (to sort by most recent)
&orderby=-date (to sort by oldest)

For example a search for `dogs` gives this URL: http://au.answers.yahoo.com/search/search_result?p=dogs

If you want to sort search results by the most recent, simply add `&orderby=+date` to the end of the URL: http://au.answers.yahoo.com/search/search_result?p=dogs&orderby=+date

We will look to add these filters within the page itself over the coming months.

In addition, we have noticed that search terms within quotation marks (“ and “) were returning no results. A few code tweaks later and hey presto – results have now returned!

Further changes

Last but not least, we’ve also taken this opportunity to fix some other bugs on the site:

For Internet Explorer users we’ve fixed the layout issue on the Ask/Answer/Discover banner.
We have also made changes to content deletion. Previously, when you deleted your question or answer, it was still showing in the public view of your profile page. From now on when you delete a question or answer, it will be entirely removed from your public profile page

Keep the feedback coming!

Chuck Norris Turns 70 -- And He Could Still Break You

2010-03-10T01:15:30+00:00

by Claudine Zap

Chuck Norris' birthday is afraid of Chuck Norris.

The action star, black belt and all-around tough guy is turning 70. Really. Not that age could put a stop to the actor -- or to searches on him. And yes, he probably was born with that beard.

The action hero's career started back in the '60s, but not as an actor -- as a fighter. According to IMDB, after helping his mom raise his two siblings and graduating from high school in Torrance, CA, Norris left for a stint in Korea. The Air Force vet returned to open a karate studio, winning championships and teaching the likes of Steve McQueen, Priscilla Presley, and the Osmonds.

Despite his movie track record in sporting weaponry of all kinds, as a tae kwon do black belt he emphasized "action and technique over violence." But what you should probably take away from this is that Norris became an unbeatable fighting force. Put it this way: This guy is so scary, the gossip site TMZ made a birthday video for him last year.

It's not surprising that the man has become a myth in his own time. The icon-turned-Internet-meme has gone up against Bruce Lee, kept order in the series "Walker: Texas Ranger," and starred in movies like "The Delta Force," "Missing in Action," and "Firewalker." And he lent his on-screen persona to shill for Republican Mike Huckabee during the most recent presidential race.

The secret to his long career may be new generations finding "serious" old TV shows to be seriously hilarious. Just look at the searches (yeah, yeah, we know -- you don't search for Chuck Norris, he finds you). Lookups on "how old is chuck norris" have risen an awe-inspiring 2,700% in seven-day searches. Searches also include "chuck norris action jeans" (apparently a real thing sold in the 80s), "chuck norris birthday greeting," "find chuck Norris," "how tall is chuck Norris," and "chuck norris biography." Find more funny Chuck Norris facts.

But our favorite has to be the "chuck norris random fact generator" for nuggets like "Chuck Norris is so fast he can start a fire by rubbing two ice cubes together. "

He is also so old, the star will be receiving a lifetime achievement award at the first annual Actionfest film festival.

Chuck Norris isn't the only star whose age catches interest on the Web.

Here, the top 10 Yahoo! Searches on "how old is."

1.	How Old Is Miley Cyrus (17)	6.	How Old Is Meryl Streep (60)
2.	How Old Is Sandra Bullock (45)	7.	How Old Is George Clooney (48)
3.	How Old Is Justin Bieber (16)	8.	How Old Is Jeff Bridges(60)
4.	How Old Is Mariah Carey (39)	9.	How Old Is Hulk Hogan (57)
5.	How Old Is Kathryn Bigelow (58)	10.	How Old Is the Earth (older than Chuck Norris: 4.5 billion years)

Global Network Initiative Announces New Executive Director

2010-03-10T00:39:55+00:00

Flickr Creative Commons | Tomeppy

March 9, 2010 – The Global Network Initiative (GNI) is pleased to announce the appointment of Susan Morgan as its first Executive Director.

As Executive Director, Ms. Morgan will be responsible for continuing to make GNI a leading voice in defending and promoting freedom of expression and privacy in the information and communications technology industry worldwide. Ms. Morgan comes to GNI at a pivotal time and will be focused on advancing GNI’s goals, including increasing membership, encouraging collective action, overseeing the learning and accountability framework, and acting as a public advocate and spokesperson for GNI.

“Technology has the potential to dramatically increase access to information and protect personal privacy. However, increasing demands from governments to limit content, restrict freedom of expression and monitor users represent a worrying threat to human rights,” said Ms. Morgan.

“GNI can lead the way in helping companies make thoughtful and responsible decisions that protect the freedom of expression and privacy rights of hundreds of millions of Internet and communications technology users around the world,” Ms. Morgan said. “I am delighted to join GNI and look forward to building its global leadership role as we encourage more companies and their stakeholders to join us in this multi-stakeholder effort to protect freedom of expression and privacy worldwide.”

Ms. Morgan expects to begin her role at GNI in May of this year, joining from British Telecommunications (BT), where she was head of corporate responsibility (CR) strategy, policy and business planning. She played a key role in BT’s approach to external reporting and corporate accountability. She also led work on assessing corporate responsibility risk and opportunity. Ms. Morgan has more than fifteen years of experience in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors.

Today, GNI also announces the formation of its Board of Directors. The GNI Board of Directors consists of eight representatives from companies, four from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), two from the academic community, two from investment firms, and an independent Chair. All the NGO, academic and investor seats on the Board are filled, and five company seats remain open for companies that join GNI.

Finally, GNI has published on its website a Governance Charter that establishes a formal decision-making and accountability structure for GNI. The Charter describes how GNI will be governed in order to ensure integrity, accountability and effectiveness.

The Global Network Initiative is a multi-stakeholder group of companies, civil society organizations (including human rights and press freedom groups), investors and academics dedicated to protecting and advancing freedom of expression and privacy in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector. To learn more, visit our website at http://www.globalnetworkinitiative.org

For media inquiries, please contact GNI at press@globalnetworkinitiative.org
About Susan Morgan: http://www.globalnetworkinitiative.org/staff/index.php
GNI Board of Directors: http://www.globalnetworkinitiative.org/board/index.php
GNI Governance Charter: http://www.globalnetworkinitiative.org/charter/index.php

Search Trends for Oscar 2010 at Yahoo!

2010-03-09T23:57:40+00:00

Last week, we introduced you to some great search features to keep up with the 82^nd Academy Awards. The coveted statuettes have been distributed and the post-show analysis is in full swing!

The buzziest acceptance speeches of the evening: Sandra Bullock and Mo’Nique – although the story behind Elinor Burkett and her so-called “hijacked” acceptance speech blazed a path through search logs on Monday.

Best Motion Picture contender that is the most anticipated DVD in search: The Blind Side, followed by Avatar, Precious, and The Hurt Locker.

The buzz, of course, is never simply about who won. One of our favorite ways to explore major events is to check out the questions they inspired in search. One standout: “Are the Oscars the same as the Academy Awards?” (Why, yes!)

A sampling of notable Oscar 2010 search questions:

Who won Best Actress? – the biggest award category in search questions
Has Meryl Streep ever won an Oscar?
What does Hurt Locker mean? – a big theme in search, coupled with “What is The Hurt Locker about?”
How tall is Kathryn Bigelow?
Are Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jake Gyllenhaal related?
Who votes for the Oscars?

Check out The Buzz Log for more Oscar search trends and buzzing topics, courtesy of our friends at Yahoo! Buzz.

Andrea Sandke

Yahoo! Search

Update: Advanced Search changes and more…

2010-03-09T22:16:46+00:00

Following our changes to the Search experience on Answers last week we received a lot of feedback from you, the community, around the changes we had made.

Advanced search changes

&orderby=+date (to sort by most recent)

&orderby=-date (to sort by oldest)

For example a search for `dogs` gives this URL: http://answers.yahoo.com/search/search_result?p=dogs

If you want to sort search results by the most recent, simply add `&orderby=+date` to the end of the URL: http://answers.yahoo.com/search/search_result?p=dogs&orderby=+date

We will look to add these filters within the page itself over the coming months.

In addition, we have noticed that search terms within quotation marks (“ and “) were returning no results. A few code tweaks later and hey presto – results have now returned! J

Further changes

Last but not least, we’ve also taken this opportunity to fix some other bugs on the site:

- For Internet Explorer users we’ve fixed the layout issue on the Ask/Answer/Discover banner.

- We have also made changes to content deletion. Previously, when you deleted your question or answer, it was still showing in the public view of your profile page. From now on when you delete a question or answer, it will be entirely removed from your public profile page

Keep the feedback coming!

– Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team

Your friend’s favorites

2010-03-09T22:05:07+00:00

Favorites are a great way to explore Flickr. You’ll almost always find jewels leading you to new photostreams and groups that you’d otherwise have never found. So next time you’re looking at someone’s photo, mouse over their buddy icon and click “Favorites”. The above photos were found by looking at one of my contact’s favorites, finding a photo, checking out that person’s favorites, etc.

Photos from Arman-h آرمان, Jim Patterson Photography, jasontheaker, LOlandeseVolante, Matilde B., and [Adam_Baker].

D.C. Joins Five States in Legalizing Gay Marriage

2010-03-09T22:04:07+00:00

by Mike Krumboltz

Gay marriage continues to be a hot-button issue for many Americans. Whenever it's legalized (or banned) anywhere in the world, searches immediately soar. In Washington, D.C., gay marriage was recently legalized, sparking tremendous Web interest.

A lesbian couple who had been together for 12 years became the first same-sex couple to be married in the nation's capital. With the couple's union, Washington, D.C. joined New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, as the only places in the United States that allow people of the same sex to legally marry.

Of course, gay marriage is a specific definition. When things are broadened to include domestic partnerships or civil unions, the list of states grows substantially. According to About.com, California, Hawaii, Maine, Washington state, Nevada, Oregon, and New Jersey allow same-sex couples to "obtain some legal recognition for their relationships."

Interestingly, according to NJ.com, the upcoming United States census will allow same-sex couples in New Jersey to "identify themselves as married." This is significant in that the census is an official government document. The census will allow "same-sex couples [to] label themselves as husband or wife even if their relationships are not recognized by law."

While laws regarding gay marriage vary by state in the United States, other countries have clearer definitions. For example, in Europe, several countries have clear legal-marriage laws. According to an article from the BBC, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Norway, and Sweden all have legalized gay marriage. Additionally, Portugal, a primarily Catholic country, is expected to legalize gay marriage in the near future. Other countries that have done the same include Canada and South Africa.

As for where gay marriage is banned, the list is a bit longer, at least in the United States. The laws are complicated and can vary between statute bans and constitutional bans. States that have constitutional bans include, but are not limited to, Florida, Ohio, Texas, Utah, Michigan, Virginia, Mississippi, and Georgia. User-edited site Wikipedia offers up a complete list.

After Washington, D.C., legalized same-sex marriage, Web searches on "gay marriage states" and "where is gay marriage legal" both soared. Also gaining traction in the Search box: "differences between gay marriage and civil unions."

Follow Buzz Log on Twitter.

YDN 2.0 Site Release

2010-03-09T21:40:00+00:00

I'm pleased to announce that in the last week, we've successfully deployed our latest site update. Read along to see what we've been doing to make things a bit easier for you.

Optional Domain Verification

One of the biggest pain points for developers wanting to use Yahoo! APIs and services was that you had to verify your domain before you got Consumer Keys for our services. This security restriction was especially annoying at events like our HackDays, when developers told us they really wanted to start coding as quickly as possible. We've now relaxed this requirement and made domain verification optional. You can still verify your domain when you sign up for a key if you want, but we now offer the option to skip this process and let you verify later from the 'My Projects' dashboard. This makes it much easier to start building apps on Yahoo! services, like our Updates and Contacts APIs.

'My Projects' dashboard

As well as the changes to the domain verification process, we also made some other changes to the 'My Projects' dashboard.

'My Favorite' module link. If you are a YAP developer, you can now update the destination link that your app uses in the 'My Favorite' module, when installed on the Yahoo! homepage. This option is found in the application details tab and gives you more control over how users interact with your Open Applications.
Update primary email address. If you submit your Open Application for inclusion in our galleries, we may need to contact you. This feature helps ensure we've got the correct email address on record.

Create Consumer Key API

The Create Consumer Key (CCK) API allows developers to easily provide Yahoo!-issued Consumer Keys, Consumer Secrets, and Application IDs to their users. You can find out more about it in this introduction.

Forum improvements

In the last few weeks, we've made several improvements to the YDN Forum, both of which make it easier to use.

Email notifications: You can now subscribe to a forum thread and get notified by email when someone replies, or subscribe to a board and get notified of a new topic.
Improved the RSS feeds: These now include replies to threads, rather than just the opening post.

New navigation bar

If you are a regular YDN user, you will probably have noticed this change already. We have made some tweaks to the navigation bar, making sure that it is easy to browse to the most popular and most used sections of the site. You can now navigate to Yahoo! Query Language, YUI, Hadoop and our Pattern Library in just one click, as well as get support from our forum. We also made some of the descriptions and names a little clearer. For instance, now you don't need any inside knowledge to know that YAP is our apps platform (Yahoo! Application Platform).

In case you were wondering, these changes are based on the results of a usability study done here at Yahoo! We invited some developers, some YDN users and some not, into the Yahoo! office here in Silicon Valley and watched them use the site through a 2-way mirror in our usability lab. We learned quite a bit from the exercise and are using the findings to make some site design decisions. The participants did know they were being spied on of course.

Bugs, bugs and more bugs

Last but not least, the YDN engineers closed a plethora of bugs (over 100). These ranged from resolving browser compatibility issues, to fixing incorrect 'new message' counts on the forum, to performance optimizations on the 'My Projects' dashboard. We'll continue to fix bugs each release.

Coming Up

The eagled-eyed amongst you may already know this, as YAP developers should see a module entitled Spring 2010. Yahoo! to introduce support for OpenSocial 0.9 on their 'My Projects' details page. We are currently working on supporting the OpenSocial gadget XML spec in YAP. This upgrade means soon you will be able to modify your application via a gadget XML file hosted on your server, rather than having to enter all your app meta-data into a form. Once deployed, you'll also be able to take full advantage of the OpenSocial APIs and increase your application's portability to other OpenSocial-compliant containers.

Suggestions? Please let us know what you think in the comments.

Matthew Lock
Product Manager
YDN
#yui-main ul,#yui-main li{list-style:square;}#yui-main ul{margin-left:1em;}

Setting up voice and video in Yahoo! Messenger 10

2010-03-09T20:44:48+00:00

If you’ve upgraded to Yahoo! Messenger 10 or got a new webcam recently, chances are you’ll want to try out the high-quality voice and video call features.

As a first step, we recommend that you complete the “Voice and Video Setup” steps to ensure that your microphone, speakers/headphones, and webcam are working properly.

To get started, click on the Messenger menu and select “Preferences”. When the Preferences window opens, click “Video & Voice” on the left hand menu. This will bring up your options on the right hand side:

If you know immediately which devices you want Yahoo! Messenger to use for your camera, microphone etc., just select them in the drop down menu. Depending on your type of computer and other software or hardware you have installed, you may only have one or many options available.

For a guided setup, click the “Open Voice and Video Setup” link in the Preferences window. This will take you through three setup steps where you can select the devices you want to use for your microphone, speakers/headset and webcam. After selecting each one in the setup, you’ll be able to test and confirm they are working.

Once you’ve successfully completed the Voice and Video Setup steps, you’ll be ready to start making free PC-to-PC calls, full-screen video calls and even calls from Messenger to regular and mobile phones (premium account required). You can also click the “Place a free test call” link in the Preferences window to try out the voice feature.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

YUI Theater — Douglas Crockford: “Crockford on JavaScript — Episode IV: The Metamorphosis of Ajax” (93 min.)

2010-03-09T20:40:38+00:00

Last week, Yahoo! JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford delivered the fourth installment of his Crockford on JavaScript series:

Volume One: The Early Years
Chapter 2: And Then There Was JavaScript
Act III: Function the Ultimate
Episode IV: The Metamorphosis of Ajax
Part V: The End of All Things (March 31 — RSVP)

In this session, Douglas tackles the DOM. On the one hand there was JavaScript, he says, and JavaScript is “what made the browser work.”

On the other hand, there was the Document Object Model, also known affectionately as the DOM. It is what most people hate when they say they hate JavaScript. Most of the people who say they hate JavaScript don’t know JavaScript, might have never seen JavaScript, but they’ve felt the DOM alright. If you don’t know what the difference is and you say, “JavaScript is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” you’re not talking about JavaScript, you’re talking about the DOM. The DOM is the browser’s API. It is the interface. It provides JavaScript for manipulating documents.

The DOM may be imperfect, but it’s nonetheless crucial to what frontend engineers do when they write web applications. In this talk, Douglas provides an overview, situated historically, of where the DOM came from, how it achieved ascendance with Ajax, and what the future might hold. In Douglas’s inimitable fashion, this history starts with Sir John Harrington and takes us up to the present day. A few choice words for CSS are among the many applause lines for veteran developers:

I find within the community of people who use CSS great affection for it. They’re totally invested in CSS, they love it. They can’t imagine any other way of doing formatting in a document. It’s it. It’s sort of like watching an episode of Cops where the cops come in and break up the family dispute, and there’s this “CSS ain’t bad, you just don’t understand it like I do. I know it hurts me, but I make mistakes, I’m wrong.” CSS is awful, and it amazes me the way people get invested in it. It’s like once you figure it out, kind of go “oh, OK, I see how I might be able to make it work,” then you flip from hating it to loving it, and despising anybody who hasn’t gone through what you’ve gone through. It doesn’t make sense to me.

If the video embed below doesn’t show up correctly in your RSS reader of choice, be sure to click through to watch the high-resolution version of the video on YUI Theater.

Subscribing to YUI Theater:

Online Video Analytics – An Introduction

2010-03-09T20:21:35+00:00

In recent years the Internet has seen an explosion in the use of streaming video. This has simplified the process of getting video to consumers as well as giving content providers the opportunity to measure the consumer’s engagement. Online Video Analytics allows for content providers to quantify user engagement in new ways that should help them measure returns on their video investments.

Essential Online Video Metrics

If you host videos using your own flash player (or stream through Windows Media Player) then many different user activities can be recorded for analytics purposes, such as pressing the pause button or sliding the video position slider bar forwards or backwards.

Some of the key video metrics (or KPIs) are:

Online video started
Online video core content started
Online video positive consumption action
Online negative consumption action
Online video paused
Online video ended
Online video played, percentage of total
Online video played, total seconds
Online video play position slider user action
Online video section played at 1st, 2nd through to last tenth section
Online video time section played: 1st, 2nd 10 and last 10 seconds, etc…

These can be measured using a combination of media player events, methods, timer events and tracking code written in JavaScript or Adobe ActionScript.

Video Segmentation

For the purpose of making measurements we can choose to conceptually split the video into a fixed number of sections, say 10 segments of 10% length. These segments can be used to measure which sections of a video have particular high end user engagement activity.

We can also define another way of splitting the video into slots, where in this second method, we can choose a fixed lot length in time of say, 10 seconds “time sections” or “time slots”. These can be used to measure engagement in terms of fixed time slots of 10 seconds length. This type of measurement can also show the total playing time of groups or individual videos.

We can further group the videos into categories such as chapters, channels (yahoo, msn, etc..), types (sports, sci-fi, etc..) or any other categorization the publisher may wish to use for analytics purposes.

Video Engagement Characteristics

A video engagement characteristic is a representation of the audience’s interactions with the video. Content providers can use this characteristic to rapidly see which of their videos are most compelling to their audience. It can also be used to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a particular video.

For the engagement characteristics we will define two types of audience video consumption:

Positive Consumption Actions

Negative Consumption Actions

Positive consumption actions are ones that associated with a positive user experience. One positive consumption action could be the act of rewinding the video to re-watch a specific section. This indicates that the user saw something that they want to see again. Therefore each time an end user rewinds the video a positive consumption action is recorded for the section that is rewinded to.

We can also decide that certain activities constitute a negative consumption action. One such example can be the act of fast-forwarding the video (or moving the slider bar) to a position further forward in a video. This can indicate that the audience is bored with the current section they are fast-forwarding from, and so for this case of fast forward, we use the section of video moved from, and not the video section moved to, as the grouping for negative consumption action.

The positive consumption action reported by the analytics system then be used indicate which sections of a video are particularly compelling. Conversely the negative consumption action sections can be removed, reworked or edited to make them more positive.

Videos and Links

Another type of video analytics could be a correlation between video sections and clicks to links for product information.

It could be deemed useful to measure at which stages in a video your audience was compelled to actively seek extra textual information sales or specification information about a product. This may also be considered as positive consumption as it shows active interest in the product, and such data can be gathered about audience behavior.

Conclusion

We’ve just scratched the surface of the types of data content providers can mine from their online videos and why it can be useful. In our next post we will show the nuts and bolts of how to implement online video analytics using Yahoo! Web Analytics.

Video: What’s Next for Yahoo! Search?

2010-03-09T19:49:45+00:00

David Pann talks about customer migration and continuing search innovation

How will the search agreement with Microsoft affect Yahoo! advertisers and products? David Pann, VP and general manager of search advertising, told WebProNews Video that the deal is “a win for advertisers with a single buy getting access to more inventory, it’s a win for consumers for a greater relevance, and it’s a win for consumers and publishers since they have greater access to a new set of participation and inventory.” For more from David, watch the video below.

More WebProNews Videos

—The Team

Advanced search update

2010-03-09T19:45:55+00:00

Following our changes to the Search experience on Answers last week we received a lot of feedback from you, the community, around the changes we made.

Advanced search changes

We’ve reacted to your feedback to make a few additional changes that now allow you to add parameters to the URL, to allow you to better sort your search result. In order to do this, here are the bits of code you’ll need to add to the end of your URL to sort your results:

&orderby=+date (to sort by most recent)

&orderby=-date (to sort by oldest)

For example a search for “dogs” produces this URL: http://answers.yahoo.com/search/search_result?p=dogs

If you want to sort by the most recent results, simply add “&orderby=+date” to the end of the URL: http://answers.yahoo.com/search/search_result?p=dogs&orderby=+date

We will look to add these filters within the page itself over the coming months.

In addition, we heard from the community that search terms within quotation marks (”and”) were returning no results. We’ve adjusted the system so that this no longer is the case, and “and” now produces results.

Additional changes

Last but not least, we’ve also taken this opportunity to fix some other bugs on the site:

For Internet Explorer users we’ve fixed the layout issue on the Ask/Answer/Discover banner
We have also made changes to content deletion. Previously, when you deleted your question or answer, it was still showing in the public view of your profile page. From now on when you delete a question or answer, it will be entirely removed from your public profile page

Thanks for your continued feedback on our latest release, and, for helping to improve Yahoo! Answers!

Open Hack Day Southeast Asia, and more!

2010-03-09T19:43:36+00:00

On November 21, 2009 we kicked off Yahoo's! first ever Open Hack in Southeast Asia. We held this inaugural event in Jakarta, and since this event, I have had numerous trips to Jakarta and decided it was time to summarize some of this activity. For an event recap including the list of winners go here.

YDN Indonesia

One of the things we realized since Open Hack Day, was that we needed a way to stay in contact with Indonesian developers. Our Facebook page, for YDN Indonesia, will list all our events for the region. Please join and feel free to add any suggestions on the page. Two events we're planning now, are still tentative, but we'd love your feedback. We know we want to have an event as soon as the new IDC is opened. And, Barcamp Indonesia is coming up as well, but there is not a date set. We'll keep you posted on both events.

If you have any questions or would like to speak to someone about developer activities in Indonesia or Asia Pacific region please leave a comment on this post, or on the Facebook page, and I will follow up with you ASAP.

Partners

Open Hack Day gave us an opportunity to build relationships with a variety of partners. Below are a few integrations that might interest you.

Kaskus

Kaskus is the largest Indonesian community site and recently implemented the Yahoo! login and will be working with us to integrate Yahoo! Updates into their commenting system. Thanks to the Kaskus team for working making it happen and congratulations on your astronomic growth!

Urbanesia

Urbanesia is a lifestyle and city directory for Jakarta. We meet them at Open Hack Day and their team have been implementing tons of stuff from Yahoo!. They've already integrated Yahoo! login and SearchMonkey, and they are one of the first partners in Indonesia to expose their interfaces via YQL! We are excited to work with Urbanesia to extend their platform via YQL and hope it is a leading example for other partners in Indonesia.

Koprol

Koprol presented at Open Hack Day, and at the time had already implemented the Yahoo! login and FireEagle. Now, they are focusing on adding Yahoo! Updates, Mim (Meme) support, and a YAP app. For the latest on Koprol check their blog.

If you are a partner or website in Indonesia and would like to alert us to your integration work with Yahoo! please leave a comment on this post and we will get back to you.

Thanks for supporting Yahoo! in Indonesia and stay tuned for more events!

Michael Smith Jr.
follow me here or here

Tornado Touches Down in Oklahoma

2010-03-09T19:34:15+00:00

by Mike Krumboltz

A tornado hit western Oklahoma on Monday, leveling five homes and a county-owned barn. Additionally, several more houses lost their roofs to the twister.

Fortunately, no people were injured in the destruction, largely thanks to the tornado skirting the center of the town of Hammon. According to an AP article from USA Today, a group of "storm chasers" saw the tornado well before it reached town limits. Thanks to them, the citizens had plenty of warning.

Below, a clip of Monday's tornado. But beware — it's rather terrifying to watch, even from the safety of your computer. Hell hath no fury like a "violently rotating column of air in contact with the earth’s surface."

Kathy Griffin's Comedy, Natalie Wood's Case, Jennifer Aniston's Scent: What's the Buzz

2010-03-09T18:50:19+00:00

by Claudine Zap

Our top picks from the day's hottest searches.

Natalie Wood (Searches increased by +3,606%). Her sister and a yacht captain want the case of the drowned actress to be reopened.
Kathy Griffin (+2,940%). Watch out, Sarah Palin: The "Life on the D-List" comedian has taken her show to Alaska. Let the skewering begin.
Joe Biden (+2,541%). The U.S. VP helped kick off a new phase of peace talks between Israel and Palestine.
Farrah Fawcett (+949%). Ryan O'Neal was "stunned" and "shocked" that the iconic 70s actress was intentionally left out of the Oscar tribute to departed stars.
Jennifer Aniston (+697%). The "Friends" star will be launching her own fragrance — just as soon as she settles on a name for her signature scent.

Best of Answers – Singapore

2010-03-09T10:36:35+00:00

Hi guys,

First, thank you for the valuable comments posted on the suggestion board about our new Yahoo! Answers home page. Thank you for your thoughts!

By the way, I found plenty of great questions today. These are the ones I really liked:

- Which laptop is better? Asked by Little
- How do I wash denim jeans correctly? Asked by Andrisnake
- I am looking for tennis coach around Orchard area, Singapore. Any recommendation? Asked by Eliza
- I am going on a Star Cruise for 2 nights to Malaysia from Singapore. Do I need a Malaysian visa? Asked by Starry

You may think these are pretty simple and plain, but hey, Yahoo! Answers is a place for everyone to share practical knowledge. We’re so glad that you’re asking about stuff that is relevant and interesting to Singapore.

One more thing. I’ve already uploaded these questions on top of the page, in a section we call “Best of Answers.” That way, the best questions we get more eyeballs! So please keep contributing and I will keep featuring great questions! If you want to know how I select the best questions, look here

Have a good day!

The Spark: Chuck Norris Rules the World

2010-03-09T08:01:00+00:00

Excerpt from "The Chuck Norris Catalog,"
for all your Chuck Norris needs
(Photo by raindog808)

Some say he was born in a log cabin that he built himself. Legend, perhaps, but the one sure thing is that his birth occurred on March 10, 1940, in Ryan, Oklahoma -- which makes him 70 years old tomorrow.

Who are we talking about? Chuck Norris: the man, the legend, the Internet phenomenon. How Norris grew from martial arts champion and movie star to the guy more or less in charge of the universe is unclear. Most sources cite Conan O'Brien's show, but how does a natural phenomenon like Chuck or an earthquake or a hurricane "start"?

In such a case as this, "facts" don't seem to matter; Chuck is. Any man who can count both Whoopi Goldberg and George W. Bush among his friends is truly a force to be reckoned with.

So who cares if he did or didn't count to infinity -- twice? All we know is that at the age when most men have settled into quiet retirement, he could still kick our ass -- and yours -- and anyone else's.

Suggested Sites...

Chuck Norris - Chuck's official site. Prepare to be awestruck.
The Chuck Norris Facts - just because they're either made up or hard to believe doesn't mean they're not true.
World Net Daily: Chuck Norris - Chuck's weekly column, with his... unique outlook on current events.
Kick Start Kids - building strong moral character in youth through martial arts.
Chuck Norris Karate Commandos - he rules the cartoon universe, too.

Directory categories: Chuck Norris, Chun Kuk Do, Martial Arts, Martial Arts Movies, Walker, Texas Ranger

Archived under: Actors, Birthdays, Celebrities, Entertainment, Humor, Martial Arts, Movies, Superheroes, TV, Westerns

Social media: Vital in the newsroom

2010-03-09T05:17:34+00:00

PROFILE SERIES:

Starting this week, we’ll be bringing you a step closer to the Yahoos who make stuff happen behind the scenes as well as guests from outside of the company to share their views on various hot topics.

Joey Alarilla, a prominent (some say famous) Filipino blogger and journalist who recently joined Yahoo! as our social media editor for Southeast Asia is our first guest. Read on to find out more about his new role and how social media is playing a critical part in the Yahoo! Southeast Asia newsroom as well as the upcoming Philippine Presidential election campaigns.

Welcome to Yahoo! Can you give us a brief introduction to yourself, for example, what were you doing before joining the company?

Prior to joining Yahoo!, I was the head of the Multimedia Department of the leading online game publisher in the Philippines, Level Up! My projects there included launching our live blogging and live video streaming services and producing/hosting a weekly online show for our community.

I was a tech journalist for over a decade. In 2000, I was one of the pioneer editors who spun off the leading Philippine online news site INQUIRER.net (then called INQ7.net) from the Philippine Daily Inquirer newspaper. As the multimedia editor, I launched the site’s blog network and online video service, while also hosting and producing several podcasts and editing the hackenslash gaming news site. I was also the founding president of the Asian Gaming Journalists Association and a tech blogger for CNET Asia.

Could you tell us what a social media editor at Yahoo! in the Philippines does?

As the social media editor, I listen and interact with the community, not just on Yahoo! properties, but also on other social networks. My job includes understanding and monitoring what’s trending on different social networks; engaging the communities on these networks to exchange ideas and get feedback; and sharing these insights with the editorial team and our content partners.

We are also looking for more user generated content and offering platforms for our users to have their stories covered by Yahoo! and their views heard and read by more audience.

Sounds exciting! Tell us more about the social media scene in the Philippines / Southeast Asia

The social media scene is quite vibrant not just in the Philippines but across the region. It’s becoming more and more mainstream, with celebrities, journalists, politicians, and other personalities becoming more active on social networks.

One of the factors contributing to the growth of social media is the increasing popularity of the mobile Internet. You could say that social media is starting to become the new SMS. When you see people typing on their phones here, they might not be texting, but actually posting status updates on their social networks, or chatting with other online users.

While Twitter and Facebook are gaining popularity in this region, Meme from Yahoo! has a huge fan base and growing very quickly. We have introduced themed Memes for comic book lovers and cosplay and anime fans – two popular topics in the Philippines.

Can you elaborate more on why you think social media has started to become a vital part for news gathering?

News organizations have to evolve to keep pace with the changing habits of their audience. Many Internet users, especially the younger ones, have embraced social media.

Their primary source of news is no longer newspapers, television or even online news. It’s trusted users on their social networks. That explains why you have a personal newspaper service like The Twitter Tim.es, which displays news and blog links from the people you trust on Twitter – you can even check out my personal newspaper.

Increasingly, social media users are “out-scooping” the breaking news teams from mainstream media. Social media is one of the key channels for delivering news and other information. In the Philippines, in the wake of the massive flooding caused by tropical storm Ondoy (international codename: Ketsana), Filipinos relied on social networks to keep themselves informed and coordinate relief and rescue operations. Through social media, different rescue groups were able to harness the spirit of volunteerism and encourage more people to help out the flood victims.

The fact is that news organizations that fail to adapt are in danger of becoming irrelevant. They can no longer assume that users will come to them, but must instead make sure their content is available wherever their users may be.

Due to different factors, some news organizations have been slow to integrate social media into the newsroom. I’m happy to say, however, that the situation is changing. Many news organizations in the Philippines and in Southeast Asia are embracing social media. This is a new and exciting frontier for many journalists, and Yahoo! will be here to help our media partners with our own insights based on our experiences and best practices.

During the recent social media forum in the Philippines, you discussed how social media is shaping the political landscape in the Philippines; do you think the candidates really understand the benefits/ use of social media?

Social media is generating a lot of hype in the upcoming Philippine presidential elections this May. Pundits are saying this will be the first Philippine elections in which social media will potentially be a game changer.

It’s good to see that many candidates recognize the importance of social media in their campaigns – no doubt inspired by the example of US President Barack Obama. What they have to keep in mind, however, is that social media is just one aspect of the campaign, and that their success will depend on how well they integrate it with their overall strategy.

The Obama team was able to reach out via social media but the crucial step was in translating this into actual grassroots support i.e, volunteers going door to door, and voters trooping out on Election Day. Social media is not a silver bullet. It’s not the be-all and end-all of a campaign, and if candidates become shortsighted, they might end up fighting an online popularity contest instead of inspiring action among their constituents.

Moreover, I would like to see candidates focus less on bombarding followers with their messages, and instead concentrate on interacting with voters online and listening to what they have to say. Social media is a conversation, and it’s a chance for voters to truly make their voices heard.

Empowering the voters through social media is the main goal of Yahoo!’s Purple Thumb site for the Philippine elections. We also held a social media forum, to examine the impact of social media on the upcoming elections. It’s all about the community – about putting the spotlight on what ordinary people have to say about the election issues that concern them most.

Social media is your chance to be heard. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

March Madness: get your bracket ready!

2010-03-09T02:27:59+00:00

Photo by GonchoA

Ahh, March. If you’re a college basketball fan, this time of the year means one thing to you: March Madness. For many, part of getting ready for the season means preparing your bracket, and getting your “picks” together. For some, this is all just fun and games, but for others, it’s a science. And, this science even has a name: “bracketology.”

It’s the science of picking winners and knowing who will be the last team standing in the end. Whether you believe in the science of it all, or, are just in it for the game, there are loads of resources popping up on the web this year making it easier for you to stay in touch with your fantasy picks and favorite teams, including Yahoo! Sports “Tourney Pick’em” fantasy sports bracket. (And, this year you can win up to a million dollars if you end up with a perfect bracket!)

Online selections open on Sunday, March 14^th and close Thursday, March 18^th, but you can start creating a pool of your favorite Answers friends, college buddies, or office mates now while you wait for the tournament field to be announced on the 14^th.

Or, if you’re looking to meet a few fellow Yahoo! Answers users who also love basketball, you’re welcome to join our bracket, found here.

Need some last minute tips and information on this year’s teams from Kansas and Kentucky? Don’t forget to check out the Basketball category on Answers in addition to the NCAA section on Rivals But remember– if you’re asking specifically about your fantasy picks, be sure to place your questions in the appropriate category: Fantasy Sports.

Good luck!

Anti-Gay Politician: I'm Gay

2010-03-09T00:30:57+00:00

by Claudine Zap

The California state Senator Roy Ashburn, whose arrest caused a frenzy of searches, has come clean. Not about his DUI. That was public knowledge, and he already apologized for his mistake. No, he admitted to what many bloggers and the rumor mill had already suspected: The anti-gay rights politician is gay.

To recap, the state senator was arrested in a state-owned car last week on suspicion of driving under the influence. Well, that was embarassing. But then reports surfaced that the politician, divorced with four kids, had been seen leaving a gay bar in Sacramento shortly before his arrest. What set tongues wagging and the Search box abuzz was the Bakersfield senator's voting record: consistently against gay rights.

The news caused Yahoo! searches on the state senator to skyrocket an astounding 224,400% in the last week alone. Queries also increased on "roy ashburn dui," "roy ashburn arrested," and "is roy ashburn gay."

Ashburn made the admission on a local radio show, then defended his voting record by explaining that it represented the will of his constituents — who live in the more conservative central and southern parts of the state. Still, this is taking voting against your interest pretty far. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Californian has one of the "staunchest records of voting against bills that would expand rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Californians."

The local news site Bakersfield.com reports that some bloggers have questioned if the Republican could have been blackmailed to vote a certain way, which he denied. Stay tuned.

Early Beta of Delicious Chrome extension available

2010-03-08T23:43:18+00:00

It doesn’t have all the API’s needed and it’s missing a good chunk of the functionality we believe it needs, but we’re getting so many requests for the Chrome extension that we’re going to make this available sooner than we originally planned.

The core ethos here was to create a light save and bookmark retrieval process that matches the no-bulk mentality that was taken with Chrome. There is no sidebar. If you click anywhere on the page while the Save frame is opened, it’ll disappear. Some error messages are missing. These are relatively minor issues, but ones we plan to address in the very near future. However, we do most definitely want to hear from you. What rocks, what sucks, what do we need to add and whats going to happen in the last episode of LOST? We’d like feedback on these in our forums.

To install the extension, click here using Google Chrome.

To give you some insight on how this extension came to be, here is the lead engineer Vivek to give you the background:

Yes. We are available on Google Chrome!

That’s true. Delicious has added a new add-on to its belt and that’s for Google Chrome. It’s been a marvelous journey being in the ‘recommended’ list of Firefox Extensions and enjoying the luxury of being downloaded by more than 5 million Delicious lovers. Now it’s time to catch up with the latest browser!

“This missing Chrome plug-in is the main reason I haven’t switched completely from Firefox.” – Delicious user

All the Delicious users who feel the same can now enjoy the availability of Delicious bookmarking on Google Chrome with this add-on. The Delicious add-on for Google Chrome was initially developed as a hack at one of Yahoo!’s in-house hack events. The story goes like this…

“I always believed the hack event is a great platform for developers to demonstrate their ideas that have potential to become a product. I wanted to take advantage of this platform and started by actively participating in the in-house hack events. In 2007, I presented a hack called ‘Delicious on Mobile’ and I could see the product m.delicious.com shaping up.

In 2009, I had a strong feeling that we needed to increase our presence so that we could reach out to a wider audience. So I came up with two different hacks, one of them was ‘Delicious Compact’ which was written in .NET Compact Framework and it would run on all the latest Windows Mobile Devices.

Secondly, I read about Google Chrome and thought let’s build an add-on for this new browser. Since the extension API was under development, I had to use the Dev Channel builds of Google Chrome to experiment. The add-on I developed was simple, just a Delicious button in the address bar (page action) which would open a new popup window containing the Delicious Bookmarklet with current URL information being prefilled.

I was lucky enough to have good Product support at Delicious who encouraged this idea and we started working on a full version of the extension. As the APIs were under development we had to wait until they became available to provide the best possible features for the Chrome extension.”

Sync your Delicious Bookmarks

Now you can sync your Delicious bookmarks in Google Chrome using the add-on. All you need to do is just login to Delicious and all of your Delicious bookmarks are there!

Get your Delicious bookmarks right there in Omnibar

Once all your Delicious bookmarks are synced up you will notice them popping up in the Omnibar. i.e. the address bar of Google Chrome. You don’t need to search for your bookmarks separately as they will come up when you start typing matching words in the address bar.

Bookmark with a button

Now you can bookmark a URL on Delicious just by clicking a Tag button present beside the address bar. You can share the URL on twitter as well as with your friends using the same Tag button.

Regards,
Vivek

Patterns: Tag Collection

2010-03-08T23:00:00+00:00

When I first started curating the Pattern Library, I put "tags" near the top of my list of user interaction patterns to investigate. By that time, Yahoo! had already acquired several pioneers in the tagging realm, Flickr and Delicious, and there were some subtle distinctions in how they implemented the experience.

We got down in the weeds on these and did a lot of research, ultimately settled on offering high-level guidance, and finished the patterns in the course of writing the social patterns book, where we filed tagging under the group of patterns known as Collecting, under Social Objects.

Tagging and other forms of collecting are also an example of social design patterns that mimic game dynamics. Collecting objects is a core "easy fun" activity in many games, and similarly these extremely lightweight social interactions around gathering or tagging objects enable a form of self-interested behavior that creates aggregate value and potentially richer forms of engagement.

Our three new tagging patterns are Tag an Object, Find with Tags, and the somewhat controversial Tag Cloud, which some people view as an "anti-pattern." Drop by, check them out, and let us know if we can make them any better.

Christian Crumlish
Curator, Design Pattern Library

A Tribute to John Hughes

2010-03-08T22:44:16+00:00

by Mike Krumboltz

It was a scene reminiscent of "The Breakfast Club." On stage at the Oscars was a brain, and a basket case, and a princess, and a criminal. Oh, and Macaulay Culkin, Matthew Broderick, and Jon Cryer were there, too.

At last night's ceremony, awards were given and speeches were made, but one of the most memorable moments came during the tribute to late writer-director John Hughes. Molly Ringwald (star of "The Breakfast Club," "Pretty In Pink," and "Sixteen Candles") and Matthew Broderick ("Ferris Bueller's Day Off") gave an introduction honoring the late artist. Broderick spoke of the fact that thanks to his Mr. Hughes, every day someone, somewhere comes up to him, taps him the shoulder and says, "Hey Ferris, this your day off?"

And then out came several more actors from some of Mr. Hughes' best known works. Joining Molly and Matthew on stage were Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Jon Cryer ("Pretty in Pink"), and Macaulay Culkin ("Home Alone"). With Ringwald, Hall, Sheedy, and Nelson together, fans of Hughes were thisdarnclose to having a full-on "Breakfast Club" reunion.

However Emilio Estevez, who played the high school jock in "BC," was notably absent. Though the Web searched en mass for the missing man, who is now known more for directing than acting, no official explanation was given. Perhaps wrestling practice ran late? Or, more likely, maybe he just didn't feel like going. A source exclusive to Yahoo! reports that he was at the Cornell Winery and Tasting Room in Agoura Hills, California, shortly before the ceremony.

But nevermind those who didn't make it. There were plenty of questions for those who did attend. From the looks of the Search box, many viewers were a bit jarred by Judd Nelson's surprise appearance. Searches on "what happened to judd nelson" and "judd nelson films" both roared to life. According to IMDb, the actor is very busy, thank you very much. He has a slew of films (or maybe TV-films) coming out in 2010.

The actual "look" of Nelson also inspired many searches. Sporting a shaggy goatee, tinted glasses, and what looked like a too-large tuxedo, Nelson definitely had a style all his own. Twitter was instantly abuzz. Some jokingly compared his look to that of a homeless man. A writer for EW wrote that "The entire crowd at the Elton John party just gasped at the sight of Judd Nelson." To us, he looked like he forgot to change out of his costume from "New Jack City".

Missed last night's Brat Pack reunion? Check out this clip from the ceremony and bask in the glow of the greatness of the late John Hughes.

Ladies' Night at the Oscars

2010-03-08T20:34:01+00:00

by Vera H-C Chan

It was ladies' night at the Oscars—and it wasn't just about the dresses.

Sandra Bullock's off-the-cuff charm, Mo'Nique's homage to a black female film pioneer, and Kathryn Bigelow's history-making win made No. 82 memorable.

Sure, the ceremony cranked out too long, and some critics cringed at the dance numbers (note to producers: Next time hire the choreographer from "Dancing With the Stars," not "So You Think You Can Dance"). And once again, Ben Stiller proved his ability to divide people into fiercely opposing camps. ("He's a hoot." "He's not funny." "He's a hoot." "Stuff him in a trunk and push the car down the hill.")

But with a double underdog vying for best picture (a war movie directed by a woman) and Bullock's savvy Razzie campaign, this year's awards show stirred up the most viewers in five years, and searchers came flocking as well. Some buzzy highlights (and maybe some suggestions for improvement), according to searches on Yahoo!:

Next year, get Bullock to host the Oscars, sans script. She got more online love than any other winner (and even blew past regular Search leaders Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga). People wanted to get updated on her age, wedding, bio, her mother (whom she thanked), and that Meryl Streep kiss. Better yet, just combine the Razzies and Oscars in one night.

Mo'Nique donned a flower in her hair and a royal blue dress, in a tribute to the first black performer to win an Oscar. Did people notice? Yes: Not only did she get the second-most Search buzz (after Bullock) and more buzz than all supporting actors combined, but she also got people to go online to look up "hattie mcdaniel" and "hattie mcdaniel biography," as well as "black oscar winners."

Bigelow has cemented her name in Oscar history and film books as the first female director to win in 82 years of Academy Awards shows. (Only three others have been nominated: Lina Wertmuller, Jane Campion, and Sofia Coppola.) And no one should call her The Ex anymore: She out-blasted former husband James Cameron's buzz.

Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" defused the competition for a big win, but the night also gave a big boost to indie "Precious": The based-on-a-book drama got more online attention than "Avatar." Part of the surge might well be due to the touchingly tearful screenwriter's acceptance speech. The winner was searched correctly and incorrectly as "geoffrey fletcher" and "jeffrey fletcher," but history will record him as the first black screenwriter to get a gold-plated statuette.

So who might the runners-up be? The Buzz countdown: George Clooney (in the best-actor category), Meryl Streep (best-actress category), Anna Kendrick (best supporting actress category), and Matt Damon (best supporting actor category).

Random low moment: There were quite a few duds according to critics, but the ridicule started before the ceremony with Kathy Ireland. The former model and brand name, responding to criticism about her stiff red-carpet interviewing techniques, is saying, no, she wasn't on meds. The mother of three might be a little more perturbed about this wondering question: " is kathy ireland pregnant?"

Follow Buzz Log on Twitter.

India Hadoop Summit

2010-03-08T20:23:58+00:00

The first India Hadoop Summit was held on Feb 28th, 2010 at DAYANANDA SAGAR EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS, Bangalore, in partnership with CloudCamp event. It was organized by Yahoo! Research and Development India in association with CloudCamp committee.

This was the first Hadoop event, of this scale, in India, and brought many Hadoop enthusiasts together. Speakers and audiences from Hadoop development community, Hadoop user-groups, Industry evangelists, university researchers and college students came together to learn more about using Hadoop in various environments.

The morning began with a keynote session “Hadoop and its impact in Computing” (slides) by Hemanth Yamijala from Yahoo!. Hari Vasudev, VP Platform Technology Group at Yahoo!, spoke on Yahoo!’s commitment to Hadoop and Open-Source (slides).

In the afternoon, a Hadoop panel followed several fascinating sessions. Some of the Hadoop sessions:

“Data Management on Grid” by Srikanth Sundarrajan, Yahoo! (slides)

“Machine Learning using Hadoop - Real Case Study” by Krishna Prasad Chitrapura, Yahoo! (slides)

“Multiple Sequence Alignment using Hadoop” by Dr. G. Sudha Sadhasivam, PSG Tech Coimbatore (slides)

“Benchmarking and Optimizing Hadoop” by Mukesh Gangadhar, Intel (slides)

“Challenges and Uniqueness of QE and RE processes in Hadoop” by Jayant Mahajan, Yahoo! (slides)

“Tuning Hadoop to deliver performance to your application” by Srigurunath Chakravarthi, Yahoo! (slides)

The ending panel was moderated by Basant Verma, Yahoo! The participants were Chidambaran V. Kollengode from Yahoo!, Dr. T.S. Mohan from Infosys, Jothi Padmanabhan from Yahoo!, and Dr. G. Sudha Sadhasivam from PSG Tech Coimbatore. They discussed a range of topics pertaining to Hadoop’s adoption, usage in research, and the future of Hadoop & Cloud Computing.

Yahoo! India also hosted a booth during the event, including a Hadoop cross-word puzzle and some popular Hadoop swag. Stay tuned to hear more about our continued commitment to Hadoop and to Open Source Technologies.

Preeti Priyadarshini
Program Manager, CCDI Grid Computing

#yui-main ul,#yui-main li{list-style:square;}#yui-main ul{margin-left:1em;}

Women of the Commons

2010-03-08T19:50:47+00:00

Stephanie Fysh has curated a wonderful selection of photos to commemorate International Women’s Day over at indicommons. Check out her post for more Women of the Commons.

Photo from the Library of Congress.

Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar Win, Iraqi Elections, "The Smurfs" Cast: What's the Buzz

2010-03-08T18:41:25+00:00

by Claudine Zap

Our top picks from the day's hottest searches.

Iraqi elections (Searches increased by +1,053%). Despite deadly bomb attacks, millions of Iraqis turned out to vote in their general election.
Kathryn Bigelow (+1,033%). "The Hurt Locker" director became the first woman to take home the Oscar.
"All About Steve" (+869%). The flop of a flick was all about Sandra Bullock winning the Razzie for worst actress.
"The Smurfs" (+669%). The little blue guys are heading to the big screen, reportedly being voiced by Katy Perry, Russell Brand, and Neil Patrick Harris.
International Women's Day (+267%). Today the world honors women's achievements. Yes, it really does take more than a day — which is why March also marks Women's History Month.

Free Email Marketing Webinar from Exclusive Concepts

2010-03-08T18:27:08+00:00

On Wednesday, March 31, at 12 p.m. ET / 9 a.m. PT, join Exclusive Concepts for "The Optimal Approach To Email Marketing," a free webinar aimed at anyone who is new to email marketing, or trying to improve the results of their existing program. If you’ve asked one or more of these questions, this webinar may [...]

Right on Target

2010-03-08T17:15:02+00:00

Case Study: Affiliate marketer profits by fully leveraging the targeting tools of Sponsored Search

Self-proclaimed “retired computer geek” Don Tuttle is a man who’s always tried to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to making money online. His current line of work, commonly known as affiliate marketing, involves using search advertising to send traffic to third-party companies, and when a sale is made, Tuttle gets a commission.

To do this, Tuttle uses all of the popular paid search providers, but he identifies Yahoo! Search Marketing as his favorite, primarily due to its powerful and more extensive targeting capabilities, and to the high quality of customer support. In a business where having access to key information about users—and then using it to reach the right prospects with the right message—is essential to making a profit, Tuttle shows that being bigger is not always better.

Using pay-per-click
In 2005, after a less-than-successful foray into selling items on eBay, Tuttle recognized a growing opportunity in the field of affiliate marketing, and decided to dive in. “I don’t own the products or the companies I promote; I’m more like a commissioned salesman,” he says. Tuttle keeps a close eye on his advertising expenses, to ensure that they don’t exceed the commissions he receives from the traffic that the ads generate. “I’m very bottom-line oriented,” he explains. “Cost-per-conversion is the metric I primarily use. And like a lot of people, I didn’t succeed at first, but once I got the hang of it, I’ve been very happy with pay-per-click advertising, and with Yahoo!.”

Tuttle uses all of the targeting options available to him in the Sponsored Search interface, but identifies geotargeting as the most valuable one to his account. “Yahoo!’s geo-targeting has enabled me to find areas that are hotbeds for what my ads offer, as well as those areas that don’t convert well,” he says. “Being able to stop my advertising in these low-performing areas has probably been the biggest factor in improving my ROI.” Tuttle explains that by picking each state and metro area independently, an advertiser can automatically get statistics on conversions by state and DMA, using the Yahoo! analytics tools.

The campaign scheduling (dayparting) feature has also proved useful to Tuttle’s business: “I’ve found that there are certain things that work better on certain days of the week and at certain times of the day, and once you figure that out it’s pretty consistent across all of the ad networks.”

Adding demographic targeting
Having covered the “where” and the “when” of the traffic he’s targeting, Tuttle also closely monitors the “who,” and makes adjustments to his bidding and ad copy accordingly. “One of the best features that Yahoo! has over Google is the fact that you can get demographic information from the account interface,” he says. “You can get age groups and the male/female ratios of the people searching on your keywords, and you just can’t get that on Google.” Simply by turning on the Demographic Reporting feature, Tuttle had additional options available to him in the Reporting section of the account to provide this transparency. When combined with the free analytics tools in his account, this data became much more valuable. “I was able to learn that although one of my sites was much more heavily trafficked by women, the male visitors actually converted better,” Tuttle continues. “Using this data, I’ve targeted the male audience more strongly by bidding higher for this traffic, and I improved my conversion ratio as a result.”

The Results
Tuttle praises Yahoo!’s excellent customer support: “My Yahoo! rep Justin Hill has been wonderful. I can spend over six figures a year with Google, and I still don’t have a rep. Justin creates campaigns, comes up with new ideas, and runs reports. The campaign results and incredible support have led me to triple Yahoo!’s share of my overall advertising budget.” With Hill’s help, Tuttle recently used the extensive targeting and demographic information to refine his campaigns, with outstanding results. “My expenses were getting out of hand before I did this,” he remembers. “But when I started making better use of geo-targeting, dayparting and demographic targeting, I was able to reduce my overall cost-peracquisition by 40 percent. Anything that improves the transparency of where my clicks are coming from, and what’s working and what isn’t, is pure gold.”

— The Team

Changes to Menu Items in Yahoo! Mail

2010-03-08T16:52:03+00:00

I want to let you know about some changes coming to some of the menus in the All-New version of Yahoo! Mail. We’re moving a couple of options to new places and renaming others. It’s all to make them easier to find.

The Mail Menu items are being reorganized and grouped together under ‘Actions‘ and we’re adding a new menu item called ‘Show‘. Here is a detailed look:

The ‘Actions’ menu changes are as shown here

‘Select’ choices have been added to easily select all emails or just the ones that you can view in your Inbox.
We’ve added ‘Sort by’ choices to give you better control on how you display the emails in your Inbox.
‘Print Message’ is changing to ‘Print Email…’
‘Filter Messages Like This…’ changes to ‘Filter Emails Like This…’
‘Full Header’ will now be ‘View Full Header’

We are also adding a ‘Show‘ menu that will allow you to view emails only from your Contacts or Connections. To view emails from your Connections, you will have to turn on the connection related features in Yahoo! Mail. You can find out how to do that in the next section.

There are also some changes to the ‘Options‘ Menu that is at the top right of your Inbox:

Here is everything you need to know about the new ‘Options‘ menu:

We’ve added a menu item labeled ‘Show’ – here you can show or hide the preview pane, as well as some of the attribute columns of your email list (attachments, size and flag columns). Don’t forget that using the ‘v’ shortcut key also shows and hides the Preview Pane.
‘Mail Options‘ is changing to ‘More Options…‘ – this is where you can enable/disable the Connection related features, set up filters, turn on your Vacation response and more.
‘Add Application‘ is changing to ‘Add Application…‘ – this lets you add Apps like ‘Attach Large Files’, ‘Edit Photos’ and many others.
‘Mail Plus’ changes to ‘Mail Plus…’ and allows you to enjoy the benefits of Yahoo! Mail Plus
‘Switch to Yahoo! Mail Classic’ is now just ‘Mail Classic…’ and lets you switch back to the Classic version of Yahoo! Mail

While that might seem like a lot, it’s actually organizing items so that they are much easier to find. And don’t forget about all the great keyboard shortcuts you can use in the All-New Yahoo! Mail. Some of these menu items can be done with one keystroke. Give it a try… Go to your Inbox and hit the ‘v’ key. Voila, you get the preview pane!

Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball ‘10 Named The Official Online Fantasy Game for MLB.com

2010-03-08T16:07:54+00:00

As Spring Training heats up, we are very excited to announce an exclusive deal with Major League Baseball making Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball ‘10 the official fantasy baseball game of MLB.com.

The co-branded Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball ‘10, will provide fans with the most relevant and engaging fantasy baseball experience on the Web. The combination of Yahoo!’s unmatched sports news and MLB.com’s in-game and post-game video highlights truly makes this the biggest and best game for passionate fantasy baseball fans.

Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball ’10 players can purchase MLB.com’s new Fantasy Highlights package, giving them the opportunity to watch customized in-game and post-game video highlights of their fantasy players directly from their homepage. The unique feature, combined with Yahoo! Sports’ leading online news and insights, will provide players with the most comprehensive and interactive fantasy baseball experience anywhere, taking fans beyond the box score to watch the performance of their fantasy roster as it unfolds on the field.

Additionally, Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball ‘10 will offer a new live online auction draft application and free live scoring, which gives fans the ability to view live stats and instant scoring for teams or matchups and get real-time league standings straight to their homepage.

Yahoo! is the partner of choice for content companies, working closely with major sports, entertainment, and media companies to deliver the world’s most relevant and engaging content to its consumers. The MLB is the third official league relationship we’ve entered into, with the NHL and PGA Tour fantasy games already leading in their respective online categories. And now, with the combination of Yahoo!’s unmatched sports news, MLB.com’s wealth of statistical research tools and never-before-available live video highlights at users’ fingertips, we know Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball ’10 will quickly become the hottest product serving the incredibly passionate fantasy baseball audience. Check it out for yourself!

Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball '10 Named Official Online Fantasy Game for MLB.com

2010-03-08T13:30:49+00:00

Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball '10 Named Official Online Fantasy Game for MLB.com

The Spark: Writing Wrongs

2010-03-08T08:01:00+00:00

If you want to write something truly
terrible, never edit your work.
(Photo by Nic McPhee)

For some of us, bad writing comes naturally. We can plant the seed of a verbal image, let it blossom into a beautiful metaphor, and then ride it off into the sunset. We leave no stone unturned in our quest to find more clichés than you can shake a stick at, and we need no assistance to effortlessly split infinitives. We don't let something as salubrious as a definition come between us and an ignominious fancy word, and we literally go crazy for adverbs.

But not everyone can mangle the language so dexterously. If you're an aspiring bad writer but you're still struggling to get past "it was a dark and stormy night," never fear. Many a ghastly writer has put ink to paper before you, and you can learn from their experience.

Before you take on a full-length work of unpublishable gibberish, you must first master the basics. Here are some tips to get you on your way toward writing laughable novels, maudlin poetry, sleep-inducing nonfiction, and generally unreadable prose.

- We no your two busy four things like grammer, spellling, and stile. Besides, proofreading is is soooo 20th century!
- Prepositions are exciting things to end sentences with.
- "Extra" punctuation is fun; and can really "liven up" a dull paragraph!!!
- A compendious thesaurus is your efficacious and duteous compatriot.
- Especially if you're writing science fiction or fantasy, don't hesitate to make up new words as flamdiforentiously as you like, and give your characters names like Vvzywk-aa'aklqy'a.

Once you've got the basics down, you're ready for a ludicrous, meandering plot (or none at all!), far-fetched (or two-dimensional) characters, and stilted, unrealistic dialogue. Now just keep going for as long as you want (if you get stuck, just stop wherever you are!), and then slap on a silly title. You'll be blessing the world with your art (and raking in the dough) in no time.

Suggested Sites...

Common Mistakes of First Time Authors - a lengthy list of things you shouldn't do while writing fiction.
How Not to Write a Novel - blog for the book that demonstrates 200 common novel-writing mistakes and how to avoid them.
Agents' Chapter 1 Pet Peeves - apparently the protagonist-waking-from-a-dream angle isn't too popular with literary agents.
How to Write a Bad Sentence - the building block for all bad writing, from novels to memoirs to textbooks to fan fiction.
How to Write Badly Well - Joel Stickley demonstrates a series of writing wrongs.

Directory categories: Creative Writing, Writing Workshops, Writing, Grammar, Usage, and Style, Writing and Editing Services

Archived under: Authors, Books, Communication, Literature, Wordplay, Words, Writers, Writing

Got Mail?

2010-03-08T03:04:54+00:00

From the Mailboxes <3 gallery by Violet Echo.

Photos by A Outra Voz, Pixmaniaque, David.Bridges, nihiels and Power RGB.

China’s Cyberposse

2010-03-07T09:28:54+00:00

Flickr Creative Commons | Toehk

by Tom Downey | New York Times | March 7, 2010

The short video made its way around China’s Web in early 2006, passed on through file sharing and recommended in chat rooms. It opens with a middle-aged Asian woman dressed in a leopard-print blouse, knee-length black skirt, stockings and silver stilettos standing next to a riverbank. She smiles, holding a small brown and white kitten in her hands. She gently places the cat on the tiled pavement and proceeds to stomp it to death with the sharp point of her high heel.

“This is not a human,” wrote BrokenGlasses, a user on Mop, a Chinese online forum. “I have no interest in spreading this video nor can I remain silent. I just hope justice can be done.” That first post elicited thousands of responses. “Find her and kick her to death like she did to the kitten,” one user wrote. Then the inquiries started to become more practical: “Is there a front-facing photo so we can see her more clearly?” The human-flesh search had begun.

Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results.

There is no portal specially designed for human-flesh searching; the practice takes place in Chinese Internet forums like Mop, where the term most likely originated. Searches are powered by users called wang min, Internet citizens, or Netizens. The word “Netizen” exists in English, but you hear its equivalent used much more frequently in China, perhaps because the public space of the Internet is one of the few places where people can in fact act like citizens. A Netizen called Beacon Bridge No Return found the first clue in the kitten-killer case. “There was credit information before the crush scene reading ‘www.crushworld.net,’ ” that user wrote. Netizens traced the e-mail address associated with the site to a server in Hangzhou, a couple of hours from Shanghai. A follow-up post asked about the video’s location: “Are users from Hangzhou familiar with this place?” Locals reported that nothing in their city resembled the backdrop in the video. But Netizens kept sifting through the clues, confident they could track down one person in a nation of more than a billion. They were right.

The traditional media picked up the story, and people all across China saw the kitten killer’s photo on television and in newspapers. “I know this woman,” wrote I’m Not Desert Angel four days after the search began. “She’s not in Hangzhou. She lives in the small town I live in here in northeastern China. God, she’s a nurse! That’s all I can say.”

Only six days after the first Mop post about the video, the kitten killer’s home was revealed as the town of Luobei in Heilongjiang Province, in the far northeast, and her name — Wang Jiao — was made public, as were her phone number and her employer. Wang Jiao and the cameraman who filmed her were dismissed from what the Chinese call iron rice bowls, government jobs that usually last to retirement and pay a pension until death.

“Wang Jiao was affected a lot,” a Luobei resident known online as Longjiangbaby told me by e-mail. “She left town and went somewhere else. Li Yuejun, the cameraman, used to be core staff of the local press. He left Luobei, too.” The kitten-killer case didn’t just provide revenge; it helped turn the human-flesh search engine into a national phenomenon.

At the Beijing headquarters of Mop, Ben Du, the site’s head of interactive communities, told me that the Chinese term for human-flesh search engine has been around since 2001, when it was used to describe a search that was human-powered rather than computer-driven. Mop had a forum called human-flesh search engine, where users could pose questions about entertainment trivia that other users would answer: a type of crowd-sourcing. The kitten-killer case and subsequent hunts changed all that. Some Netizens, including Du, argue that the term continues to mean a cooperative, crowd-sourced investigation. “It’s just Netizens helping each other and sharing information,” he told me. But the Chinese public’s primary understanding of the term is no longer so benign. The popular meaning is now not just a search by humans but also a search for humans, initially performed online but intended to cause real-world consequences. Searches have been directed against all kinds of people, including cheating spouses, corrupt government officials, amateur pornography makers, Chinese citizens who are perceived as unpatriotic, journalists who urge a moderate stance on Tibet and rich people who try to game the Chinese system. Human-flesh searches highlight what people are willing to fight for: the political issues, polarizing events and contested moral standards that are the fault lines of contemporary China.

Versions of the human-flesh search have taken place in other countries. In the United States in 2006, one online search singled out a woman who found a cellphone in a New York City taxi and started to use it as her own, rebuffing requests from the phone’s rightful owner to return it. In South Korea in 2005, Internet users identified and shamed a young woman who was caught on video refusing to clean up after her dog on a Seoul subway car. But China is the only place in the world with a nearly universal recognition (among Internet users) of the concept. I met a film director in China who was about to release a feature film based on a human-flesh-search story and a mystery writer who had just published a novel titled “Human-Flesh Search.”

The prevailing narrative in the West about the Chinese Internet is the story of censorship — Google’s threatened withdrawal from China being only the latest episode. But the reality is that in China, as in the United States, most Internet users are far more interested in finding jobs, dates and porn than in engaging in political discourse. “For our generation, the post-’80s generation, I don’t feel like censorship is a critical issue on the Internet,” Jin Liwen, a Chinese technology analyst who lives in America, told me. While there are some specific, highly sensitive areas where the Chinese government tries to control all information — most important, any political activity that could challenge the authority of the Communist Party — the Western media’s focus on censorship can lead to the misconception that the Chinese government utterly dominates online life. The vast majority of what people do on the Internet in China, including most human-flesh-search activity, is ignored by censors and unfettered by government regulation. There are many aspects of life on and off the Internet that the government is unwilling, unable or maybe just uninterested in trying to control.

The focus on censorship also obscures the fact that the Web is not just about free speech. As some human-flesh searches show, an uncontrolled Internet can be menacing as well as liberating.

On a windy night in late December 2007, a man was headed back to work when he saw someone passed out in the small garden near the entryway to his Beijing office building. The man, who would allow only his last name, Wei, to be published, called over to the security guard for help. A woman standing next to the guard started weeping. Wei was confused.

Wei and the guard entered the yard, but the woman, Jiang Hong, was afraid to follow. As they approached the person, Wei told me, he realized it was the body of someone who fell from the building. Then he understood why Jiang wouldn’t come any closer: the body was that of her sister, Jiang Yan, who jumped from her apartment’s 24th-floor balcony while Hong was in the bathroom. Two days earlier, Yan, who was 31, had tried to commit suicide with sleeping pills — she was separated from her husband, Wang Fei, who was dating another woman — but her sister and her husband had rushed her to the hospital. Now she had succeeded, hitting the ground so hard that her impact left a shallow crater still evident when I visited the site with Wei a year and a half later.

Hong soon discovered that her sister kept a private diary online in the two months leading up to her death and wanted it to be made public after she killed herself. When Hong called her sister’s friends to tell them that Yan had died, she also told them that they could find out why by looking at her blog, now unlocked for public viewing. The online diary, “Migratory Bird Going North,” was more than just a reflection on her adulterous husband and a record of her despair; it was Yan’s countdown to suicide, prompted by the discovery that her husband was cheating on her. The first entry reads: “Two months from now is the day I leave . . . for a place no one knows me, that is new to me. There I won’t need phone, computer or Internet. No one can find me.”

A person who read Yan’s blog decided to repost it, 46 short entries in all, on a popular Chinese online bulletin board called Tianya. Hong posted a reply, expressing sadness over her sister’s death and detailing the ways she thought Yan had helped her husband: supporting him through school, paying for his designer clothes and helping him land a good job. Now, she wrote, Wang wouldn’t even sign his wife’s death certificate until he could come to an agreement with her family about how much he needed to pay them in damages.

Yan’s diaries, coupled with her sister’s account of Wang’s behavior, attracted many angry Tianya users and shot to the top of the list of the most popular threads on the board. One early comment by an anonymous user, referring to Wang and his mistress, reads, “We should take revenge on that couple and drown them in our sputa.” Calls for justice, for vengeance and for a human-flesh search began to spread, not only against Wang but also against his girlfriend. “Those in Beijing, please share with others the scandal of these two,” a Netizen wrote. “Make it impossible for them to stay in this city.”

The search crossed over to other Web sites, then to the mainstream media — so far a crucial multiplier in every major human-flesh search — and Wang Fei became one of China’s most infamous and reviled husbands. Most of Wang’s private information was revealed: cellphone number, student ID, work contacts, even his brother’s license-plate number. One site posted an interactive map charting the locations of everything from Wang’s house to his mistress’s family’s laundry business. “Pay attention when you walk on the street,” wrote Hypocritical Human. “If you ever meet these two, tear their skin off.”

Wang is still in hiding and was unwilling to meet me, but his lawyer, Zhang Yanfeng, told me not long ago: “The human-flesh search has unimaginable power. First it was a lot of phone calls every day. Then people painted red characters on his parents’ front door, which said things like, ‘You caused your wife’s suicide, so you should pay.’ ”

Wang and his mistress, Dong Fang, both worked for the multinational advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. Soon after Netizens revealed this, Saatchi & Saatchi issued a statement reporting that Wang Fei and Dong Fang had voluntarily resigned. Wang’s lawyer says Saatchi pushed the couple out. “All the media have the wrong report,” he says. “[Wang Fei] never quit. He told me that the company fired him.” (Representatives for Saatchi & Saatchi Beijing refused to comment.) Netizens were happy with this outcome but remained vigilant. One Mop user wrote, “To all employers: Never offer Wang Fei or Dong Fang jobs, otherwise Moppers will human-flesh-search you.”

What was peculiar about the human-flesh search against Wang was that it involved almost no searching. His name was revealed in the earliest online-forum posts, and his private information was disclosed shortly after. This wasn’t cooperative detective work; it was public harassment, mass intimidation and populist revenge. Wang actually sought redress in Chinese court and was rewarded very minor damages from an Internet-service provider and a Netizen who Wang claimed had besmirched his reputation. Recently passed tort-law reform may encourage more such lawsuits, but damages awarded thus far in China have been so minor that it’s hard to imagine lawsuits having much impact on the human-flesh search.

For a Westerner, what is most striking is how different Chinese Internet culture is from our own. News sites and individual blogs aren’t nearly as influential in China, and social networking hasn’t really taken off. What remain most vital are the largely anonymous online forums, where human-flesh searches begin. These forums have evolved into public spaces that are much more participatory, dynamic, populist and perhaps even democratic than anything on the English-language Internet. In the 1980s in the United States, before widespread use of the Internet, B.B.S. stood for bulletin-board server, a collection of posts and replies accessed by dial-up or hard-wired users. Though B.B.S.’s of this original form were popular in China in the early ’90s, before the Web arrived, Chinese now use “B.B.S.” to describe any kind of online forum. Chinese go to B.B.S.’s to find broad-based communities and exchange information about everything from politics to romance.

Jin Liwen, the technology analyst, came of age in China just as Internet access was becoming available and wrote her thesis at M.I.T. on Chinese B.B.S.’s. “In the United States, traditional media are still playing the key role in setting the agenda for the public,” Jin told me. “But in China, you will see that a lot of hot topics, hot news or events actually originate from online discussions.” One factor driving B.B.S. traffic is the dearth of good information in the mainstream media. Print publications and television networks are under state control and cannot cover many controversial issues. B.B.S.’s are where the juicy stories break, spreading through the mainstream media if they get big enough.

“Chinese users just use these online forums for everything,” Jin says. “They look for solutions, they want to have discussions with others and they go there for entertainment. It’s a very sticky platform.” Jin cited a 2007 survey conducted by iResearch showing that nearly 45 percent of Chinese B.B.S. users spend between three and eight hours a day on them and that more than 15 percent spend more than eight hours. While less than a third of China’s population is on the Web, this B.B.S. activity is not as peripheral to Chinese society as it may seem. Internet users tend to be from larger, richer cities and provinces or from the elite, educated class of more remote regions and thus wield influence far greater than their numbers suggest.

I found the intensity of the Wang Fei search difficult to understand. Wang Fei and Jiang Yan were separated and heading toward divorce, and what he did cannot be uncommon. How had the structure of the B.B.S. allowed mass opinion to be so effectively rallied against this one man? I tracked down Wang Lixue, a woman who goes by the online handle Chali and moderates a subforum on Baidu.com (China’s largest search engine, with its own B.B.S.) that is devoted entirely to discussions about Jiang Yan. Chali was careful to distance herself from the human-flesh search that found Wang Fei and Dong Fang. “That kind of thing won’t solve any problems,” she told me. “It’s not good for either side.” But she didn’t exactly apologize. “Everyone was so angry, so irrational,” Chali says. “It was a sensitive period. So I understand the people who did the human-flesh search. If a person doesn’t do anything wrong, they won’t be human-flesh-searched.”

Chali was moved by the powerful feeling that Wang shouldn’t be allowed to escape censure for his role in his wife’s suicide. “I want to know what is going to happen if I get married and have a similar experience,” Chali says. “I want to know if the law or something could protect me and give me some kind of security.” It struck me as an unusual wish — that the law could guard her from heartbreak. Chali wasn’t only angry about Jiang Yan’s suicide; she also wanted to improve things for herself and others. “The goal is to commemorate Jiang Yan and to have an objective discussion about adultery, to talk about what you want in your marriage, to find new opinions and have a better life,” Chali says. Her forum was the opposite of the vengeful populism found on some B.B.S.’s. The frenzy of the occasional human-flesh search attracts many Netizens to B.B.S.’s, but the bigger day-to-day draw, as in Chali’s case, is the desire for a community in which people can work out the problems they face in a country where life is changing more quickly than anyone could ever have imagined.

The Plum Garden Seafood Restaurant stands on a six-lane road that cuts through Shenzhen, a fishing village turned factory boomtown. It has a subterranean dining room with hundreds of orange-covered seats, an open kitchen to one side and a warren of small private rooms to the other. Late on a Friday night in October 2008, a security camera captured a scene that was soon replayed all over the Chinese Internet and sparked a human-flesh search against a government official.

In the video clip, an older man crosses the background with a little girl. Later the girl runs back through the frame and returns with her father, mother and brother. The subtitles tell us that the old man had tried to force the girl into the men’s room, presumably to molest her, and that her father is trying to find the man who did that. Then the girl’s father appears in front of the camera, arguing with that man.

There is no sound on the video, so you have to rely on the Chinese subtitles, which seem to have been posted with the video. According to those subtitles, the older man tells the father of the girl: “I did it, so what? How much money do you want? Name your price.” He gestures violently and continues: “Do you know who I am? I am from the Ministry of Transportation in Beijing. I have the same level as the mayor of your city. So what if I grabbed the neck of a small child? If you dare challenge me, just wait and see how I will deal with you.” He moves to leave but is blocked by restaurant employees and the girl’s father. The group exits frame left.

The video was first posted on a Web site called Netease, whose slogan is “The Internet can gather power from the people.” The eighth Netizen comment reads: “Have you seen how proud he was? He’s a dead man now.” Later someone chimed in, “Another official riding roughshod over the people!” The human-flesh search began. Users quickly matched a public photo of a local party official to the older man in the video and identified him as Lin Jiaxiang from the Shenzhen Maritime Administration. “Kill him,” wrote a user named Xunleixing. “Otherwise China will be destroyed by people of this kind.”

While Netizens saw this as a struggle between an arrogant official and a victimized family of common people, the staff members at Plum Garden, when I spoke to them, had a different take. First, they weren’t sure that Lin had been trying to molest the girl. Perhaps, they thought, he was just drunk. The floor director, Zhang Cai Yao, told me, “Maybe the government official just patted the girl on the head and tried to say, ‘Thank you, you’re a nice girl.’ ” Zhang saw the struggle between Lin and the family as a kind of conflict she witnessed all too often. “It was a fight between rich people and officials,” she says. “The official said something irritating to her parents, who are very rich.”

Police said they did not have sufficient evidence to prosecute Lin, but that didn’t stop the government from firing him. It was the same kind of summary dismissal as in the kitten-killer case — Lin drew attention to himself, and so it was time to go. The government had the technology and the power to make a story like this one disappear, yet it didn’t stand up to the Netizens. That is perhaps because this search took aim at a provincial-level official; there have been no publicized human-flesh searches against central-government officials in Beijing or their offspring, even though many of them are considered corrupt.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, argues that China’s central government may actually be happy about searches that focus on localized corruption. “The idea that you manage the local bureaucracy by sicking the masses on them is actually not a democratic tradition but a Maoist tradition,” she told me. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao encouraged citizens to rise up against local officials who were bourgeois or corrupt, and human-flesh searches have been tagged by some as Red Guard 2.0. It’s easy to denounce the tyranny of the online masses when you live in a country that has strong rule of law and institutions that address public corruption, but in China the human-flesh search engine is one of the only ways that ordinary citizens can try to go after corrupt local officials. Cases like the Lin Jiaxiang search, as imperfect as their outcomes may be, are examples of the human-flesh search as a potential mechanism for checking government excess.

The human-flesh search engine can also serve as a safety valve in a society with ever mounting pressures on the government. “You can’t stop the anger, can’t make everyone shut up, can’t stop the Internet, so you try and channel it as best you can. You try and manage it, kind of like a waterworks hydroelectric project,” MacKinnon explained. “It’s a great way to divert the qi, the anger, to places where it’s the least damaging to the central government’s legitimacy.”

The Chinese government has proved particularly adept at harnessing, managing and, when necessary, containing the nationalist passions of its citizens, especially those people the Chinese call fen qing, or angry youth. Instead of wondering, in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, why the world was so upset about China’s handling of Tibet, popular sentiment in China was channeled against dissenting individuals, painted as traitors. One young Chinese woman, Grace Wang, became the target of a human-flesh search after she tried to mediate between pro-Tibet and pro-China protesters at Duke University, where she is an undergraduate. Wang told me that her mother’s home in China was vandalized by human-flesh searchers. Wang’s mother was not harmed — popular uprisings are usually kept under tight control by the government when they threaten to erupt into real violence — but Wang told me she is afraid to return to China. Certain national events, like the Tibet activism before the 2008 Olympics or the large-scale loss of life from the Sichuan earthquake, often produce a flurry of human-flesh searches. Recent searches seem to be more political — taking aim at things like government corruption or a supposedly unpatriotic citizenry — and less focused on the kind of private transgressions that inspired earlier searches.

After the earthquake, in May 2008, users on the B.B.S. of Douban, a Web site devoted to books, movies and music, discussed the government’s response to the earthquake. A woman who went by the handle Diebao argued that the government was using the earthquake to rally nationalist sentiment, and that, she wrote, was an exploitation of the tragedy. Netizens challenged Diebao’s arguments, saying that it was only right for China to speak in one voice after such a catastrophe. These were heady days, and the people who disagreed with Diebao weren’t content to leave it at that. In Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, Feng Junhua, a 25-year-old man who on the Internet goes by the handle Hval, was getting worried. Feng spent a lot of time on Douban, and, he told me later, he saw where the disagreement with Diebao was going — the righteous massing against the dissenter. He e-mailed Diebao, who lived in Sichuan Province, to warn her of the danger and urge her to stop fighting with the other Netizens. “I found out that the other people were going to threaten her with the human-flesh search engine,” he told me. “She wrote back to me, saying she wanted to talk them out of it.”

The group started to dig through everything Diebao had written on the Internet, desperate to find more reasons to attack her. They found what they were looking for, a stream-of-consciousness blog entry Diebao posted right after the earthquake hit: “I felt really excited when the earthquake hit. I know this experience might happen once in a lifetime. When I watched the news at my aunt’s place, I found out that it caused five people to die. I feel so good, but that’s not enough. I think more people should die.” Diebao wrote this right after the earthquake struck her city, possibly while she was still in shock and before she knew the extent of the damage.

The group tried to use this post to initiate a human-flesh search against Diebao. At first it didn’t succeed — no one responded to the calls for a search. (There are hundreds, maybe thousands of attempts each week for all kinds of human-flesh searches, the vast majority of which do not amount to much.) Finally they figured out a way to make their post “sparkle,” as they say in Chinese, titling it, “She Said the Quake Was Not Strong Enough” and writing, of Diebao: “We cannot bear that an adult in such hard times didn’t feel ashamed for not being able to help but instead was saying nonsense, with little respect for other people’s lives. She should not be called a human. We think we have to give her a lesson. We hereby call for a human-flesh search on her!”

This time it took hold. A user named Little Dumpling joined the pile-on, writing: “Earthquake, someone is calling you. Please move your epicenter right below [Diebao’s] computer desk.” Juana0906 asked: “How could she be so coldblooded? Her statement did greater harm to the victims than the earthquake.” Then from Expecting Bull Market, the obligatory refrain in almost every human-flesh search, “Is she a human?”

Feng, the user who tried to warn Diebao of the impending search, became angry that so many people were going after Diebao. “I cannot stand seeing the strong beating the weak,” he told me. “I thought I should protect the right of free speech. She can say anything she wants. I think that she just didn’t think before she spoke.” But the searchers managed to rally users against Diebao. “Her school read a lot of aggressive comments on the Internet and got pressure from Netizens asking them to kick out this girl,” Feng told me. Shortly after the human-flesh search began, Diebao was expelled from her university. “The school announced that it was for her own safety, to protect her,” Feng says.

Feng decided to get revenge on the human-flesh searchers. He and a few other users started a human-flesh search of their own, patiently matching back the anonymous ID’s of the people who organized against Diebao to similar-sounding names on school bulletin boards, auction sites and help-wanted ads. Eventually he assembled a list of the real identities of Diebao’s persecutors. “When we got the information, we had to think about what we should do with it,” Feng says. “Should we use it to attack the group?”

Feng stopped and thought about what he was about to do. “When we tried to fight evil, we found ourselves becoming evil,” he says. He abandoned the human-flesh search and destroyed all the information he had uncovered.

Genealogy in the Commons

2010-03-07T01:51:05+00:00

People are discovering their relatives in photos from The Commons, the world’s public archives on Flickr. It’s fascinating to read the connections.

My grandfather Benjamin Franklin Metz b 2/21/1883, d 3/22/1954. Opening Day at the Polo Grounds, NY 4/10/1913 – Braves 8, Giants 0. This photo was probably taken within the next day or so, as others in this group have a date of 4/11/13 or 4/12/13 written on them. Game 2 against the Giants was played 4/17/13 at home in Boston. – pfmetz

Oh my gosh! How bizzare! Walter is my great great grandfather… – Patricia Snook.

Walter Brickett is also my grand grandfather too!! wow we’re related ,small world right! – Henry8362.

Hi Henry! Ha ha, we’ve just read your comment with the family recovering around the christmas dinner table, after a HUGE meal. My grandma is Walter Sydeny’s Daughter, the oldest son of Walter Septimus…. My grandmother is very interested, and amazed that you can connect so easily online! – Patricia Snook.

Sylvia Sweets Tea Room: My father, John Dayos started Sylvia Sweets Tea Room in the early thirties. He had worked for many years at Liggett’s Drug Store across the street as a “Patent Man” but after getting married in 1929, he soon decided he wanted to own his own business as so many Greek immigrants did. – soistaile.

Click through the photos below for more personal stories:

Try out a search of the Commons (or browse the photostreams of a particular institution) to see if you can have any personal connections there. You can share these stories with other members in the Flickr Commons group. We’d love to hear them!

Photos from the Library of Congress, Australian War Memorial, Smithsonian Institution and Swedish National Heritage Board.

Hello, India!

2010-03-06T17:33:43+00:00

It was back in June 2007, when we launched Flickr in 7 additional languages, localizing in 15 countries. Today, that number has grown to 22* with India being our most recent addition last December.

To celebrate, we’ll be hosting three regional events. Please save the date:

Delhi, April 16th Bangalore, April 21st Mumbai, April 23rd

Whether you can attend or not**, please share a photo in Hello, India!, a companion group for our events. As with our previous events, photos from the Flickrverse have been a highlight of the evening. The full details are available in the group.

Photos from $aintVikas, j.fisher and anu1243.

* Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Philippines, Singapore, Spain, United States, United Kingdom, and Venezuela.

** We’ll keep our fingers crossed.

Air Traffic, Sarah Palin, and Sony's Problems: Buzz Week in Review

2010-03-06T01:12:12+00:00

by Mike Krumboltz

Air travel is rarely eventful. And that's a good thing — the less exciting the flight, the better. However, this past week, flyers were given a bit of a jolt after hearing tapes of a child speaking with pilots over the control-tower radio. Elsewhere, former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin paid a visit to "The Tonight Show," where she did something unexpected: standup comedy. It was a weird, weird week in the Buzz, and here are some of the stories that made it so.

Cookie Monster Express, You Are Cleared to Land
According to various articles around the Web, an air-traffic controller working out of New York's JFK airport (one of the nation's busiest airports) allowed his children to radio instructions to the pilots. The air-traffic controller as well as his supervisor have been suspended, but not before the story blew the lid off the Buzz. Web searches on "kids in airport control tower" and "tapes of children talking to pilots" both soared sky-high, and maintained a holding pattern throughout the week. An article from the AP explains that this is only the latest incident in a disturbing trend: Poor judgment among U.S. air-safety professionals.
Find a job as an air-traffic controller.

Sarah Palin: Standup Comic?
OK, so maybe she wasn't as funny as Tina Fey, but you gotta give Sarah Palin credit for trying the toughest job in show business: standup comedy. This past week, the former Alaskan governor visited "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno." But instead of just sitting on the couch and gabbing, Ms. Palin took to the stage and performed Leno's opening monologue for him. Her jokes, which we doubt she wrote herself, weren't as cringe-worthy as one might have expected. Still, there are some who suspect that Jay Leno's staff "added both applause and laughter in postproduction" to make the appearance look like more of a success.
Look up Jay Leno's ratings for his first week back.

Sony, We Have a Problem
People love their video games. And when they can't play them, they get mad. Not quite villagers-at-the-end-of-"Frankenstein" mad, but definitely in the same ballpark. Witness the outrage that transpired this past week, when Sony's PlayStation Network went down. Millions of gamers took to the Web to look for the scoop on the unwelcome error code and to flood message boards with rage. Throughout the week, searches on "playstation error" and "playstation network error" both roared. Oddly, the problems seem to have been due to an internal clock error. According to The New York Times, "the error appeared as the date changed from Feb. 28 to March 1. The problem appeared to cause the date on the consoles to reset to Jan. 1, 2000." OMG, it's Y2K all over again.
Check out reviews for PlayStation 3 games.

Also buzzing this week...
• Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" opened to mixed reviews.
• LeBron James announced plans to switch jersey numbers. But why?
• Apple's mighty iPad gets a release date: April 3.

Follow Buzz Log on Twitter.

Planet Yahoo!

Tech Thursday - CSS3 please, Trojans via USB, IBM visualization engine and Mosaic source code

The Spark: Bad Boys and Bad Television

Lifetime bans from International Cricket

Farewell Corey Haim

"Mad Men" Madness

In the YUI 3 Gallery: Matt Snider’s Number Module

Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Update

An Epic Lawsuit Looms

Ad News and Views from Around the Web

Idol Talk: Seems Like Old Times. Really Old.

Consumer Recalls & Peace of Mind

Michelle Obama's Gown, Gabourey Sidibe's New Role, Census Jobs: What's the Buzz

Searching on the Two Coreys

YQL code samples: YQL is easy to use

Yahoo! Sports’ “Tourney Pick’em” Goes Mobile

2010 Yahoo! Sports Tourney Pick’em Offers the Thrill of Victory Across Multiple Experiences

Flickr on Black

Advanced search changes

The Spark: Saint Bix of Davenport

A tasty discount for Web Directions @Media 2010

Delicious ‘bookmark’ option in Yahoo! Messenger

Advanced search update

Chuck Norris Turns 70 -- And He Could Still Break You

Global Network Initiative Announces New Executive Director

Search Trends for Oscar 2010 at Yahoo!

Update: Advanced Search changes and more…

Your friend’s favorites

D.C. Joins Five States in Legalizing Gay Marriage

YDN 2.0 Site Release

Optional Domain Verification

'My Projects' dashboard

Create Consumer Key API

Forum improvements

New navigation bar

Bugs, bugs and more bugs

Coming Up

Setting up voice and video in Yahoo! Messenger 10

YUI Theater — Douglas Crockford: “Crockford on JavaScript — Episode IV: The Metamorphosis of Ajax” (93 min.)

Other Recent YUI Theater Videos:

Subscribing to YUI Theater:

Online Video Analytics – An Introduction

Essential Online Video Metrics

Video Segmentation

Video Engagement Characteristics

Videos and Links

Conclusion

Video: What’s Next for Yahoo! Search?

Advanced search update

Open Hack Day Southeast Asia, and more!

YDN Indonesia

Partners

Tornado Touches Down in Oklahoma

Kathy Griffin's Comedy, Natalie Wood's Case, Jennifer Aniston's Scent: What's the Buzz

Best of Answers – Singapore

The Spark: Chuck Norris Rules the World

Social media: Vital in the newsroom

PROFILE SERIES:

March Madness: get your bracket ready!

Anti-Gay Politician: I'm Gay

Early Beta of Delicious Chrome extension available

Patterns: Tag Collection

A Tribute to John Hughes

Ladies' Night at the Oscars

India Hadoop Summit

Women of the Commons

Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar Win, Iraqi Elections, "The Smurfs" Cast: What's the Buzz

Free Email Marketing Webinar from Exclusive Concepts

Right on Target

Changes to Menu Items in Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball ‘10 Named The Official Online Fantasy Game for MLB.com

Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball '10 Named Official Online Fantasy Game for MLB.com

The Spark: Writing Wrongs

Got Mail?

China’s Cyberposse

Genealogy in the Commons

Hello, India!

Air Traffic, Sarah Palin, and Sony's Problems: Buzz Week in Review