Planet Yahoo!

iPortrait

2012-02-06T10:39:29+00:00

Tablets make for a great weekend project! Have fun.

Photos from Buvone, tismey, Pichead, Jonathan Vazquez, • Andrei •, coreyweekley, and PBodyPhotos.
Idea from gregivu.

Y! Sports Blogger Predicts Patriots Will Win Super Bowl XLVI Rematch

2012-02-03T23:44:59+00:00

The big game is almost here, and Yahoo! Sports takes it seriously. Check out “Yahoo! Brings the Super Bowl to You” for details about all the special coverage Y! is planning around the big day.

If online searches are any indication of who will win this year’s game, the New England Patriots would come out on top – this year they had 50% more Yahoo! searches than the New York Giants.

Still, the Patriots are in for a real fight when they take on the Giants in Super Bowl XLVI. The Patriots’ pass defense isn’t what it was four year ago when these two franchises tussled in Super Bowl XLII, and Eli Manning is running a far more productive passing game. Tom Brady’s offense isn’t quite as explosive as it was four years ago, and the Giants’ pass rush is every bit as ferocious as it was back then. Also, receiver Hakeem Nicks and running back Ahmad Bradshaw will play in this game, and neither player was available in the Week 9 game won by the Giants, 24-20.

However, there are aspects to the Patriots’ game that set them up for victory in ways that were not evident in the last Super matchup. Randy Moss is gone but the Pats compensate for their lack of a deep attack with some of the best formation diversity in the NFL. Tight ends Aaron Hernandez and Rob Gronkowski are the main men in the Pats’ aerial attack, and when they’re on the field together, they’re nearly unbeatable.

Gronkowski’s ankle sprain has been a big subject since he was hurt in the AFC Championship game, but I don’t think “Gronk” will be most valuable going out on routes. Where the Patriots will need him is as a blocker – and with all the things the second-year man does well, he blocks better than any tight end in the game. Brady balked against the furious pass rush of Michael Strahan and Justin Tuck in XLII, and the G-men still have Tuck to contend with. Add in Jason Pierre-Paul and Osi Umenyiora, and it’s a handful. But Gronkowski blocked at a dominant level in the AFC Championship game, even after he was hurt. He could make the difference right there.

Brady will still have problems with the Giants’ defense, and if the Pats do win, I don’t think he’ll be the deserving MVP. I see defensive lineman Vince Wilfork, who has been as dominant as any defender in the game over the last few weeks, continuing his rampage through the NFL in the Super Bowl and picking up the award if the voters aren’t too quarterback-centric.

Could the Giants win? Without question, and that’s what makes this particular matchup to intriguing, These teams tend to play close most of the time, and if Eli Manning gets in a groove like he was against the Green Bay Packers in the divisional round, the Pats could be in trouble. But between their improved defense, their just-good-enough passing game, and a few new wrinkles in their secondary, I think New England exacts a measure of revenge for what was the biggest upset in the history of the Super Bowl.

Call it a flip of the Week 9 game – the Patriots will beat the Giants this time, 24-20.

Doug Farrar
Editor, Yahoo! Sports Shutdown Corner Blog

Photo: Getty

Ad of the Week: Gatorade on Yahoo! Sports

2012-02-03T21:35:11+00:00

Quench your thirst for rich media with Gatorade’s muscular custom pushdown video and wallpaper on the Sports front page

To promote its G series of energy drinks, Gatorade kicked off its Win from Within campaign in G-force style with a rich media custom (sporting) event front and center on Yahoo! Sports.
This ad is a triathlon of rich media athleticism: Wallpaper featuring opposing football players leaning into the 950 x 60 banner along the top while a 300 x 250 screen on the right shows one of several brief montages and taglines that Gatorade suited up for this campaign.

If you accept the banner’s invitation to “view commercial,” it pushes down to play a 30-second spot featuring all the athletes you could’ve seen in the right-hand box, while the earnest voiceover admonishes you that you only get out of it what you put into it.

The video player is bracketed by the G logo and a “How Do You Win from Within?” link that takes over the banner after the commercial, inviting you to sprint over to the G series section of the Gatorade site.

Like any skilled athlete, this rich media ad makes full use of the field of play, a digital canvas that provides the ideal arena for advertisers to flex their muscles in an interactive style that spectators could find nowhere else.

Click here to find your mettle.

– Thomas T. Lady

Editor’s Note: This entry was reposted from the Yahoo! Advertising Blog. For more information, visit their site, or follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Upgrade Your Life: Tips and Tricks for Managing Your Email

2012-02-03T20:55:41+00:00

Check out the latest episode of Upgrade Your Life on Yahoo! News where you can get the latest tips and tricks for managing your emails! Learn about how best to protect yourself from spam and bacn, unsubscribe from mailing lists, track all of your online purchase receipts, keyboard shortcuts in Yahoo! Mail and much, much more!

HTML5 Advent Calendar, Polyfilling, Game Theory 101, and more…

2012-02-03T17:43:22+00:00

HTML5 and CSS3 advent calendar 2011 edition.

19 creative computer animations to inspire you.

Polyfilling the HTML5 Gaps With JavaScript, slides from Addy Osmani's FITC talk.

Interactive CSS3 lighting effects.

Ember (formerly SproutCore 2.0) is a JavaScript framework for creating ambitious web applications.

HTML5 and CSS3 without guilt.

Animate.css is a bunch of cool, fun, and cross-browser animations for you to use in your projects.

Game Theory 101: Game theory made easy.

An introduction to object oriented CSS (OOCSS).

Learn almost anything for free at Khan Academy.

Deprecation of Y! Term Extraction API – Action required by non-YQL users

2012-02-03T17:42:39+00:00

Today we announce the closure of our Term Extraction service on YDN, which will happen on March 31, 2012. So, you have plenty time to make changes to your applications using this service.

Term Extraction has been a part of YDN since 2006 and we are glad so many developers have found it useful over that time. As we've noted on the Term Extraction product page the closure will take place over two steps.

First, we will close access to the API in favor of access through YQL. We encourage all existing users of Term Extraction to migrate to YQL requests. If you are already using the Term Extraction API via YQL, you don't need to do anything.

We will subsequently retire Term Extraction in favor of a more advanced API, also accessed through YQL, Content Analysis API. Once you have migrated your calls to YQL, those same calls will work with Content Analysis. Content Analysis includes many features beyond Term Extraction and we hope you'll try it out today.

AOL Chooses Right Media Exchange as Display Advertising Platform for Ad Agreement

2012-02-03T13:55:38+00:00

AOL has chosen Right Media Exchange as the platform to provide real-time access to AOL inventory as part of the display advertising agreement among AOL, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced last November. The inventory that AOL makes available under the agreement will be surfaced through Right Media Exchange across the U.S. and Canada. “We have had a [...]

The Eastern Hemisphere

2012-02-03T11:54:43+00:00

The Blue Marble 2012 photo that we told you about last week, had an amazing reception with more than 3.2 million views to date. That’s why NASA Goddard Photo and Video decided to create another Blue Marble 2012 view, this time showing the Eastern Hemisphere.

“The new image is a composite of six separate orbits taken on January 23, 2012 by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite. Both of these new ‘Blue Marble’ images are images taken by a new instrument flying aboard Suomi NPP, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS).” NASA describes in detail how the Blue Marble photos are created and shares more background information in this “How To” image uploaded alongside the new view.

Even topping the size of the previous view of Earth, NASA has uploaded the 132.25 Megapixel version to Flickr. From the large size you can click through to see the original 11500 x 11500 image on Flickr.

Photo and quote from NASA Goddard Photo and Video.

Safer Internet Day – 2012

2012-02-03T09:08:16+00:00

On February 7th 2012, Yahoo is joining forces with INSAFE to support Safer Internet Day.

Safer Internet Day is a major annual event, designed to promote safer and more responsible use of Internet and mobile devices among young people.

In 2012, Safer Internet Day’s central theme is to endorse good communication between all generations. “Every one of you, from age 7 to 77, from young computer whizz to old-fashioned granddad, and of course parents, teachers, institutions and anyone else out there in world of the internet can help to develop safer use of the internet for children and for all.”

This year, Yahoo! Answers Community Managers from across the world, are sharing their own tips for you and your loved ones when browsing the Internet.

And remember:

Play nice online, don’t cheat, never be rude or aggressive!
Send the right message and do it with care (your words could be misinterpreted).
Take a break and get some fresh air!
Take matters into hand and become an ambassador for http://www.saferinternet.org

You want to take part in this exciting event? Here’s how!

Learn more about online safety on Yahoo! Safely
Share these online safety tips with your family, children, friends through Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks
Watch the SID video clips 2012: watch it now!
Take part of SID, of course!
Share your own advice with the Answers community!

NOW IT’S YOUR TURN!

“Share with the community, connect between generations!” and answer the official question:

What is the most important advice you would give to someone using the Internet for the very first time?

The best answer will receive a bonus of 200 points and the 2^nd and 3^rd place answers will receive 50 points. The winning answers will be posted on the Blog when the question will be closed.

Yahoo! Search Trends: New England Patriots Rush Ahead of New York Giants with 50% More Yahoo! Searches

2012-02-03T03:00:35+00:00

As the nation awaits Super Bowl 46, people are heading to Yahoo! to get the inside scoop on one of the most popular sporting events of the year! Yahoo! searches this week for “Indianapolis Super Bowl 2012” are up 1,743%.

Who Will Win? If online searches were an indicator of who might win this year’s Super Bowl, the Patriots would come out on top – the New England Patriots had 50% more searches this year on Yahoo! compared to the New York Giants.

Brady vs. Manning: Whether it’s his endorsement with UGG or his relationship with Gisele Bundchen, Tom Brady has dominated searches this year compared to his NY Giants counterpart, Eli Manning. Yahoo! searches this NFL season for “Tom Brady” have been two times higher than searches for “Eli Manning.” Additional Brady vs. Manning searches on Yahoo!:

In the regular season, Tom Brady got four times the number of searches on Yahoo! compared to Eli Manning.
Since the post-season play has begun, Eli Manning has received slightly more searches on Yahoo! than Tom Brady.
Yahoo! searches for “Tom Brady and Gisele photos” are up 397% and searches for “Tom Brady baby” are up 1,109%.

Ladies Love Manning: This month on Yahoo!, women are certainly buzzing more for Eli compared to Tom. Yahoo! searches by women for “Eli Manning” this month are up 268%. And, speaking of love, the players’ love lives are certainly a topic of interest this month on Yahoo!: Searches this month on Yahoo! for “Eli Manning girlfriend” are up 1,201% and searches for “Eli Manning wedding” are up 308%.

Player & Coach Showdown:

This year on Yahoo!, Bill Belichick got over five times more searches compared to Tom Coughlin.

Yahoo! searches this month for “Bill Belichick” are up 730% and searches for “Tom Coughlin” are up 550%.

Offense vs. Defense: Does defense really win the game or is it more of a team effort? When it comes to Yahoo! searches for players, offense gets just as much search play as defense.This year, Rob Gronkowski received over four times the searches on Yahoo! compared to Hakeem Nicks.

According to Yahoo!, the top searched receivers this week are:

Kids Rush to Search: Of the searches for “Ahmad Bradshaw” this week on Yahoo!, 27% are coming from kids aged 13-17; however compared to “Brandon Jacobs,” this is a small percentage. Of the searches for “Brandon Jacobs” this week on Yahoo!, 52% are coming from kids ages 13-17.

Super Bowl Questions: From game time to point spreads, each year, people turn to Yahoo! for all of their Super Bowl related questions. Some of this year’s most searched questions on Yahoo! include:

Q: When is the Super Bowl 2012? A: Sunday, February 5, 2012
Q: What time is the Super Bowl? A: 6:30 p.m. EST (kickoff)
Q: Who is playing in the Super Bowl 2012? A: New England Patriots vs. New York Giants
Q: Who will win Super Bowl 2012? A: We’ll just have to wait and see!
Q: Where is Super Bowl 2012? A: Lucas Oil Stadium; Indianapolis, IN
Q: Who is singing the national anthem at the Super Bowl? A: Kelly Clarkson

The Fun Behind the Bowl: From parties and friendly wagers to commercial hype and half-time performances, for many Americans, the Super Bowl is about more than a football game – it’s about having fun!

Half-time Performers: Although Madonna will rule the half-time stage at the Super Bowl, searches for Nicki Minaj, who is also reported to be performing, this week on Yahoo! are slightly greater than those for Madonna. This year on Yahoo!, Nicki Minaj received 45% more searches than Madonna.

Dipping Into the Fun: Super Bowl parties typically start early in the day and continue well after the final whistle, and oftentimes involve snacking throughout the day. The snack favorite for many people? Dips!

According to Yahoo!, the top searched “dips” this month are:

Cooking Up a Win: In addition to dips, many people turn to Yahoo! to find a new recipe for the Super Bowl – searches this week for “Super Bowl recipes” are up 210%, with 70% of the searches coming from women. The top states searching for “Super Bowl recipes” this week on Yahoo! include: Missouri, Michigan, New York, New Jersey, and Florida.

According to Yahoo!, the top searched “recipes” this week are:

Quick Tip: On Yahoo! Recipe Search (recipes.search.yahoo.com), once you land on the search results page you can filter by “occasion” on the left side of the page and “Super Bowl” is a filter option. For example, the “Chicken recipe” search results filtered by Superbowl can be found here!

Commercial Laughs: Whether you’re a football fan or not, it’s likely that on Sunday you’ll at least spend some time scoping out the commercials. Searches this week on Yahoo! for “2012 Super Bowl commercials” are up 732%. From Bueller to Beckham, this is the one time when most Americans will be glued to their seats during the commercials.

Watch Super Bowl Commercials on Yahoo! Screen

With all of the excitement around the Honda commercial that riffs off of Matthew Broderick’s famed role in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, searches for the movie this week on Yahoo! are up 1,274%. Also of interest this week on Yahoo!: “Ferris Bueller commercial,” “Ferris Bueller quotes,” and “Ferris Bueller soundtrack.”
Additional Super Bowl commercials piquing interest in search this week include: “funny Super Bowl commercials,” “cost of Super Bowl commercials,” “top 10 Super Bowl commercials,” “Super Bowl commercial transcripts,” and “new Super Bowl commercials.”

Friendly Wager Anyone?: Yahoo! searches this week for “Super Bowl point spread” are up 591% and “2012 Super Bowl odds” are up 432%. Also, searches for “Super Bowl 2012 predictions” are up 836%. Of the searches for “Super Bowl bets” this month on Yahoo!, 78% are coming from men.

###

Quick Tip: Love Yahoo! Search Trends? Explore them for yourself on Yahoo! Clues.

What is Yahoo! Search Data?

Yahoo! aggregates the billions of searches performed every day across Yahoo! properties to give the pulse on what people are thinking and talking about. We sift through billions of Yahoo! searches to uncover trends, burning questions, popular personalities and hot ideas. Yahoo! has been extremely successful in sifting through searches for trend-spotting, historical insight, forecasting projections, and big-picture analysis. Billions of searches are conducted on Yahoo! each month.

Yahoo! Search Data on Twitter: @yahoosearchdata

Yahoo! Search on Twitter: @yahoosearch

Automatic identification of personal insults on social news sites

2012-02-01T22:29:26+00:00

Using Crowdsourcing to Improve Profanity Detection

2012-02-01T22:23:41+00:00

YUI: Open Hours Thurs Feb 2nd

2012-02-01T01:28:33+00:00

3.5.0pr2 is available

We deployed the second 3.5.0 preview release right on time, celebrated for a couple minutes, then went back to work on PR3, which will be the gating preview before 3.5.0 GA in mid-March.

But we’ll stop to take a breath and highlight some of the changes in PR2. You’ve read the short list on the release blog post, so join us for a little more detail and probably some live tinkering.

As is the case with all preview releases, we’re eager to get your feedback and any bugs you find. Or if you’re note yet convinced to give it a try before the GA, maybe we can convince you.

Recording

The recording is available in the YUILibrary YouTube channel.

Ask Mike: Black History Month

2012-01-31T23:01:24+00:00

Hey Guys,

February is Black History Month, a time for Americans to reflect on the cultural contributions African Americans have made to the United States. Some may be wondering how Black History Month became an official celebration. And why is it celebrated in February? Here’s the scoop.

Most history experts give credit to Dr. Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950). Woodson is commonly referred to as the father of black history. Carter led a challenging but amazing life. At the age of 19, he entered high school and completed his studies in two years. He then studied Greek and Latin, while working in a mine shaft. Eventually, he went to the University of Chicago, and finally got his PhD from Harvard University.

But what does that have to do with Black History Month? After founding the Journal of Negro History, Woodson was instrumental (read: it wouldn’t have happened without him) in organizing “Negro History Week.” Woodson chose a week in February as a way to honor the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln, who abolished slavery, and Frederick Douglass, the iconic civil rights activist.

Negro History Week became Black History Month during the 1960s. “No other single thing,” Woodson said, “has done so much to dramatize the achievement of persons of African blood.” According to AppalachianHistory.net, Woodson often remarked that “he hoped the time would come when Negro History Week would be unnecessary; when all Americans would willingly recognize the contributions of black Americans as a legitimate and integral part of the history of this country.”

Thanks for reading,

Mike

Joining Together in the Fight Against Phishing

2012-01-31T02:30:37+00:00

Today Yahoo! Mail and the email industry took a big, collective step towards helping end phishing. Phishing is when someone misrepresents their identity and sends you a fake email that is designed to look like it was sent by a legitimate institution. It is one of the biggest online threats today and it’s been a [...]

Introducing OurWorld IMVironment for Yahoo! Messenger

2012-01-31T01:01:44+00:00

Bring your virtual world to life with OurWorld IMVironment for Yahoo! Messenger! In this latest addition to the IMVironment suite, which currently includes Emoticats, Dilbert and Flickr, you can create your own styled avatar and chat with your friends in a safe, virtual space designed to reflect your personal style.

Create a unique avatar that screams YOU!
With a pool of over 30,000 items, you can uniquely customize your avatar with a vast array of virtual items, including clothing, accessories, hairstyles, and pets. Chat and dance the night away with your friends, while earning coins for new items. As you level-up your avatar, you get to unlock exclusive new features – it’s easy and fun!

Design your own virtual space
Your OurWorld Condo can be decorated with furniture items that can be sized and moved around within your new virtual home to your heart’s content. Hang out with friends, dance, chat, and play mini-games to earn new furniture for your Condo.

Launching OurWorld IMVironment
While chatting with your friends, click on the ‘IMVironments’ button on the top-right of the chat window. Simply choose the ‘OurWorld Condo Game’ icon, and in mere seconds, you’ll be chatting with your friend in your virtual Condo!

Check out the video here for a sneak peek into OurWorld.

Enjoy!

Yahoo! Messenger Team

YUI 3.5.0 PR2 Is Now Available

2012-01-31T00:28:25+00:00

YUI 3.5.0 Preview Release 2 has been released to the developer community for feedback and testing. It is now available on the Yahoo! CDN at yui.yahooapis.com/3.5.0pr2/build/yui/yui-min.js, or as a download if you plan to test it locally.

The rollup of 3.5.0 changes introduced up until PR2 is available on our GitHub Wiki. You can also review the list of tickets that were resolved in this release.

Work-in-progress user guides and API docs for 3.5.0 can be found on our staging site, but beware that these docs may be incomplete or even broken, since this is where we test new stuff. Official docs for the latest stable release can always be found on our production site, yuilibrary.com.

Some highlights in this release include:

New HTML5 File Uploader with Flash fallback
Major DataTable refactor. If you’re a DataTable user, please read the user guide for details about API changes.
CSS Button, Button and ButtonGroup modules
Many bug fixes and feature enhancements for App Framework components

To file bugs against this release, please visit our bug tracking system. If you’d like to provide input on these and future modules, the ongoing discussions on various topics relating to the 3.5.0 release are happening on our GitHub wiki.

We will release YUI 3.5.0 GA in mid-March. Happy testing!

Groundhog Day Storms the Web

2012-01-30T23:36:03+00:00

by Claudine Zap

Groundhog Day is almost upon us, when marmot meteorologists take over the weather report to answer the pressing question: Is spring almost here, or are we subject to six more weeks of winter -- and maybe more important, are rodents ever right?

Searches on Yahoo! have forecasted a storm of interest, including "what is groundhog day," "when is groundhog day," and "history of groundhog day."

The story goes that on February 2, if the groundhog (also known as a woodchuck) emerges from its burrow and sees its shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter. No shadow means an early spring.

The history of this now American tradition stems from pagan and Christian holidays brought over from Europe that looked to hibernating animals to signal the end of winter. The Germans used hedgehogs as their weather guides. In Pennsylvania, early American settlers found groundhogs, not hedgehogs, and the forecasting began in the new country with a new rodent.

Thanks to the movie "Groundhog Day," the marmot Punxsutawney Phil has reached celebrity status. The supposedly 125-year-old rodent, who gained fame in the comedy starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, boasts a Facebook page along with media hype.

So how accurate is the forecast from Punxsutawney Phil? According to the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, Phil's reading is 100% accurate, natch. But the National Climatic Data Center disagrees, noting that its research shows "no predictive skill for the groundhog during the most recent years of this analysis." The Stormfax Almanac concurs, judging the Pennsylvania prognosticator to be correct a not-very-impressive 39% of the time.

But perhaps that's not all that surprising: As the Christian Science Monitor points out, no weather forecaster would dare deliver predictions further than a few days out. And they've got high-tech gadgets at their fingertips.

But in this case, tradition rules, and across the country, reasonable people turn to rodents for their weather report -- and the results can be unpleasant. The most infamous groundhog has to be Staten Island Chuck, who gained notoriety for biting New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg a few years back. Other groundhogs emerge on the day to make their own, possibly contradictory, predictions: The Huffington Post tracked down lesser-known furry mammals who forecast.

Groundhog or no, the first day of spring is officially March 20, and it can't come soon enough.

The Yahoo! Answers App for Android is Retiring

2012-01-30T11:10:19+00:00

It’s no surprise; mobile is getting bigger and bigger in the online world. Over a year ago, we introduced the mobile-optimized version of Yahoo! Answers, which is proving to be extremely successful amongst users on any device.

To make things easier for Android users, we developed an app that offered the Yahoo! Answers mobile experience outside the browser, available at a single tap. However, we noticed that most of our mobile users still access the site directly from their browsers. As a result, we decided to focus our resources in building better core experiences for Yahoo! Answers across devices. Effective today, we are retiring the app for Android, but don’t worry: you can continue accessing the mobile version of Yahoo! Answers by visiting answers.yahoo.com from your favorite browser.

We’re working hard to deliver new features that will make Yahoo! Answers more relevant and personalized. Stay tuned!

The Yahoo! Answers App for Android is retiring

2012-01-28T00:18:13+00:00

It’s no surprise, mobile is getting bigger and bigger in the online world. Over a year ago, we introduced the mobile-optimized version of Yahoo! Answers, which is proving to be extremely successful amongst users on any device.

To make things easier for Android users, we developed an app that offered the Yahoo! Answers mobile experience outside of the browser. However, we noticed that most of our mobile users still access the site directly from their browsers. As a result, we decided to focus our resources in building better core experiences for Yahoo! Answers across devices. Effective today, we are retiring the app for Android, but don’t worry: you can still access the mobile version of Yahoo! Answers by visiting answers.yahoo.com from your favorite browser. Or if you already have the Android app downloaded, you’ll still be able to use it.

Thanks for reading,

The Yahoo!7 Answers App for Android is retiring

2012-01-27T23:51:20+00:00

It’s no surprise, mobile is getting bigger and bigger in the online world. Over a year ago, we introduced the mobile-optimised version of Yahoo!7 Answers, which is proving to be extremely successful amongst users on any device.

To make things easier for Android users, we developed an app that offered the Yahoo!7 Answers mobile experience outside of the browser. However, we noticed that most of our mobile users still access the site directly from their browsers. As a result, we decided to focus our resources in building better core experiences for Yahoo!7 Answers across devices. Effective today, we are retiring the app for Android, but don’t worry: you can still access the mobile version of Yahoo!7 Answers by visiting au.answers.yahoo.com OR nz.answers.yahoo.com from your favourite browser. Or if you already have the Android app downloaded, you’ll still be able to use it.

Thanks for reading,

Kate
Community Manager

Lego Man in Space Moves the Web

2012-01-27T20:46:58+00:00

by Claudine Zap

Two teens from Toronto successfully launched a Lego figure into near space -- and launched a storm of interest on the Web.

Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, 17-year-old classmates at Agincourt Collegiate Institute, took four months, many Saturdays, and $400 to carry a Lego figurine and four cameras miles above the earth, a project that the two did for fun, not for class.

"We didn't really believe we could do it until we did," Ho told the Toronto Star. You can see the video they made, using the stunning photos of the Lego man 78,000 feet off the ground, here.

The video of the Lego man in near space has gone viral, with 570,000 views and counting. Searches on Yahoo! for "lego man in space" have soared 325% in just one day.

The high school students, both seniors, were inspired by a video of a similar project undertaken by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The DIY contraption included a GPS locator so the students could track the weather balloon (a professional-grade one they purchased online) once it landed. Using a website that calculates a weather balloon's landing position based on coordinates and variables like wind speed, the two waited to launch the object until the timing was right for a Canadian landing.

The video shows the two-inch high LEGO man holding a Canadian flag flying high above Earth and the clouds, until the tilt of the earth's axis can be seen. And then the balloon pops, sending the Lego guy back to the ground in a mere 32 minutes.

Ho and Muhammad may still be walking on air with all the accolades they've received for their successful project. The teens have been offered cameras from Canon and asked to speak at an engineering competitions, and they've been given funds to cover the cost of the project. Even Lego sent its congratulations.

Not bad for two kids who haven't even found out yet where they're going to college.

The Times They Are a Changing…and These Apps They are A-Going

2012-01-27T20:15:27+00:00

As all of you know, the mobile space moves incredibly fast. Our users are changing, and their needs are changing. New devices and new technologies are coming to market seemingly every day, not to mention the rate at which app stores are growing. All of us are looking for the freshest, most interesting apps and content all day, every day.

At Yahoo!, we’re focused on creating deeply personal digital experiences and there’s no doubt that one of the biggest, if not the biggest, priorities for us is to bring those products and ideas to the mobile user, whether they’re using feature phones, smartphones or tablets.

We’ve got some amazing mobile experiences, from News, Sports and Finance, to Mail, Messenger and entirely new products like IntoNow and Livestand. Our commitment is to deliver these products in ways that help all of our users (and advertisers) enjoy engaging and seamless experiences across all the devices they use.

Our plan is to keep moving, to keep innovating, and to continuously measure and scrutinize what’s working and what isn’t – so we can make room for great new products. In that spirit, today we’re decommissioning several of our current mobile apps. We will be sending a notification later today that thefollowing apps will no longer be supported:

• Yahoo! Meme (iPad and iPhone)

• Yahoo! Mim (iPad)

• Yahoo! Answers (Android)

• Yahoo! AppSpot (Android and iPhone)

• Yahoo! Deals (iPhone)

• Yahoo! Finance (BlackBerry)

• Yahoo! Movies (Android)

• Yahoo! News (Android)

• Yahoo! Shopping (iPhone)

• Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search (iPad and iPhone)

We’re moving forward with a “mobile first” mindset. You can expect to see more new Yahoo! mobile products in 2012, especially in areas ripe for innovation that build on Yahoo!’s strengths, such as companion experiences for TV like IntoNow, new ways to experience personalized media like Livestand, and some of our most popular and useful mobile apps like Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Sportacular and Flickr, which are already being used by millions of people around the world. And we’ll be building these experiences with disruptive technology that’s going to change the mobile game well beyond Yahoo!.

For apps such as AppSpot and Sketch-a-Search, we decided to integrate the key features you know and love into the Yahoo! Search app. For example, we recently announced the app search feature in the Yahoo! Search app for iPhone. Stay tuned for moreupdates to the mobile search apps for both iPhone and Android.

With more than 700 million users around the world, we’ve got a huge and growing audience. We’re going to bring them the Yahoo! they love on every device in their life.

Stay tuned for a lot of action from Yahoo this year. 2012 has just begun and we’re just getting started.

– Yahoo! Mobile Team

The Times They Are a Changing…and These Apps They are A-Going

2012-01-27T20:14:01+00:00

Yahoo! Meme (iPad and iPhone)
Yahoo! Mim (iPad)
Yahoo! Answers (Android)
Yahoo! AppSpot (Android and iPhone)
Yahoo! Deals (iPhone)
Yahoo! Finance (BlackBerry)
Yahoo! Movies (Android)
Yahoo! News (Android)
Yahoo! Shopping (iPhone)
Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search (iPad and iPhone)

For apps such as AppSpot and Sketch-a-Search, we decided to integrate the key features you know and love into the Yahoo! Search app. For example, we recently announced the app search feature in the Yahoo! Search app for iPhone. Stay tuned for more updates to the mobile search apps for both iPhone and Android.

With more than 700 million users around the world, we’ve got a huge and growing audience. We’re going to bring them the Yahoo! they love on every device in their life.

Stay tuned for a lot of action from Yahoo this year. 2012 has just begun and we’re just getting started.

– The Yahoo! Mobile Team

International Data Privacy Day is January 28

2012-01-27T19:05:11+00:00

Tomorrow January 28 and in the coming weeks many countries will be celebrating International Data Privacy Day. To celebrate this day and honor the spirit of promoting awareness about privacy and best practices in this area, this year we chose to put the focus on the Spanish speaking Americas, due to the attention and momentum that privacy keeps gaining in this side of the world. Not only the right to “Habeas Data” has been widely recognized across the region but countries like Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, Colombia, Peru and Costa Rica have take a step further in developing and enacting comprehensive data protection laws. It is therefore not by coincidence that the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners took place in Mexico in 2011 and will take place in Uruguay in 2012.

At Yahoo! we have always taken privacy very seriously. Privacy is a core element in building our users’ trust, which is in turn core to us. We build our world-class products with privacy and trust in mind, and in order to succeed we strongly believe that the very first targets of education and awareness should be within the very inside of our company. This is why on February 1st the Yahoo! Miami office will host an invitation-only discussion on the latest global and regional developments in privacy. We will share perspective on how Yahoo! has maintained the hard earned role as a leader in building and maintaining user trust, how Yahoo! innovates with privacy in mind to give users transparency and choice in their online experiences, and what the landscape looks like for the online industry, as well as an overview of legislation affecting user privacy especially those affecting Latin America. There will be a Q&A session and the event will be videotaped – all in Spanish – for audiences unable to attend.

laura
juanes
director, international privacy for Yahoo!

January 2012 Feature Enhancements

2012-01-24T18:39:03+00:00

We rolled out our first release of the year early this morning, which included a number of enhancements for your Yahoo! store. This post provides information about some of these enhancements, as well as actions that may be required on your part. For the full list of enhancements, please read our New Feature Releases page.

First, an important note for all merchants: Upon your first visit to Checkout & Registration Manager following this release, your Publish Order Settings link in Store Manager will become active. If you have not made changes in Checkout & Registration Manager, you do not need to publish your order settings [...]

Join the discussions in the Messenger Help Community beta!

2012-01-23T18:18:25+00:00

We’re excited to introduce to you the Messenger Help Community! In this new extension of Yahoo! Help, you’ll find a friendly environment where you can talk to real people like yourself, as well as members of the Yahoo! staff (yes, we’re real too). Whether you want to discuss features, seek help with an issue, or save someone’s day by sharing your wisdom and experience, there are a variety of discussion forums available to you. Come check it out!

While you visit, there are some features we’d like to bring to your attention:

Don’t miss out!
You can keep up to date with discussions by subscribing to them. Go to “My Subscriptions” and sign up to receive email notifications when posts are made to topics and forums that you’ve subscribed to. Have topics of your own? You can easily track these through “My Topics” and see what others are saying about your ideas and queries.

Boost your community status!
It’s easy to increase your reputation score in the community; just participate in a discussion to earn a variety of point awards. You’ll gain the most points when you successfully help others. A topic reply is good, a helpful reply even better, and a reply picked as a solution by the topic owner…the best.

Stay tuned…
These new community forums have only been open for a few weeks and already there are all sorts of great conversations going on. We’re continually seeking ways to improve the features of the Help Community, so watch for updates and be sure to let us know what you think in our feedback forums.

We’re looking forward to hearing from you–come join the conversation!

Yahoo! Messenger Team

Right Media Partner Profile: TLV Media

2012-01-23T15:43:48+00:00

TLV Media’s Ohad Gliksman talks about using optimization technology to boost campaign performance This is the second in our series of profiles on Right Media seatholders—who they are, what they do, and their views on today’s digital marketplace. Founded in 2007, TLV Media built an industry-leading optimization platform that helps agencies, networks, advertisers and publishers maximize the performance [...]

Farewell FlickrAuth

2012-01-13T17:13:19+00:00

Last year, we added support for OAuth 1.0 – a much better way to have your users authenticating against Flickr. More information on Flickr user authentication via this method is available here in our Developer Guide and specifically here.

If you are app already uses OAuth, then you can skip this post and look at some gorgeous photos instead. However – if your app still uses the old Authentication API, you will need to update it to OAuth by July 31st this year.

Updating to OAuth is easy and you don’t worry about any user impact. You can exchange an old auth token from the old Authentication API, to an OAuth access token. The process simply requires that you make an authenticated request to the flickr.auth.oauth.getAccessToken API, which will exchange the old token used to make the request, with a new OAuth access token. Again, everything is documented right here. Flickr member Jef Poskanzer has also written an overview and comparison between the two auth methods: http://acme.com/flickr/authmap.html.

After July 31st, we will no longer support the old Authentication API.

More information is available in the Flickr API FAQ’s, and in the Flickr Developer guide, but if you have specific questions about updating your app, you may file a help ticket here.

Thanks for making Flickr more fun by contributing to our growing collection of apps!

Your Engineering Team at Flickr
(@FlickrAPI)

How Yahoo! Small Business Customers Inspire Me

2012-01-11T20:38:00+00:00

Last month during the holiday shopping season, I wrote an article for Yodel Anecdotal (Yahoo!'s corporate blog) about life working for Yahoo! Small Business and how all of you — our customers — inspire me every day. It was posted last night when Yodel Anecdotal launched their new look. You can read an excerpt from the article below, or read the full article at Yodel Anecdotal.

On behalf of the entire Yahoo! Small Business team, thank you to all of our Yahoo! Small Business customers for allowing us the opportunity to help bring your dreams to life. We're looking forward to a great year ahead [...]

The Life of an Ad Interest

2011-12-22T23:04:01+00:00

The Yahoo! Privacy team sometimes receives the question of how long we retain a web browser’s ad interests. The answer is a bit complicated but I’d like to take a moment to review the life of an ad interest and how for the most part that life is a fairly short one – typically less than a few weeks.

Before an ad interest can be determined, a category must first be created. Yahoo! has nearly 400 standard interest categories in the US (these can viewed from Ad Interest Manager). Categories fall across a range of topics such as iPods, Ford Trucks, Kitchen Remodeling or European Travel interests. Once a category is created, the next step is scoring interest in that category.

The birth of an ad interest begins when an interest scoring rule is triggered in our backend ad interest systems. Only a few key events are reviewed for scoring today: searches, page view, ad views, and ad clicks. Note – our new mail system processes email keywords similarly to “searches”. These events are funneled to a special set of servers at Yahoo! which score each event for interest in a category. Each category may give different scores to different events. For example, for an interest in Gifting Flowers the system will typically weight a search higher than a page view, whereas the Truck interest category may score a visit to the Yahoo! Autos site higher than a generic “truck” search. The resulting event score is then added to the existing score for an ad interest in relationship to an anonymous browser cookie.

Once an event has been scored for an ad interest it is held in these systems for a short period of time just in case something fails and data needs to be reprocessed. After a few days the raw event information is purged from these systems and only the resulting scores remain. It’s important to note that when a user opts-out of receiving interest-based ads, their activity is no longer sent to our backend ad interest systems for scoring (this includes from the new Yahoo! Mail platform) AND ads are no longer selected for that user based on interests.

Now that we have a score for an ad interest, the question of its life span can be addressed. Ad interest scores at Yahoo! “decay” – meaning that each day that goes by, each ad interest category will slowly reduce its score for a browser cookie. Each ad interest category has a different decay rate – tied to how long it typically takes to make a purchase decision. For example, an interest in Gifting Flowers may live a very short period of time – less than a week. Whereas an interest in Trucks lasts longer. While most ad interest categories will decay out scores within a few weeks, the maximum decay is about 90 days.

Interest scoring and decaying are always occurring at the same time. On some days activities may increase the score in a particular ad interest category while other interests are decaying because no activity occurs in relationship to them. If a browser cookie event isn’t processed through our backend systems for 90 days, all ad interests for that browser cookie will decay out.

That’s it! In quick review, the steps are: ad interest category creation, select event scoring, raw data purging, and category interest decay.

To learn more about other forms of log data retention at Yahoo!, please read this blog article.

To learn more about interest based advertising at Yahoo!, view what we believe your ad interests are, and see other general ad interest related information, please visit http://privacy.yahoo.com/aim .

Shane Wiley
VP, Privacy & Data Governance
Yahoo!

Yahoo!’s Holiday Gift to You – New Features and Content for Livestand

2011-12-21T20:59:08+00:00

Just in time for folks to unwrap new iPads or simply spend more time with the iPad they already own this holiday season, Yahoo! has dropped new features and content for Livestand. Time to sink into your couch.

In only six short weeks since Livestand’s debut in the App Store (picked as one of Apple’s featured apps), we’ve added in more entertaining features and popular titles to give you an even more personalized digital newsstand. And we’re still not finished – we’ll continue to iterate the app as we hear back from users like you!

In that spirit, here’s a look at what is new in the app today. To download the updated app or try it out for the first time here, visit the App Store for Livestand.

A new recipe finder in Shine from Yahoo! so you can browse recipes and create handy shopping lists. Cooking for a holiday celebration? This is a great time saver.
Local deals from your favorite sites like Groupon, LivingSocial or Bloomspot are now seamlessly integrated into Yahoo! Today and Shine from Yahoo!.
New Guest Mode to allow you to take a tour and experience Livestand without signing in. It’s now a lot easier for your friends and family to take a peek at what Livestand would be for them. Just make sure to get your iPad back when they’re done!
Twitter integration to share articles, videos and more with a few taps. Simply log into your Twitter account through “Settings” on your iPad and start socializing.
New publications, including:
- Shine from Yahoo!
- Technology Review published by MIT
- The Ticket from Yahoo! News (a new title focused entirely on the 2012 Elections)
- Minyanville
- Victorian Christmas
- Big Think

We have big plans for Livestand in the coming year and will always be creating new ways to more relevant, more personal for you. We’ll be adding new capabilities (many of which you’ve let us know you want), and of course, a lot more great content that you’ll want to jump into every chance you get. 2012 will be a busy year!

Have a healthy and happy holiday season,

The Livestand team

Pipes Changelog 2.0.9

2011-12-20T23:50:03+00:00

Renamed Module “Fetch Site Feed” to “Find First Site Feed“. Changed due to confusing name, which resulted in users using “Fetch Site Feed” instead of “Fetch Feed” – http://y.ahoo.it/uaPda
Removed Alert icon in all modules that access a url. Confused users thinking the feed was invalid or unreachable. – http://y.ahoo.it/IoPXn
Fixed Namespaced elements issues – http://y.ahoo.it/7x6PZ
Fixed Subsequent Split module increases Truncate value – http://y.ahoo.it/pDyu0
Fixed Pipe name alias redirect issue: http://y.ahoo.it/yoEsT

Pleiades: A guest post

2011-12-16T22:41:45+00:00

I recently asked our friend Sean from Pleiades (which I will *never* be able to spell correctly) to write up a lil’ guest post on how we did something cool with Flickr machine tags and ancient sites of the world – and here it is!

Intro

I’m Sean Gillies, a programmer at ISAW, the Institute for the Study of the
Ancient World at New York University. I’m part of the Digital Programs team,
which develops applications for researchers of ancient civilizations. Most of
my work is on a gazetteer and graph of ancient places called Pleiades. It
identifies and describes over 34,000 places in antiquity and makes them
editable on the web. A grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH) running through April 2013 is allowing Pleiades to bulk up on
ancient world places and develop features that can support ambitious
applications like the digital classics network called Pelagios.

Background

In August of 2010, Dan Pett and Ryan Baumann suggested that we coin Flickr
machine tags in a "pleiades" namespace so that Flickr users could assert
connections between their photos and places in antiquity and search for photos
based on these connections. Ryan is a programmer for the University of
Kentucky’s Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments and
collaborates with NYU and ISAW on Papyri.info. Dan works at the British
Museum and is the developer of the Portable Antiquities Scheme’s website:
finds.org.uk. At about the same time, ISAW had launched its Flickr-hosted
Ancient World Image Bank and was looking for ways to exploit these images,
many of which were on the web for the first time. AWIB lead Tom Elliott,
ISAW’s Associate Director for Digital Programs, and AWIB Managing Editor Nate
Nagy started machine tagging AWIB photos in December 2010. When Dan wrote "Now
to get flickr’s system to link back a la openplaques etc." in an email, we all
agreed that would be quite cool, but weren’t really sure how to make it happen.

As AWIB picked up steam this year, Tom blogged about the machine tags. His
post was read by Dan Diffendale, who began tagging his photos of cultural
objects to indicate their places of origin or discovery. In email, Tom and Dan
agreed that it would be useful to distinguish between findspot and place of
origin in photos of objects and to distinguish these from photos depicting the
physical site of an ancient place. They resolved to use some of the predicates
from the Concordia project, a collaboration between ISAW and the Center for
Computing in the Humanities at King’s College, London (now the Arts and
Humanities Research Institute), jointly funded by the NEH and JISC. For
findspots, pleiades:findspot=PID (where PID is the short key of a Pleiades
place) would be used. Place of origin would be tagged by pleiades:origin=PID.
A photo depicting a place would be tagged pleiades:depicts=PID. The original
pleiades:place=PID tag would be for a geographic-historic but otherwise
unspecified relationship between a photo and a place. Concordia’s original
approach was not quite RDF forced into Atom links, and was easily adapted to
Flickr’s "not quite RDF forced into tags" infrastructure.

I heard from Aaron Straup Cope at State of the Map (the OpenStreetMap annual
meeting) in Denver that he’d seen Tom’s blog post and, soon after, that it was
on the radar at Flickr. OpenStreetMap machine tags (among some others) get
extra love at Flickr, meaning that Flickr uses the machine tag as a key to
external data shown on or used by photo pages. In the OSM case, that means
structured data about ways ways and nodes, structured data that surfaces on
photo pages like http://flickr.com/photos/frankieroberto/3396068360/ as "St
George’s House is a building in OpenStreetMap." Outside Flickr, OSM
users can query the Flickr API for photos related to any particular way or
node, enabling street views (for example) not as a product, but as an
grassroots project. Two weeks later, to our delight, Daniel Bogan contacted Tom
about giving Pleiades machine tags the same kind of treatment. He and Tom
quickly came up with good short labels for our predicates and support for the
Pleiades machine tags went live on Flickr in the middle of November.

The Pleiades machine tags

Pleiades mainly covers the Greek and Roman world from about 900 BC – 600 AD. It
is expanding somewhat into older Egyptian, Near East and Celtic places, and
more recent Byzantine and early Medieval Europe places. Every place has a URL
of the form http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/$PID and it is these PID
values that go in machine tags. It’s quite easy to find Pleiades places through
the major search engines as well as through the site’s own search form.

The semantics of the tags are as follows:

pleiades:depicts=PID: The PID place (or what remains) is depicted in the photo
pleiades:findspot=PID: The PID place is where a photo subject was found
pleiades:origin=PID: The PID place is where a photo subject was produced
pleiades:where=PID: The PID place is the location of the photo subject
pleiades:place=PID: The PID place is otherwise related to the photo or its subject

At Pleiades, our immediate use for the machine tags is giving our ancient
places excellent portrait photos.

On the Flickr Side

Here’s how it works on the Flickr side, as seen by a user. When you coin a new,
never before used on Flickr machine tag like pleiades:depicts=440947682 (as
seen on AWIB’s photo Tombs at El Kab by Iris Fernandez), Flickr fetches the
JSON data at http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/440947682/json in which the
ancient place is represented as a GeoJSON feature collection. A snippet of
that JSON, fetched with curl and pretty printed with python

  $ curl http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/440947682/json | python -mjson.tool

is shown here:

  {
    ...
    "id": "440947682",
    "title": "El Kab",
    "type": "FeatureCollection"
  }

[Gist: https://gist.github.com/1488270]

The title is extracted and used to label a link to the Pleiades place under the
photo’s "Additional info".

Flickr is in this way a user of the Pleiades not-quite-an-API that I blogged
about two weeks ago.

Flickr as external Pleiades editor

On the Pleiades end, we’re using the Flickr website to identify and collect
openly licensed photos that will serve as portraits for our ancient places. We
can’t control use of tags but would like some editorial control over images,
so we’ve created a Pleiades Places group and pull portrait photos from its pool.
The process goes like this:

We’re editing (in this one way) Pleiades pages entirely via Flickr. We get a kick
out of this sort of thing at Pleiades. Not only do we love to see small pieces
loosely joined in action, we also love not reinventing applications that already
exist.

Watch the birdie

This system for acquiring portraits uses two Flickr API methods:
flickr.photos.search and flickr.groups.pools.getPhotos. The guts of it
is this Python class:

  class RelatedFlickrJson(BrowserView):

      """Makes two Flickr API calls and writes the number of related
      photos and URLs for the most viewed related photo from the Pleiades
      Places group to JSON like

      {"portrait": {
         "url": "http://flickr.com/photos/27621672@N04/3734425631/in/pool-1876758@N22",
         "img": "http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2474/3734425631_b15979f2cd_m.jpg",
         "title": "Pont d'Ambroix by sgillies" },
       "related": {
         "url": ["http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/pleiades:*=149492/"],
         "total": 2 }}

      for use in the Flickr Photos portlet on every Pleiades place page.
      """

      def __call__(self, **kw):
          data = {}

          pid = self.context.getId() # local id like "149492"

          # Count of related photos

          tag = "pleiades:*=" + pid

          h = httplib2.Http()
          q = dict(
              method="flickr.photos.search",
              api_key=FLICKR_API_KEY,
              machine_tags="pleiades:*=%s" % self.context.getId(),
              format="json",
              nojsoncallback=1 )

          resp, content = h.request(FLICKR_API_ENDPOINT + "?" + urlencode(q), "GET")

          if resp['status'] == "200":
              total = 0
              photos = simplejson.loads(content).get('photos')
              if photos:
                  total = int(photos['total'])

              data['related'] = dict(total=total, url=FLICKR_TAGS_BASE + tag)

          # Get portrait photo from group pool

          tag = "pleiades:depicts=" + pid

          h = httplib2.Http()
          q = dict(
              method="flickr.groups.pools.getPhotos",
              api_key=FLICKR_API_KEY,
              group_id=PLEIADES_PLACES_ID,
              tags=tag,
              extras="views",
              format="json",
              nojsoncallback=1 )

          resp, content = h.request(FLICKR_API_ENDPOINT + "?" + urlencode(q), "GET")

          if resp['status'] == '200':
              total = 0
              photos = simplejson.loads(content).get('photos')
              if photos:
                  total = int(photos['total'])
              if total < 1:
                  data['portrait'] = None
              else:
                  # Sort found photos by number of views, descending
                  most_viewed = sorted(
                      photos['photo'], key=lambda p: p['views'], reverse=True )
                  photo = most_viewed[0]

                  title = photo['title'] + " by " + photo['ownername']
                  data['portrait'] = dict(
                      title=title, img=IMG_TMPL % photo, url=PAGE_TMPL % photo )

          self.request.response.setStatus(200)
          self.request.response.setHeader('Content-Type', 'application/json')
          return simplejson.dumps(data)

[Gist: https://gist.github.com/1482469]

The same thing could be done with urllib, of course, but I’m a fan of httplib2.
Javascript on Pleiades place pages asynchronously fetches data from this view
and updates the DOM. The end result is a "Flickr Photos" section at the bottom
right of every place page that looks (when we have a portrait) like this:

We’re excited about the extra love for Pleiades places and can clearly see it
working. The number of places tagged pleiades:*= is rising quickly – up 50%
just this week – and we’ve gained new portraits for many of our well-known
places. I think it will be interesting to see what developers at Flickr, ISAW,
or museums make of the pleiades:findspot= and pleiades:origin= tags.

Thanks

We’re grateful to Flickr and Daniel Bogan for the extra love and opportunity to
blog about it. Work on Pleiades is supported by the NEH and ISAW. Our machine tag
predicates come from a NEH-JISC project – still bearing fruit several years later.

‘We want our cute cats and we want our rights too’

2011-12-14T21:07:43+00:00

A crisp fall night turned out to be the perfect setting for the 2nd annual Vancouver Human Rights Lecture, co-sponsored by the Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Program, The Laurier Institution, the University of British Columbia Continuing Studies and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Speaker Ethan Zuckerman in his lecture “Cute Cats and the Arab Spring: When Social Media Meet Social Change” asked the question ‘if 2011 ends up being the year of revolution, is it possible that social media had something to do with it?’

He questioned the theory that social media had nothing to do with protests and activism in 2011 and the opposing theory that the Internet changes everything – that as soon as you have access to information and to the internet, people will mobilize.

The reality, he stated, is not black and white: social media is not irrelevant, nor is social media responsible for how (or why) people get together and protest; instead social media falls within a complex grey area.

Citing Mohamed Bouazizi and his act of self-immolation as a launch-pad or ‘patient zero’ in the movements that have swept through the Arab world, he noted that social media platforms make it possible for people to create and disseminate information at a low cost. More importantly, they allow people to contribute to the wider media ecosystem (including traditional media), which can sometimes result in citizens mobilizing beyond a small protest movement to removing a dictatorship from power.

He argued that while the development of encrypted and specialized tools for activists is important, just as effective are the tools that are simple enough for anyone to use. The tools that allow persons to easily share their own content and interests to a wide audience, as in the case of the internet user sharing her pictures of cute cats, becomes an even more potent tool for the person who accidentally stumbles upon activism. That user may be already using the tools, and can now use them to share their concerns and express themselves. These platforms are often difficult for governments to censor.

Ethan challenged the audience to become empowered citizens and netizens of the online world and to call on governments to respect the idea of a networked public sphere where content and information can be shared but also to call on companies to run the private spaces in a manner consistent with freedom of expression and privacy.

Yahoo! recognizes that the Internet is a powerful space for free expression and for this reason is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder initiative comprised of ICT companies, human rights organizations, academics, investors and others. The GNI is a positive and collective step by these stakeholders to work together to challenge censorship and threats to privacy. The group has worked together to establish a code of conduct to guide technology companies in protecting and advancing freedom of expression and privacy across the globe when they encounter laws and policies that interfere with these fundamental human rights.

Over the next year, the Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Program will continue to explore how people, and more specifically women, are using social and digital media to support positive change in their communities and around the world. Our Change your World summits start in Cairo on January 18 2012, where, together with Yahoo! Maktoob and in partnership with Vital Voices we will focus on how women across the Middle East and North Africa are using technology, the Internet and various social and digital media platforms to create positive change in the world through four areas: leadership in governance and politics, human rights and social justice, journalism and entrepreneurship. Join us for Change your World: Cairo 2012. Click here for more information.

To listen to the 2011 Vancouver Human Rights Lecture podcast, please click here or view the lecture video here

Pipes DB write outage.

2011-12-13T21:56:04+00:00

Currently our cloud DB service has an outage that effects writes to the service. Reads are operational and working.

This means creating new pipes or editing existing Pipes will not work. But existing Pipes will still run and produce output as normal.

You can access you Pipe output by entering:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=<yourpipeid>& _render=rss/json/kml…etc.

e.g. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=ZKJobpaj3BGZOew9G8evXg&_render=json

Of Anna, Saifeena and Adele

2011-12-12T11:03:30+00:00

Hello there, everyone! It’s been an eventful few months, and interacting with our community here at Answers has been as exciting as ever.

Adele, beautiful talented Adele, has been in the spotlight for a while now, with her powerful music and incredible voice. Rolling in the Deep and Someone like You are requested for every hour on the radio, are must-haves on every playlist, and can persuade even the most reticent bathroom singer into humming along. Adele has been nominated for 6 awards at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards due to take place in Los Angeles on 12th February, 2012. We checked in with our users on what the odds are of her cleaning out the Grammys. Our TC Wendigo believes it’s unlikely as sweeps at the Grammys are very rare. But there is also a strong community out there rooting for her and cheering her on. Good luck to you, Adele. We’re crossing our fingers for you.

2011 has been a year of many losses in Indian music. Very recently, we bid farewell to the Evergreen Dev Anand. Our editors too, felt the loss dearly; there were many outpourings of grief in the office. A memorial page was created to document tributes, and we invited Yahoo! users to join in and pay their respects to the Peter Pan of Bollywood. We received an overwhelming 250+ responses, as readers shared childhood memories of their beloved hero, and how he is inextricable linked to the magic of cinema. We invite you to write your own tribute, as you read the memorials here.

Touching on some burning issues across the country, like FDI in retail, and the new political tinge to the Anna movement, made us realize that there are strong opinions out there, if divided. While most believe FDI will be a positive change, benefiting the consumer by lowering prices and increasing quality, creating more jobs and pulling India out of recession, others believe that FDI is not suitable for a country like India which is still in early stages of development, where population, inflation and illiteracy are high. The Anna issue also sees divided support. A large section believe that things have to become political before progress can be made, while others who support Team Anna’s ideals against corruption feel the cause will lose validity if given a political agenda. And the debate rages on…

With all the glitz surrounding Dirty Picture and Vidya Balan’s delicious performance as Silk Smitha, we decided to check in with our readers on whether Size Zero was still the in thing. Could the unabashed portrayal of retro sex-appeal change what is popularly perceived as beautiful? I’m happy to report that nearly all of our 75+ responses rejected the Size Zero definition of beauty. Users spoke instead of healthy bodies, confidence and self-esteem as the components of beauty. Summing it up perfectly in fact, is the Best Answer as chosen by voters, which says size zero is beautiful only to people who like stick insects! Well said!

The month of December is quickly flying by, and we will soon be saying goodbye to 2011. The Yahoo! Year In Review is out, and comes highly recommended as a ton of fun (even if we do say so ourselves!). To wrap up the year with a little silliness, we invited our users to send in their predictions for big Bollywood weddings in 2012. Who will tie the knot in B-town next year? While Saifu and Kareena ran away with the most number of votes, it appears that many are still rooting for Salman and Katrina! A few others that topped the list were Soha Ali Khan and Kunal Khemu, Vidya Balan and Siddharth Roy Kapoor, and Ritesh and Genlia. Well, dear users, only 2012 will tell how accurate that third eye is, and we look forward to measuring the New Year against your forecasts!

The Spark: Current and Upcoming Events

2011-11-28T19:47:00+00:00

Yahoo! Directory categories for current and upcoming events:

Sports in Season:

Holidays:

Advent - November 27 - December 24
Hanukkah - December 20-28
Festivus - December 23
Christmas - December 25
Boxing Day - December 26
Kwanzaa - December 26-January 1

Entertainment Events:

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees announced - December 14
Golden Globe Nominations - December 15

The Spark: A Little Thanksgiving Thanks

2011-11-23T18:34:00+00:00

(Photo by Scott Liddell)

(Editor's note: We originally ran this piece in 2006, but we felt its message about the holiday was as relevant now as it was then. Please enjoy it and thank you.)

In anticipation of this year's commotion, we had planned to focus our Thanksgiving edition of The Spark on ways to beat holiday stress. But as I sat down to write, I couldn't stop thinking about what's missing this holiday. This will be my 14th Thanksgiving without my mother, who died of cancer when I was 14 years old. The loss caught up with me this year, and I joined a local grief group.

Today, I'm thankful for the strong strangers I met there: a homeless woman mourning the loss of her son while trying to remain together with her husband in a transitional home; a woman who lost her stepfather only three weeks before is finally beginning to grieve for the little brother she'd lost nearly a decade ago; a man who shyly admitted that he sprays his wife's perfume in the bedroom every so often after recently losing her.

Most of us will experience holidays of missing at some point in our lives. While I thank my group for sharing their stories and their strength, I have some colleagues to thank as well. One editor cherishes her Yahoo! Messenger conversations with her husband in Iraq. They turn on their web cams so they can see each other. And their daughter leaves palmprints on the monitor after touching the image of her dad's face. Another editor is afraid he can't carve the turkey like his dad used to. But as he shares his father's Thanksgiving traditions with his young daughters, he is sure they will learn all the great things about Grandpa... Through our memories and the stories we share, our loved ones can live on, during the holidays and beyond them.

Thank you for reading. Happy Thanksgiving.

Suggested Sites...

How to Remember a Loved One at the Holidays - listen to their favorite music. Light a candle. Plant a tree, or establish a scholarship.
How to Cope With Grief During the Holidays - ways to cope with loss of a loved one the holiday season.

Directory categories: Bereavement, Grief Groups, Thanksgiving Graces and Blessings, Thanksgiving, Holiday Stress

Archived under: Bereavement, Death, Health, Holidays, Mental Health, Thanksgiving

2011 Vancouver Human Rights Lecture

2011-11-15T21:39:15+00:00

The Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Program is proud to be a co-sponsor, together with The Laurier Institution, the University of British Columbia Continuing Studies and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, of the 2011 Vancouver Human Rights Lecture. This year’s speaker will be Ethan Zuckerman whose lecture is titled “Cute Cats and the Arab Spring: When Social Media Meet Social Change“. The lecture will be held on Sunday November 20th 2011, at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, Vancouver, BC, Canada. For tickets, please visit here.

Cute Cats and the Arab Spring: When Social Media Meet Social Change”

Activists around the world are turning to social media tools usually used for more pedestrian purposes: the sharing of family videos and videos of cats flushing toilets. But these tools can be extremely powerful in the hands of activists, as they are pervasive, easy to use and difficult for governments to censor. Ethan Zuckerman will look at “the cute cat theory” of internet activism, as it helps explain the Arab Spring protests, aggressive internet censorship in countries like China and Vietnam, and the challenges for the corporate owners of social media platforms in an era of online speech.

Get organised and stay safe

2011-11-03T05:52:23+00:00

It’s been a while since my last blog but I’m very happy to report that since then, over the past quarter, our users have embraced the new Yahoo!7 Mail with over 80% of our audience now on the faster, safer and more beautifully designed Yahoo!7 Mail (not that I’m biased!). And if you’re one of the many, make sure you’re using all the great features and have personalised your Mail by accessing the Mail Overview microsite – there are many colourful themes to choose from.

Incredibly now, it’s the lead up to Christmas which means more online activity sharing with the people who are important to you as well as shopping, organizing events and researching festive products and services through Yahoo!7 Search. So I urge you to ‘stay safe online’ during this busy period by adhering to the excellent advice on the Stay Safe Online initiative.

You may be planning holidays but remember that spammers don’t ease up at this time and security can be compromised if you’re not vigilant. Whilst Yahoo!7 has powerful and effective tools to prevent spam, detect spamming activity and reduce the risk of compromised email accounts, it’s a daily and industry-wide problem. Damage can occur through a variety of ways – malicious software being installed silently on computers, users logging in unknowingly via a phishing page, having a common or easy-to-crack password and more. In these cases, it’s vital to change your email password and scan your computers immediately to secure your account.

1) Change your password immediately – you can change your Yahoo!7 email account password at https://edit.yahoo.com/config/change_pw. If you can no longer access your account, you can get a new password at https://edit.yahoo.com/forgotroot/. Important: If you use the old password at other sites, we recommend you change it for those accounts as well. Furthermore, don’t revert to the old password at any time; that password can never be used safely again for any of your accounts.
2) Scan your computers for malicious software. If you have an anti-virus program installed, make sure to update it and then run a scan. Do this for both your personal and work computers (ideally you should be doing this periodically – put it in your Calendar). If you don’t have an anti-virus program and are using a Windows computer, you can try Microsoft’s free, anti-virus program here. For more advice and information on keeping your online experience safe, and your email and computers secure, visit the Yahoo! Security Center.

I hope you’ll never have to take these steps with your Yahoo!7 mail account but it’s better to be safe than sorry, that’s for sure! So enjoy connecting with with your friends, family and colleagues safely and securely as we head towards Summer.

Farewell Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T09:01:05+00:00

Photo by Sip Khoon.

One of the giants of the technology sector, Steve Jobs, passed away today aged 56.

The Internet is rife with tributes from every possible corner; from blogs to Flickr to print and social media – everyone is mourning and remembering.

Yahoo! co-founder, Jerry Yang, had the following words to share:

“Steve was my hero growing up. He not only gave me a lot of personal advice and encouragement, he showed all of us how innovation can change lives. I will miss him dearly, as will the world.”

Steve Jobs Tribute, a gallery by U.S. Yahoo! Editorial on Flickr.

As we mourn his passing, we look back at the legacy he left behind:

Which Apple product is the most innovative to you? And why?

Leave your tribute to Steve Jobs in the comments below!

New blog on the way

2011-09-27T06:56:00+00:00

Did you see the news? The new Delicious is now live!

We are also planning to launch a new Delicious blog in the coming weeks to better represent all the changes. In the meantime, you can follow our updates at the AVOS blog: http://www.avos.com.

- The AVOS team

Yahoo! Answers planned maintenance on Tuesday, September 13

2011-09-12T16:23:17+00:00

(Flickr photo by General Wesc)

Hello everyone,

Yahoo! Answers is undergoing some essential planned maintenance on Tuesday, September 13 starting at 1pm, and lasting several hours. Answers will be unavailable during that time. The Suggestion Board will not be affected by this.

Meanwhile, please check out these Yahoo! pages and:

Upload your photos on Flickr.
Get your geek on with the latest tech news on Yahoo! Singapore Tech Talk.
Read about the latest news at Yahoo! Singapore News.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Get the latest Yahoo!7 Mail

2011-07-29T06:14:27+00:00

Last month, the newest version of Yahoo!7 Mail went live. Some of you may have already seen and used it in beta form but now it’s dropped its ‘beta’ tag to become our latest and greatest Yahoo!7 Mail! We’re proud of it and pleased to offer it to you. We hope you upgrade soon – it’s easy, just go to our Mail Microsite to upgrade and enjoy the benefits:

Faster: This version of Yahoo!7 Mail is 2x faster than our previous versions of Yahoo!7 Mail, even for those with slower internet connections.
Safer: Globally, Yahoo! blocks over 550 billion spam messages a month and our advanced SpamGuard technology and anti-phishing platform have helped us reduce spam reports by 60 percent. Here’s to a clean inbox!
Easier: Getting things done in Yahoo!7 Mail is even easier with features like rich photo slideshows, chatting with Facebook friends and instantly responding to messages with the reply bar. We’ve also got over 50 themes so you can personalise your Mail box the way you like it – just drop down Options menu!

We’ve been building this new Mail for a while now and continually fixing things and releasing new functionality every few months. Have a look at our Help page for some tips to guide you during the migration process – click here.

Finally, even though the ‘beta’ label is no longer on the Mail product, we’re continuing to improve Yahoo!7 Mail. There is a long list of features and functionality we’re tackling in the coming months and you’ll be hearing more!

We hope you enjoy using the new Yahoo!7 Mail.

Hadoop Summit 2011 – A Different Approach

2011-07-07T02:16:00+00:00

Hadoop Summit 2011 is over. If you saw this tweet ”#hadoopsummit planned for 1,500. upped on demand to 1,600. finally accommodated 1,700. ran out of space, good problem to have. :-),” then you probably got an idea of how exciting and mobbed the conference was this year. With folks dropping by from coast-to-coast, and quite a few from around the world, Hadoop Summit 2011 will quite likely be the year’s largest Hadoop gathering. But even more so, because of the passion of everyone that participated, it was also the best Hadoop gathering of the year, raising the bar yet again for Hadoop technical content and networking.

At the Summit and since it ended, I have received questions from folks who attended the show and some who couldn’t make it. In general, a lot of people were curious about what went into developing the Summit and the approach we took to the Summit. I thought I’d take some time today and summarize my thoughts on this topic.

Obviously, in conference planning, a lot of the success of an event comes down to logistics, and fitting 1,700 people into the Santa Clara Convention Center for one action-packed today definitely requires a lot of logistics. But beyond those details, I think more important this year was the decision to change how we approached the Summit and to make sure the focus of the event was on building the Hadoop community itself. The Hadoop community will be at the heart of that continued innovation, so it is important that the community continues to grow and share with each other.

Here is what the Summit was really about for me and what I asked the team to focus on:

Content: This year we moved away from the “come as you please” style for presentation content that we had used in years past. What is the line that I used to stress this to the team? “Content is to the Summit what Location is to Real-Estate.”. Everything. Therefore all technical content was first selected then shepherded through a rigorous review and feedback process by the Program Committee. As a result, we heard some fantastic feedback on the quality and usefulness of the presentations this year in the technical tracks. Raymie Stata, Yahoo!’s CTO, made the point numerous times, saying that as a technology grows you usually see the amount and depth of technical content at conferences dedicated to that technology erode, but that at Hadoop Summit was just the opposite. If anything, the technical content was even deeper, which bodes well for Hadoop and the communities future. I cannot thank my Track Co-chairs enough for their support in making this happen. You can find out more about them at: www.hadoopsummit.org.
Sponsored Content: Related to keeping the overall quality of technical content high at the Summit was the desire to keep the amount of sponsored content relatively low, ideally in the ball park of 30 minutes out of the day. Mind you, the goal was never not to have any sponsored content. Sponsors who are offering Hadoop-related solutions have a significant role to play in the Hadoop Ecosystem and its evolution, but especially with so many new attendees and folks just getting started with Hadoop, the most valuable content is the technical focused insights they can put to work as they ramp up projects and get up to speed. The results speak for themselves – check out my fun fact number 3 below.
Ecosystem: There was some discussion and thinking early on in the conference planning that we should only include open source solutions in the program. However, in the end the majority of the Program Committee agreed that the Summit should represent the entire Hadoop ecosystem. Why? Because while technically it’s possible to separate Apache Hadoop from other Hadoop powered solutions, actual users don’t always make this distinction when putting Hadoop to work. Some use Apache, some use other distributions, but all of these folks are Hadoop users and are therefore part of the Hadoop ecosystem. Without users, there is no Hadoop, so who are we to leave some out?
Users: Speaking of users, they are who motivated us to have a brand new track this year focused on them, the Operations and Experience track. The goal of this track was to provide a forum for sharing how different companies are operating and managing Hadoop in the real world, or otherwise talk about their experience with Hadoop. As we had expected, this content was particularly popular with Hadoop users this year. I believe, in the years to come, given the pace of Hadoop growth the interest in this track will continue to increase and the content will no doubt expand as well.
Developers: Finally, developers are still the core of the Hadoop Summit and are still the engine for innovation in Hadoop. Many attendees complimented me on what a great “event” Hadoop Summit was. Interestingly, I never really thought of the Summit as an event. For me it was a Hadoop developer and user gathering. As a developer myself, having been there and done that, now I enjoy helping showcase the amazing, high quality work that comes from the Hadoop community of developers. Helping great code get shared and adopted by developers and users is really the heart and soul of the Summit for me.

Looking forward, on the heels of a successful Summit, what’s next? Here at Yahoo! I’ve been saying that Hadoop the Software is maturing, while Hadoop the Product is still in its nascence. Do I mean that Hadoop the Software is done? Not at all. What I mean is that future work on Hadoop as software will be focused on transforming it into Hadoop the product. That means a lot of development on Usability, Manageability and Operability. These very broad areas cover a lot of ground, but collectively they all go towards making Hadoop more Enterprise ready. Hadoop is already ready for the Enterprise when it comes to Scalability, Availability and Reliability. At Yahoo! we know this probably better than anyone else. But it is the rest of these core “abilities” that will put Hadoop on the fast track to Enterprise deployment at companies that don’t have large Hadoop engineering teams in-house.

Before I wrap-up, here are a few little known facts about this year’s Summit that speak to all of the above:

The Summit had a 27% percent acceptance rate for submissions – it was very competitive and a great sign that the interest in Hadoop is driving high-quality technical content.
50% of the ticket sales happened in the last two weeks. In other words, you all need to plan better so we can fit more of you. :-)
There were no sponsored tech talks this year, none at all – so if you’re looking for unbiased, useful technical content, the Summit tech talks were as pure as can be.
Multiple leading database vendors are currently evaluating Hadoop and HBase for internal use.
Hadoop is designed for use with non-reliable storage. ;-)

Looking forward to seeing the northern California Hadoopers at the July HUG. If you would like to attend, you can sign up here: http://www.meetup.com/hadoop/.

These are exciting times for Hadoop and may you enjoy living through them.

/later

Delicious Add-on for Firefox 5.x

2011-06-29T21:48:15+00:00

Some of you have been asking us about Firefox v5.x support.

The Delicious add-on for Firefox v5.x is available on the Mozilla site at this link.

If you upgraded to Firefox v5.x from an earlier version of Firefox, your existing Delicious add-on will not be automatically upgraded at this time. We’re working on making that happen – hopefully soon. For now, you will need to get the add-on at the above link.

Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your patience.

- AVOS Team

Fourth Annual Hadoop Summit: The Countdown Begins!

2011-06-15T00:38:44+00:00

On June 29, Yahoo! will host the 4th annual Hadoop Summit at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Hadoop Summit 2011 brings together some of the most influential thought leaders in the space - from Yahoo, Facebook, IBM, NetApp, and others.

Jay Rossiter, Senior Vice President of the Yahoo! Cloud Platform Group will open the show with a keynote around how Yahoo! is developing the next generation of Hadoop applications to handle big data, the important role that Hadoop plays in Yahoo!’s integrated technology ecosystem and how wide industry adoption of Hadoop is benefiting the entire community.

Also on the main stage, Facebook will discuss its use of Hadoop to power the Facebook Messages infrastructure and IBM will discuss how they used Hadoop to power supercomputer, Watson.

Additional conference highlights include some key sessions:

Next Generation Apache Hadoop MapReduce: Arun Murthy, Yahoo!’s lead architect on the Hadoop Map-Reduce development team, will lead a discussion on the next generation of Apache Hadoop MapReduce that factors the framework into a generic resource scheduler and a per-job, user-defined component that manages the application execution.
Introducing HCatalog (Hadoop Table Manager): Alan Gates, Yahoo! architect for Pig and Howl, will provide an overview of HCatalog as well as the release/roadmap.
Automated Rolling OS Upgrades for Yahoo! Hadoop Grids: Dan Romike, Yahoo! Hadoop Data and Grid Systems engineer, will detail how we are upgrading thousands of servers, the problems of system state management, and the operational workflows specific to a Hadoop grid environment.
Case Studies of Hadoop Operations at Yahoo!: The Grid Operations team at Yahoo! operates about 40,000 servers running Hadoop in clusters of up to 4,200 servers. Charles Wimmer, Yahoo! senior service engineer of grid computing, will provide a dive deep into a series of case studies that exemplify these issues.
Large Scale Math with Hadoop MapReduce: Nerd out and learn how Yahoo! established a new world record by computing the two quadrillionth bits of pi using Hadoop in July 2010. Widely covered in the news, the world record computation was composed of 35,000 MapReduce jobs, requiring 23 days of real time and 503 years of CPU time in Yahoo! clusters. Led by Yahoo! Hadoop engineer Tsz-Wo Sze, attendees will also learn MapReduce algorithms for large-scale mathematical calculation, their implementation, and our experience in running and tuning these computations in Hadoop clusters.

Check out the official conference agenda for a full preview of what’s to come and a look at the 32 different sessions, including best practice deep-dives and case studies on the Hadoop roadmap, operations and management, innovative Hadoop applications and research, and much more.

Space is limited, so don't miss this unique opportunity to hear directly from Hadoop thought leaders and pioneers by registering now.

And finally, a special thanks to the Hadoop Summit 2011 sponsors:

Platinum Sponsors:
* MapR Technologies
* NetApp

Gold Sponsors:
* Aster Data
* Cloudera
* DataStax
* Datameer
* IBM

Silver Sponsors:
* Amazon Web Services
* Arista
* Impetus
* Pentaho
* Syncsort

Sponsors:
* Dell
* Hadapt
* HStreaming
* Jive
* Karmasphere
* Mellanox
* Pervasive DataRush
* Quest Software
* Softlayer
* StackIQ
* ThinkBig Analytics

Stay up to date on Hadoop Summit buzz by following #hadoopsummit on Twitter.

If you are a Hadooper or would like to become one, come join the community for this one day event.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog Closing May 31

2011-05-02T23:57:23+00:00

But you can continue to get search marketing content at the Yahoo! Advertising Blog

The English poet Geoffrey Chaucer is widely credited as coining the phrase “All good things must come to an end.” So it is with this blog, which will be shut down at the end of the month, on May 31, 2011. But in Internet parlance, this represents merely a redirect, not a 404 Error.

Our blogging attention these days is squarely on the Yahoo! Advertising Blog, which covers all aspects of online (and sometimes, offline) advertising, including search marketing. We generally post a dozen or more new, original articles there every week, including strategy advice and tips, coverage of industry events, interviews with industry leaders, the “Ad of the Week,” round-ups of internet and social media news, and much more.

And if search advertising in particular is the center of your universe, we’ve got you covered with a “Search” section on the Yahoo! Advertising Blog. Recent Ad Blog posts covered How Online Display Advertising Affects Search, Best Practices for Integrating Search and Display and why Product Strategy is the New SEO.

It’s been a pleasure providing high-quality content, advice and news to our customers and friends here on the YSM Blog since its launch in 2006. We encourage you to bookmark the Yahoo! Advertising Blog as a favorite in your browser, or better yet, sign up for a once-daily email digest of all of the blog’s content. You can also keep up with Yahoo! advertising news on Facebook and Twitter.

— The Team

Mobile My

2011-03-23T18:12:27+00:00

If you have a smart or feature phone or a tablet computer like an iPad, you can now use My Yahoo! on it in a whole new way. We recently launched our beta site for My Yahoo! on Mobile. You can check it out here: http://m.yahoo.com/w/myyahoo. You’ll be able to access all of your feeds, add new ones, remove ones you don’t want anymore, as well as have access to all of your other favorite Yahoo! sites.

We have not yet implemented the My Yahoo! applications on the mobile site; we have plans to do that later in the year. If you need access to your apps, simply scroll down to the bottom of the page on the mobile site and click “Desktop”. To switch back, scroll down to the bottom of the Desktop My Yahoo! page and click on “Mobile”.

Enjoy taking My Yahoo! with you wherever you go.

Michael – Product Lead

Yahoo! Answers blog

2011-03-04T21:53:31+00:00

Hey everyone,

Doing things twice instead of once is always a bit silly, so recently we decided it would be best to make the US blog (US) the main focus for everyone who speaks English and wants to keep up to date with everything going on in the world of Answers.

On the US Answers blog you’ll find everything from product updates to Answers news, celebrities and topical posts, competitions and of course Ask Mike (US), who blogs on curious, thought-provoking topics. You can leave your comments as well as Tweet and Liking posts on Facebook.

This means that for the foreseeable future the Canada Answers blog will point to the US Blog so for fresh news you’re better off heading there. All our older posts will remain here.

Thanks for all your feedback over the years,

Blake Irving: Yahoo! = the Premier Digital Media Company

2011-03-03T21:03:16+00:00

Chief Product Officer riffs on Yahoo! and the future of data-driven media

“Yahoo! has a ton of data,” writes ZDNet Editor-in-Chief Larry Dignan. But then the post office has a lot of data, too. The question for any media company is how it plans to use that data to serve the interests of its core constituents—its audience, advertisers and partners.

Dignan was listening to Yahoo! Chief Product Officer Blake Irving, who spoke yesterday at the Morgan Stanley “Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference” at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, on how Yahoo! is utilizing its data now more than ever.

Dignan quotes Blake:

“Spending time with the folks at Yahoo!, I started to uncover some other strengths that I frankly didn’t know were there—the amount of science and data that exists. The way that the research organization communicates with the product team is unlike any company I’ve worked at before.”

Blake goes on to define Yahoo!:

“Yahoo!, at its core, is the premier digital media company. It’s simple. That’s it. We’re the premier digital media company. That doesn’t mean that we are a traditional media company that’s producing magazines. It means that we are a digital technological company that produces media. Media in the vernacular of the Internet is e-mail, it’s crowd-sourced, it’s conversations that happen whether it’s in the social media site or whether it’s media that served from a crowd-sourced editor, or somebody who is an editor using a series of digital publishing tools and surfacing that content around the world. So there’s, I think, a misunderstanding of what media is. Really, when you’re talking about the digital landscape and you’re talking about the Internet, just about everything you touch is media, whether I produce it myself and communicate with a few people, or it’s an editor reaching tens of millions of people.”

Read the full article on ZDNet.

— The Team

Yahoo! Messenger Faceoff Contest

2011-03-02T22:09:46+00:00

C’mon, Join the fun. Enter the Yahoo! Messenger Faceoff Contest Today!

Do you love emoticons as much as our 500,000+ Yahoo! Messenger Facebook fans do? From now through March 18th, show us your best emoticon impression for a chance to have your face turned into a brand new Yahoo! Messenger emoticon to be added to the Yahoo! Messenger emoticon gallery.

Check out the Yahoo! Messenger Faceoff Contest on our Facebook fan page. Join the fun by simply submitting a photo of yourself imitating your favorite emoticon. Then encourage friends and family to vote for your submission in the Faceoff gallery or to submit their own photos if they think they can do better! After two rounds of voting, the winner with the most votes will have their face turned into a brand new emoticon for the world to use.

Go ahead – show the world your best smiley! If you’re too shy to submit a photo, visit the Faceoff gallery to vote for your favorites and support your friends.

Which emoticon are YOU?

- Yahoo! Messenger Team

Yahoo!’s Sweet Sixteen!

2011-03-02T20:59:22+00:00

A look at the premier digital media company, then and now

It all started in February 1994. In a Stanford trailer. Innocently enough.

Two Ph.D. students decided to build a guide to the web. The goal? Keeping track of their personal interests.

Soon the lists that David Filo and Jerry Yang had compiled became too unwieldy, so they broke them out into categories. When those categories became too full, the two denim-clad engineers developed subcategories, and Yahoo! was born.

By the fall of 1994, Yahoo! celebrated its first million-hit day.

Fast-forward 17 years. Yahoo!’s global network includes 25 properties and is available in 13 languages. In January 2011 alone, nearly 179 million Americans pointed their browsers toward Yahoo!, ranking #1 in the comScore Media Metrix Audience Rank tabulation for the month

Here are four more ways Yahoo!’s gone from humble student beginnings to becoming the premier digital media company:

1. Global Reach: Globally, Yahoo! properties are ranked #1 in 8 categories, according to comScore figures for January 2011.Yahoo! was the top-ranked site in a whopping 13 U.S. categories in January, including News, Mail, Sports, Finance, Television and Shopping.

2. Personalization: The Today Module on the Yahoo! homepage shows consumers the stories they are most likely to be interested in reading, based on the information they gave in their profile, their previous clicks and other insights. Yahoo! visitors worldwide get a completely customized experience. On a typical day at the end of 2010, there were more than 45,437 variations of the homepage generated every five minutes—and more than 13 million variations every day.

3. Most Trusted: Yahoo! was ranked in 2010 by Edelman Trust Barometer as the most-trusted technology company in the world, a full 13 percent ahead of the nearest competitor in the technology category. Among all companies evaluated globally, Yahoo! holds the #2 spot for most-trusted companies, just one percentage point behind the leader, a consumer products goods company.

4. Advertising innovation: Yahoo! is a leading online ad network in the U.S. In 2010, Yahoo! launched a dozen new ad formats (for PC and mobile web) to help advertisers unleash creativity and connect with audiences through new, high-impact creative canvasses.

Yahoo! was created to make sense of this big, messy place we call the Web. And we’ve never strayed from that mission: to filter through the clutter and help people connect with what’s most important to them. By connecting each person with what is relevant, meaningful and inspiring to them, we create deeply personal digital experiences.

Congrats to all the loyal Yahoos, Yahoo! users and Yahoo! advertisers who have contributed to our success over these sweet 16 years.

And, if you’d like to give us a little something for our birthday, how about liking Yahoo Advertising on Facebook, following us on Twitter, or subscribing to our blog by email?

You could also recommend our marketing and advertising content to a friend. We want to continue spreading our yodels far and wide now that we can drive.

— Dianne Molina

Yahoo! Finance Introduces MarketDash for iPad

2011-02-26T04:08:03+00:00

Earlier this week Yahoo! Finance launched a brand new app for the top-selling tablet on the market. iPad users now have anytime access to their portfolios and stocks they care about most through MarketDash. The new iPad app provides real-time market data, news and charts, letting you walk away from your desk, yet still stay in sync with your investments.

The interactive app takes advantage of the iPad’s multi-touch capabilities so you can manipulate views of stock charts; the ability to scroll across hours, days or months of market action; plot points in time; and even compare multiple stock tickers in one compelling chart. Anyone interested in following the market, or specific stocks on the iPad can now use Yahoo! Finance’s reliable and personalized tools anywhere, anytime.

We’ve become so dependent on our mobile devices that it’s important to have a seamless experience across all of the technology we use on a daily basis. That’s why Yahoo! Finance provides centralized storage of portfolios and watch lists.

Add a stock to a watch list from your iPad and it will show up instantly in the Yahoo! Finance app for iPhone or Android phones or when you view your portfolio on Yahoo! Finance. No matter where you log in to your account you will see updated and personalized portfolio data.

To download MarketDash, go to the App Store or search for MarketDash in the App Store from your iPad!

ShareThis

Yahoo! Answers blog

2011-02-22T09:57:32+00:00

Photo by antwerpenR

Hey everyone,

This means that for the foreseeable future the UK & Ireland Answers blog will point to the US Blog so for fresh news you’re better off heading there. All our older UK & Ireland posts will remain here, from topical stories to our favourite, the profiles of amazing contributors that we call Featured Users.

Thanks for all your feedback over the years,

- Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team

Hello world!

2011-02-15T20:26:19+00:00

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Preview the New Yahoo! Finance Portfolios

2011-02-09T23:28:32+00:00

UPDATE
Ongoing product innovation is important to Yahoo! and we constantly test various product designs and features to gain valuable feedback and insights from our users. Part of this process includes identifying how we can make Yahoo! Finance even more useful and personally relevant.

On Tuesday night we started testing a new Yahoo! Finance Portfolio experience in the US to further enhance usability. Based on feedback about certain key features, we have chosen to move users back to the previous Portfolio experience and will make additional updates and modifications before we roll out the new features to our US users. The previous version will be back as soon as possible - we’re hoping to have it restored by the end of the day (Thursday).

Unrelated to the Portfolios redesign, we are currently experiencing an issue on a small select set of tickers on Yahoo! Finance. Tickers such as SPY, FPX, PLND, KCE and others. The team is actively working to restore these tickers. As a result, your Portfolio experience may show “No such ticker symbol”. We will have this issue resolved shortly.

Users that preferred the updated version can continue to access it through tour U.K. site or our Canada site. We apologize for any inconvenience this caused.

We’ll soon be launching a new version of Yahoo! Finance portfolios in the US. The update features a sleek new design, more flexible ways to create, view and modify portfolios, and a more intuitive user interface. All of your existing portfolios data will remain intact.

Below is a list of improvements that we think you’ll enjoy:

Creating portfolios: Simplified and streamlined the process.

Editing portfolios: Add and remove symbols directly from portfolio view page.

Adding holdings: Easily add holdings and cost-basis information used to calculate value and performance.

Sorting your data: Instantly sort data by clicking the table headings (”Last trade,” “Volume,” “Mkt Cap,” …).

New ‘Recent Quotes’ page: Detailed views from the popular “Recent Quotes” module on the front page.

Additional ways to create portfolios: Your “Recent Quotes” and “Multiple Quote” results can be saved as a portfolio for quick future access.

For a sneak peak at the new Yahoo! Finance portfolios, please visit our U.K. site or our Canada site, where the new design has already been launched. After you have logged in, click on the “My Portfolios” tab, and you will be able to view your portfolios as they will appear after the U.S. launch.

Portfolios are one of the top features on Yahoo! Finance and we will continue to refine the portfolios section and add new features and innovations over the coming months. Feel free to use the ‘Feedback’ link on the UK or Canada sites. We’ll also have ‘Feedback’ turned on in the US when we launch.

Whether you use portfolios to track your actual investments, to manage watchlists of companies or a combination of both, it’s our goal to deliver the functionality you need with an intuitive and reliable solution.

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Stay safe online with Yahoo!

2011-02-04T15:07:51+00:00

On February 8, 2011, Yahoo! will be joining forces with INSAFE, to celebrate Safer Internet Day and to help raise awareness about safety online.

Answer our special question: here.

This year, efforts will address safety around “virtual lives” encompassing online gaming and social networking. The slogan for 2011 is, “It’s more than a game, it’s your life.” Staying online and being connected has become critical for today’s youngsters, and not being connected frequently means social exclusion.

GET INVOLVED

It’s easy to take part in this exciting one-day event!

• Learn more about online safety tips
• Share these online safety tips with your family and friends through Yahoo! Pulse, Facebook and Twitter
• Participate in the global Safer Internet Day Fair
• Share your own advice with the Answers community

Learn more about online safety tips

Think before you post. How you represent yourself online – the way you play games, the photos and texts you share, your avatar, and your profile – all add up to who you are. Invest in your online image.

Be a good sport when online. If you wouldn’t do it on the field, don’t do it online.

Take action and report bullying. By standing by and watching, laughing, or doing nothing when you see bullying happen, you become part of the problem. Don’t be a passive bystander.

Spread positivity when texting. Texting is core to staying connected and what you text is a reflection of you. Be thoughtful about what you text and confident that your texts portray you the right way. Remember messages can be misunderstood without body language to support your meaning.

Get out and connect with your world. It’s estimated that teens spend 7.5 hours a day watching some form of media. The Internet is fun, rich world, but don’t forget to unplug sometimes. Get out and connect with your friends in the real world.

Learn more about online safety. Yahoo! Safely is a global resource that provides parents, educators and teens with tips and advice on online safety. The site covers important topics such as managing digital reputations, avoiding cyber-bullying, and learning how to minimize risks on mobile devices, as well as provides guidance on how to safely use specific Yahoo! products, as well as a Yahoo! Answers Safety Guide.

Share these online safety tips for youth with your family and friends

Support Safer Internet Day by updating your Yahoo! Pulse status with:
“It’s more than a game, it’s your life: http://www.saferinternet.org”

Help drive awareness of online safety by sharing this blog post on Twitter and Facebook. It’s easy – just click `Like` or `Tweet` from the box at the bottom of this blog post to share it online.

Participate in the Safer Internet Day Fair
Join us in a “real” celebration of our virtual lives in the SID fair, by registering online or contacting your national awareness centre or SID committee. A video clip has been created in all official EU languages. Watch the clip and find further information about the activities being organised in your country through the Insafe website.

Share your own advice with the Answers community
Now over to you to share your own advice with the Answers community by sharing your tips on how to stay safe online in this week’s featured question:

– What are your best tips for staying safe on the Internet?

The best answer will receive a bonus 50 points and an additional `top 5` best tips will receive 10 points each!

Here’s to staying safe online – not just on Safer Internet Day, but EVERYDAY!

– Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team

New theme for Lunar New Year

2011-01-25T20:14:08+00:00

It’s a new year so how about a new theme for your My Yahoo! page. We wish you prosperity in this year of the rabbit.

Change your theme to 年年有餘 (prosperity through the years)

Michael - My Yahoo! Team Lead