The world wasn’t built with disabled people in mind. Too many bumps and corners and narrow spaces. Too many objects just out of reach, too high or too low. Sights and sounds hard to see and hear. And that’s just the real world. The world of the Internet, initially, was a lot worse.

But not anymore.

Back in 1984, while I was at Apple, we discovered that the just-announced and beautifully designed Macintosh computer was, in some ways, terribly designed for much of the disabled population. One way we demonstrated this to our hardware and software engineers was to have them sit together, each in front of the Macintosh they’d been instrumental in designing, and do the following: “Put your hands in your pocket, put a pencil in your mouth, and type a 2-line memo.”

That simple simulation eventually led to the identification and fixing of more than 40 obstacles that were originally designed as conveniences for the average user. More than any lecture could have accomplished, the real-life simulation of disabled experiences led not only to the increased usability of the Macintosh, but also, in the words of one software engineer, to a new, more inclusive, way of seeing the world: “I’ll never view my work in the same way again.”

It’s useful to mention that the fixes—what we termed “electronic curb-cuts”—were, for the most part, quite simple to make. The much more difficult challenge was to recognize that the accessibility problems existed in the first place.

And so it is with websites. Even Yahoo!.

Which is why we’ve just opened the Yahoo! Accessibility Lab, a place where engineers, designers, and product managers can experience for themselves how disabled users navigate the web. And sometimes, how they can’t.

At this point, the Accessibility Lab is in its formative stage; we’re still learning how to make it as valuable a resource as possible. As a result, it is only available—for now—to Yahoo! employees. Here is part of what we’ve said to them in announcing this new on-campus location:

No matter what your position is at Yahoo!, we invite you to wander in, look around, play a little, watch a little, try a little, borrow a little… and then come back again. And again.

Come in and be blind for a while and learn how to buy a car at Yahoo! Autos. Or be paralyzed from the neck down and use Yahoo! Mail or play Yahoo! Games. Or be deaf, or learning disabled, or non-verbal. These are the kinds of experiences you can have in the Lab.

Our goal is to help you understand what it means to design products that are accessible to all of Yahoo!’s customers. Products that are usable. Enjoyable. Delightful. And inclusive.

In addition to simulating the disabled experience, the Accessibility Lab also provides a growing collection of books and videos that we hope will help visitors become more comfortable with the culture of disability. And help Yahoos keep disabled kids and adults clearly in mind as they design and code.

Alan Brightman
Senior Policy Director, Special Communities

Alan is the author of many books about the disabled experience, including his recent “DisabilityLand” (SelectBooks, 2008).

Today, Yahoo! moves past a distracting proxy contest. This morning we announced a settlement with Carl Icahn which will enable Yahoo! to put an end to this challenging chapter in our history, and allow us to get back to the business at hand – building our business and maximizing value for all stockholders.

Over the past few weeks we’ve made progress communicating with investors, helping them to better understand our roadmap for long-term growth, our valuable combination of assets, and our solid position in the converging search and display marketplaces. These discussions have been productive for everyone.

Under the terms of the settlement with Mr. Icahn, he has withdrawn his nominees for consideration at the annual meeting, and has agreed to vote his Yahoo! shares in support of the Board’s nominees. At our annual stockholder meeting on Aug. 1, we’ll ask stockholders to re-elect eight of our current directors. (In connection with the settlement of the proxy contest, Bobby Kotick has notified the Company that he will not stand for re-election to the Board.) After the annual meeting, Mr. Icahn will be appointed to our Board. We’ve also agreed to expand our Board to make room for two additional members to be chosen by the Board upon the recommendation of the Board’s Nominating and Governance Committee from a list that includes the rest of Mr. Icahn’s slate and Jon Miller, former Chairman and CEO of AOL.

We’re pleased that both parties were able to work together productively to accomplish this settlement, and we look forward to working with the new Board members and benefiting from their fresh perspective.

Yahoo! is now moving forward with one team and one voice, and we’re excited about what the future holds.

Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo

I respect lots of journalists. But I’m in awe of Violet Gonda, who was the 2007-08 Yahoo! International Fellow at Stanford last year. Why? Because she defies an oppressive regime in Zimbabwe that wants to shut her up. She walks the walk of speaking truth to power.

The Yahoo! International Journalism Fellowship at Stanford was established for people like Violet, journalists from countries where there are strong challenges to a free press. Yahoo! and the Knight Fellowships agreed that we needed to support journalists who were directly or indirectly under attack, and so we created the fellowship in 2006, with a generous gift from Yahoo!. (The Knight Fellowships itself has been around since 1966. A young Jerry Yang first met with the Knight Fellows in the spring of 1995.)

The first Yahoo! Fellow was Imtiaz Ali, from Pakistan, where journalism is a deadly occupation. But there could hardly be country that fits our definition better than Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe’s regime has systematically and brutally cracked down on anyone who disagreed with it — opposition politicians, the press, human rights activists and others. Violet Gonda has been banned from the country (actually, the justice minister said the country would welcome her back — but only in prison) so she works in exile, at a small radio station, SW Radio Africa, in London. This station broadcasts uncensored news about Zimbabwe back into the country by any means possible, including text messaging. (Want to get a taste of her work? Listen to these two interviews, one with a Mugabe spokesman and the other with Desmond Tutu.) We were proud to have her for the year at Stanford, where she studied the development of news media in emerging democracies. Now she is back in London. If there’s a God in heaven, someday she will someday be able to return to her homeland.

And as she leaves, we are ready to welcome Abebe Gellaw, of Ethiopia, who will be the 2008-09 Yahoo! International Fellow. Like Violet, Abebe is in exile. He left after the Ethiopian government started rounding up and arresting journalists in November 2005. He is editor-in chief of Addis Voice, a London-based website devoted independent news about Ethiopia. He will arrive in August for his year.

Journalists are under attack around the world, and organizations like the Committee To Protect Journalists make sure that those attacks are brought to light. It makes me feel proud that the Knight Fellowships and Yahoo! have teamed up to provide a fellowship at Stanford every year for someone who is bearing the brunt of those attacks.

Jim Bettinger
Director, John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists
Stanford University

With gas prices soaring to new heights every day, who can afford to drive? At Yahoo!, we are lucky to have a Commute Alternatives program that allows us get out of our cars, save money on gas, and fight global warming all at the same time. So to help folks outside of Yahoo! take public transportation, we asked Yahoo! employees to give away 100 commuter checks to encourage their friends and family to go green.

As part of Yahoo! for Good’s Purple Acts of Kindness program, a monthly initiative that surprises and delights our local community with random acts of generosity, we reached out to Yahoos all over the country to invite them to share a story about someone they know who could put a $50 commuter check to good use. In just a matter of hours, we gave away commuter checks to 100 deserving individuals. Here are just a few of their inspiring stories:

• “I’d like to get commuter checks for my girlfriend. She commutes every day from San Jose to Oakland on the Capitol Corridor train. She wakes up at 5am every morning to catch the limited schedule. She doesn’t get home till 7:30. She could take the easy way out & drive everyday to save time, but she really wants to help the environment by taking another car off the road.”
• “My girlfriend currently commutes back and forth from Fremont to Oakland. She is a single Mom who is a nurse for the Children’s Hospital in Oakland. She has to be at work at 5:00 to 3:30.I know she could use the pass to save on both money and sleep. =)”
• “I’d like to give my dad a commuter check because at age 58, he has taken up riding Caltrain and his bike to and from work (3 mile bike ride to the station, Caltrain from Hillsdale to San Jose, and then an 8 mile bike ride to his office).”

To find out how you can deal with high gas prices and help the environment at the same time, check out these tips on Yahoo! Green.

Connie Chan
Associate Manager, Yahoo! for Good

Photo from richardmasoner

Forty-six years ago today, a guy taking classes at the London School of Economics grabbed some friends and performed at a small jazz club in London. They didn’t get paid a dime. Two years later, they outranked the Beatles in popularity. After you hum a few bars of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” see what wild horses dragged out of us this week:

• Be the BOSS: We’re sitting on a goldmine of search infrastructure and thought it was about time we shared. Enter Yahoo! Search BOSS (short for Build Your Own Search Service), a new open Web services platform that brings DIY to one of the most valuable assets on the Web. If you’re a developer or owner of a site of any size, we’re giving you the keys to creating unlimited search mashups for the search experience of your dreams. If you’re a user, be prepared for searching to take on a whole new dimension when you’re visiting your favorite sites. We’re leveling the playing field and want everyone to play ball. More here, here, and here.
• Beta be gone: It’s official. The old My Yahoo! is being sent to Sunny Acres Farm on Monday, to be replaced with the *new* My Yahoo!. You’ll find a pile of new content like third-party (gasp!) modules from Netflix, Facebook, and Gmail, as well as custom-designed modules with more of the best stuff from select publishers (Entertainment Weekly, Forbes, People, Salon, Wall Street Journal, etc.). You also get more flexibility and control over page layout and easier customization tools. What’s more, the team has launched the My Yahoo Content Gallery, which presents cool cherry-picked modules that you can add with one click. And they’ve improved the search capabilities to surface content that’s related to your query. More here. Mine, mine. All mine!
• Pinpointing your peeps: Ever wondered where all those people you’ve met in your favorite Yahoo! Group are from? Now you can get a visual representation through People Map Beta, a new “grouplet” launched by our new “Groups Lab” team. Group owners and/or moderators fire off a form to their members, who voluntarily complete it with information that puts them on a map and becomes a dynamic mini-profile. More here. Stay tuned for more cool hacks from the Lab.
• I’m busy but this is really funny: If you’re an avid user of Yahoo! Messenger status messages, you know what a bummer it is when you have to tell people you’re busy, on the phone, away from your desk, etc. That’s because it means your friend won’t be able to click on your latest favorite video link. Or see that you’re peeved by coffee grounds. Or see what song you’re listening to. In the latest Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta, you’ll notice your days of sacrifice are now over. You can have your cake and eat it, too. More here on how to mix work with pleasure.

Subscribe to the RSS feed (or add it to My Yahoo!) to get this Product Pulse every week.

When the Web first appeared, people browsed for the sheer serendipitous kick of it, but soon the Web became a place to get things done. Web search has witnessed a similar transformation: search engines have graduated from fielding ego queries to becoming the starting point for being productive. While search engines have evolved with these changing needs, we think search technology is far from mature.

What if your favorite news site had a search engine you could turn to when news breaks that not only surfaces the best articles on that topic, but also the most relevant content from across the Web? Or what if your search engine understood your social relationships or your site preferences and presented results with that in mind? When you’re searching for new music, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a search engine that knew your and your friends’ taste in music, drew in reviews from across the Web, and recommended songs you might enjoy?

Today we’re announcing a service that brings ideas like these a bit closer to reality.

Yahoo! Search BOSS, which stands for Build Your Own Search Service, is a new open Web services platform from Yahoo! Search that will allow developers and companies of all sizes to leverage one of the most valuable assets on the Web, the Yahoo! Search infrastructure. It lets them realize their own vision of what a search experience should be, enabling unlimited mash-ups and disrupting the search landscape.

BOSS will enable developers and companies to easily enter the search industry –- without large capital or resource expenditures — unleashing a wave of search innovation beyond any one of today’s search principals. Now anyone –- your favorite shopping site, an entrepreneur with a great idea or a start-up developer –- can tap into Yahoo!’s technology to create their own Web search experience without the infrastructure or talent resources needed to create one from scratch.

The result is that you’ll have more choice and flexibility in finding whatever you’re looking for on the Web –- just as you now have far more programming options with cable TV than when there were just three networks. (For examples of how BOSS technology can be used or to get started building your own search engine, visit the Yahoo! Developer Network.)

Stay tuned for more to come on how we are fundamentally changing the way you search.

Prabhakar Raghavan
Chief Strategist for Yahoo! Search

Getty Images has always been interested in discovering, championing and marketing great imagery. The availability of economical digital cameras and the dramatic evolution of distribution technologies over the last five years have changed the landscape of our photography industry in exciting ways. It has had a hugely democratizing effect and now image makers all over the globe are able to share and develop their imagery within global communities such as Flickr.

We recognise that the many designers, art buyers and art directors that make up our client base visit sites like Flickr to find daily inspiration for their projects. As a result of a new partnership between Getty Images and Flickr, they will now not only be able to view the imagery, but easily license it, too.

As the unrivalled experts in the licensing of intellectual property — imagery, footage, multimedia and music — Getty Images will be able to work with Flickr to easily make the commercial licensing of what is, in effect, the world’s image library a reality.

Apart from the value of the accomplished and experienced photographers that contribute to Flickr, the addition of this content also brings a new flavour of photography to Getty Images and its customers — there is another world of photography that will afford an authentic view into the daily lives of people around the world. The places they live, the food they eat, the people they love and the milestones in their lives.

Sometimes the most amazing imagery is more about moments in time and place than it is about technical expertise. This partnership gives our clients access to thousands of these moments.

We congratulate the Flickr community for its fresh collection of high-quality images, and we look forward to working closely with the community.

Andy Saunders
Vice President of Creative Imagery
Getty Images

Whether you celebrate with pyrotechnics, battle re-enactments, red-white-and-blue parades, patriotic ballads, or rabble-rousing barbecues, today marks 232 years of severing ties with King George and his British Empire. Take that for taxation without representation! After you pause to thank that guy with the disproportionately large signature and his fellow forefathers, check out what we declared this week:

• Upcoming feels refreshed: It’s summer and you can’t afford to miss a single kite festival, music festival, puppet show, or free Slurpee day. The team at Upcoming just made it easier for you to find things to do with a sleek new interface and more types of events. Now you can browse by smaller-scale local categories like farmers’ markets, craft fairs, and street festivals. In addition to making over the front page, they’ve added “What’s Nearby” info, so you can find parking, a place to catch a bite, and even the closest cash machine so you don’t have to bum bucks from a buddy. More here and here.
• Heavenly headers: Scrolling is out, tabs are in. That’s why My Yahoo! has spruced up its header with a new tabbed design, letting you create additional customized My Yahoo! pages to your heart’s delight. Just click “new tab,” name your tab, add content, and set up your page’s appearance. You can have up to nine My Yahoo! tabs, compartmentalizing your many interests to specific pages. Now you can finally keep your tattoo passion neatly separated from your knitting obsession. More here.
• Fireworks finder: Not sure where to head for that pyrotechnic extravaganza this year? Looking for pie at a great county fair? Go visit our Fourth of July fireworks and event finder. While you’re there, peruse 100 milestone documents of U.S. history, pick up a picnic recipe or two, and see what the most popular Independence Day search terms are. Forgot the URL? Just click on the star-spangled masthead on our front page and you’re there. Happy Fourth!

Subscribe to the RSS feed (or add it to My Yahoo!) to get this Product Pulse every week.

With the 2008 Olympic Games just around the corner, this is a nostalgic time for many Americans. After all, who can’t remember their favorite Olympic moment?

I’m no different, except my favorite moments were spent atop the Olympic medal podium. My formative years were with the U.S. gymnastics team, and for three unforgettable Games, I got to compete with and against the best in the world.

Needless to say, a lot has changed for me since I last wore the red, white and blue. Instead of worrying about my next floor exercise, I’m worrying about how I’ll be able to stay up late enough to watch the women compete. I’m a spectator now, and I want to make sure my next favorite sports moment isn’t happening while I’m sleeping or driving to the grocery store!

This made me realize I needed to be in Beijing this year, but I haven’t forgotten how it feels for everyone back at home. That’s why I’ll be joining fellow Olympians Gretchen Bleiler and Mike Powell to cover the 2008 Games on the Yahoo! Sports Summer Games site. We’ll work alongside Yahoo!’s experts to give every fan a minute-by-minute account of what’s happening with the world’s greatest athletes, day or night.

I know, you’re thinking that still won’t help when your favorite sport isn’t covered in the papers, or is only on Channel 390 at 3:25 a.m. But Yahoo! is offering some new features to help you stay on top of all the sports – like the Watch List, which lets fans track results, news and medals for their favorite countries, sports and athletes. You won’t even need to worry about staying next to your computer, because Yahoo!’s mobile Web site gives fans the option of tracking the medal count, getting the latest news, and seeing photos right on your mobile phone.

So while you’re half way around the world from the Games this summer, don’t wonder what it’s like to be there. Just visit Yahoo! Sports Summer Games and look for me and my friends; we’ll tell you – anytime you want. It’s not a trip to the podium, but it’s pretty close!

Dominique Dawes
Yahoo! Sports
1992, 1996, 2000 U.S. Olympic Gymnastics Team

Last week, when Yahoo!’s home state of California joined the state of Massachusetts, as well as Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, and Spain in extending legal recognition of marriage to gay and lesbian couples, the annual June Pride events immediately took on a special meaning to many, including Yahoo!’s LGBT employees, friends, families, and supporters. The civil rights changes we’ve all been witness to recently inspired us to learn more about how people celebrate Pride, not just in our own backyard, but throughout the diverse world in which Yahoo! users live.

The results surprised even us, as we discovered official Pride celebrations in all 50 U.S. states and in 64 other countries. From the world’s largest LGBT Pride Parade – that would be in Sao Paulo, Brazil, with an estimated five million attendees in 2008 – to the more understated Rainbow Kite Flying day in cities throughout China, celebrations of our community’s diversity occur in many different flavors.

With Pride events scattered around the globe and throughout the year, we thought our local festivities would be the perfect opportunity to re-launch Yahoo!’s annual Pride site with some fun new additions at its first permanent destination: pride.yahoo.com.

Features of this new site include:

• The World Map of Pride – A resource for locating and browsing the breadth of LGBT Pride celebrations around the globe. Search the world map for festivals, parades, film fests, and other major events near you … and invite your friends to join in.
• The Past Century in LGBT History and Civil Rights – An interactive timeline exploring many of the key milestones for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community over the last 100 years.
• Visions of Pride on Flickr – Photos from Yahoo! users of the various Pride celebrations around the world.
• And easy access to the latest LGBT-related news, sports, entertainment, and community resources.

If you’re in the area, please also plan to join the 500,000+ people at San Francisco’s 38th annual LGBT Pride Celebration and Parade this Sunday, June 29. We’ll be demo’ing our shiny new Pride site and handing out some fabulous gifts at Yahoo!’s booth on Grove Street between Larkin and Polk. We’re also a sponsor of the 32nd annual San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival which runs from June 19-29. We’d be thrilled to see you there.

Happy Pride!

Drew Geishecker
Yahoo! Network Services
Co-chair, Yahoo! Pride

Today is the Summer Solstice, which means Summer’s offically here - well in the Northern Hemisphere at least. This is also the longest day of the year. Wondering what to do with those extra hours of daylight? Pull up a lounge chair, break out the tequila and check out what we’ve been up to this week.

Yahoo! Mail goes vintage: Frustrated by not being able to to get the email address you want? We’ve heard you and we’re doing something about it with the introduction of two new email domains: ymail.com and rocketmail.com. If “rocketmail” sounds familiar it’s because it’s vintage Internet. RocketMail was one of the first free webmail services in the ’90s, was acquired by Yahoo! in 1997 and formed the basis of the first version of Yahoo! Mail. So, whether your style is brand spanking new (ymail.com), hip vintage (rocketmail.com) or comfortable classic (yahoo.com), head on over to http://new.mail.yahoo.com/addresses and get the email address you’ve always wanted.

Media Player gets foxy: Check out the latest wily addition to the Yahoo! Media Player. Through a rather clever integration with FoxyTunes you can now control all of the music inside your browser as well as outside of it. The latest version of FoxyTunes enhances any page that has music on it by automatically adding the Yahoo! Media Player to that page. This allows you to play any track on that page or even the whole page as one big playlist. The best thing is that once you start playing a web page with the new player you can instantly control it with FoxyTunes, even while surfing in other tabs or browser windows - just make sure to leave the page that’s currently playing somewhere in the background. And, if you close that page, your FoxyTunes will automatically switch back to your regular media player, be it iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, etc. Now that’s foxy!

Kids and technology - a parents’ guide: Wondering where to find the best information on keeping kids safe on the web? Well, look no further. Yahoo! Kids launched a new Parents channel this week bringing together some of the best resources in the business. Larry Magid, longtime technology journalist, Internet safety advocate and co-director of ConnectSafely.org, will be blogging alongside Ann Collier who’s been providing some of the best kid-tech news to parents on NetFamilyNews. Together they co-authored “MySpace Unravelled: A Parents’ Guide to Teen Social Networking.” So head on over to learn how to help your kids navigate the online world safely.

Internet Explorer - more del.icio.us: Last month we unleashed an early beta release of an Internet Explorer version of our del.icio.us bookmarks extension. And this week you can now officially begin to enjoy social bookmarking on Microsoft Windows XP and Vista operating systems. While the features are similar to its Firefox 3 extension counterpart, this little number also has more unique additions including faster searching within larger accounts of bookmarks and signals for new network activity and links for you. Learn more and download it now here.

Smithsonian goes to the Commons: The Commons photo collection on Flickr welcomes its fourth member in the shape of the Smithsonian Institute. As you’d expect the collection is rich in history – from photos by the Institute’s First Photographer, Thomas Smillie, to portraits of Artists, Scientists and Inventors (yes even Albert Einstein makes an appearance) and People and The Post. The contemporary collections include American Celebrations and a documentary from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. And don’t forget to check out collections from the other three members: The Library of Congress, Australia’s Powerhouse Museum and The Brooklyn Museum.

Ever tried to sign up for a new email account, only to find that the name you want is unavailable? We hear you. As the most popular email service in the world, Yahoo! Mail has more than a quarter of a billion users worldwide *. That’s a LOT of email addresses in use already. With that in mind, we’re making millions of desirable email addresses available today with the launch of two shiny new domains: ymail.com and rocketmail.com.

If “rocketmail” rings a bell, it’s because it’s vintage Internet. Back in the ’90s, RocketMail was one of the very first free Webmail services. Yahoo! acquired it in 1997 and built the first version of Yahoo! Mail based on RocketMail technology. Some of the original RocketMail users chose to keep their RocketMail IDs to show that they had been among the first users of Webmail. Now, like so many beloved classics that are hip again –- cupcakes, big sunglasses, Indiana Jones, The New Kids on the Block –- RocketMail is back for a new generation to enjoy.

These new domains will offer the same great Yahoo! Mail experience, like unlimited storage, integrated instant messaging, free text messaging, and localized versions around the world. And, as always, a Yahoo! email address works for everything across Yahoo!, from checking Mail to using Messenger, Flickr, Groups, Finance and more. The added bonus is that with these two new domains, you’ll have the chance to land your perfect email address to help reflect who you are - which is what the majority of you are looking for according to a recent Yahoo! survey conducted by Harris Interactive**.

So whether your style is brand spanking new (ymail.com), hip vintage (rocketmail.com), or comfortable classic (yahoo.com), surf on over to http://new.mail.yahoo.com/addresses and get that email address you’ve always wanted.      

John Kremer
Vice President, Yahoo! Mail

*According to comScore Media Matrix, April 2008.

**In a survey of 2,035 online adults ages 18+ conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of Yahoo!, 56% of online adults indicated that they want their email address to reflect who they are.

Every day, it seems, kids are using technology more for fun, for school, and for keeping in touch with friends. Keeping up with everything they do with technology is a real challenge for parents.

Kids don’t email often anymore. They text-message and send instant messages faster than you can figure out what they’re saying, and sometimes faster than they know what they’re saying. The new iPhone will be available in July; just what does that mean for the kids who use iPhones? There are plenty of controls parents can put in place to help guide their kids to use the web safely, but it’s not always the simplest information to find. And even when we put controls in place, kids grow into teens quickly and move beyond simple controls. They need to learn how to navigate the online world safely, and parents need to know how to help them find their way.

There are some great resources on the web for parents to learn all of this, of course. It’s just often hard to know where to look. Yahoo! Kids launches its new Parents channel this week with some of the best resources and top minds who have been looking out for kids on the web under one roof: Yahoo! Kids Parents.

You’ll find Larry Magid, a longtime technology journalist and Internet safety advocate blogging about safety issues, including what parents need to know about the new, less-expensive iPhone that will surely make its way into more kids’ hands. Larry contributes to CBS News, The New York Times, The San Jose Mercury News and several other major news outlets.

He also is the co-director of ConnectSafely.org, an interactive web site for teens, parents, and educators with Anne Collier, who also is blogging on Yahoo! Kids Parents. Anne and Larry are the co-authors of “MySpace Unraveled: A Parent’s Guide to Teen Social Networking.” Anne has been providing some of the best kid-tech news to parents in an accessible, measured way on NetFamilyNews, and she’s now bringing her well-informed, clear-eyed perspective to Yahoo! Kids.

As a Yahoo! Tech blogger for the past few years, I followed Anne and Larry’s take on kids and technology closely. I also checked in often on Common Sense Media, a wonderful resource for parents to vet movies, video games – all media available for kids to consume. Now, you can find all of these and more expert voices and resources on Yahoo! Kids Parents to make sense of the latest technology advances and what they mean for kids of all ages. I’ll also be blogging on Yahoo! Kids Parents, in addition to blogging for my daily Yahoo! gig, editor of Shine Work+Money.

Finally, a place on the web to find reliable information from several trusted sources about kids, technology, and online safety.

Dory Devlin

Yahoo! Kids Parents Tech Blogger

Photo from galina135

Here I am again, writing to you from CommunicAsia in Singapore, where we’re making an even bigger splash than the last time you heard from me. As in other regions, we’ve been making massive inroads in the mobile markets in Asia over the past year.

We’ve definitely proven Yahoo! to be the partner of choice for mobile carriers around the world. How? By making our products mobile-first. From Yahoo! Mail SMS Alerts, which we just announced in India, to Yahoo! Go 3.0, we want to give users around the world the best possible mobile experience — no matter what mobile device they’re using.

Let’s start with mobile search. Today, we announced five new Yahoo! oneSearch™ partnerships with leading mobile operators in India, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Taiwan. With these partnerships in place, we now reach 95% of the mobile users in the Philippines and more than 50% of the mobile users in India, one of the fastest growing markets in the world.

We’ve also introduced an English version of Yahoo! oneSearch with voice that recognizes regional accents for India and Singapore. I’m also excited to announce the launch of Yahoo! Go 3.0 for India, Australia and Southeast Asia, including a local language version for Indonesia.

And we’re not stopping there. Today we also announced several new mobile widgets specifically geared to the Asian markets. We’ve got something for music lovers (MTV Asia), sports fans (Yahoo! Cricket), movie fans (Yahoo! India Movies Showtimes), and even one for fans of the hit Australian TV show “Home and Away” to name but a few of the widgets added to our growing roster.

For those of you wondering how mobile brings home the bacon, we’ve got big news there, too. Mobile operators around the world are looking to content and services for additional revenue growth. Enter mobile advertising, which will ultimately offer these carriers new revenue streams.

This brings me to my final announcement here at CommunicAsia. We’ve just added Malaysia’s Maxis Communications Berhad and India’s Idea Cellular Limited to our growing list of mobile advertising partners, which includes AT&T, T-Mobile International and Vodafone UK.

With mobile usage nearing ubiquity in Asia, we’re really pleased with the increasing array of services we’re offering this important market. And we believe these latest announcements show that we are on the right path. We’re getting ever more excited about where that path will lead us. Keep an eye out for what we do next.

Dave Ko
Managing Director and VP, Connected Life Asia Pacific

Photo from KarlMarx

There’s no denying that celebrity news draws a crowd. And we’re particularly proud of the size of our omg! crowd after only a year. Handily beating TMZ many months, omg! has risen to the top of the Comscore heap in record time with our addictive take on celebrity news. From red carpets to hotties and baby bumps galore, omg! has covered Hollywood at its best and most embarrassing moments.

And what a year it’s been… two million user comments, 2,000 photo stories, and the launch of “Goddess,” our new celebrity mom blog. And Hollywood did not disappoint — we had an endless stream of material to work with. Britney bottomed out, rebounded and went on vacation with Mel Gibson. Halle, Angelina, Tori, Jessica, Jamie Lynn, J Lo, Nicole and Christina broke out the bugaboos for new babies. Meanwhile, Paris and LiLo spent some QT in the county jail, Amy Winehouse wandered the streets of London, and Heidi and Spencer broke up, got back together, and went to every party around town.

Phew! Here’s to another year of celebrity break-ups and shake-ups, fashion faux pas, tiny dogs, big sunglasses, time in the clink, and even bigger handbags!

Sibyl Goldman
GM, Yahoo! Entertainment

Forget throwing salt over your shoulder and avoiding black cats. Today is Blame Someone Else Day. Late for a meeting? Forgot to charge your cell phone? Overdue mortgage payment? Just not your problem. After you’ve passed the buck to an unsuspecting scapegoat, read up on what we were culpable for this week:

• Video revisions: Head on over to Yahoo! Video and you’ll see we’ve spruced up a few features. By popular demand, you’ll now find a bevy of sharing options under each video so you can shoot it off to the world via Digg, Facebook, MySpace, del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. We also made it easier to check out stats, which now includes how often a video has been favorited. And, perhaps coolest of all, you can now play back videos without leaving the search results page. Makes looking for just the right baby hamster video a cinch. More here.
• Didn’t you see my blog?: If your friends get sore when you don’t keep up with their latest blogging brilliance, we’re here to help. Upgrade to Yahoo! Messenger for Windows (9.0, Beta) and your friends’ most recent blog post will show up as their status message, courtesy of the MyBlogLog wizards. You’ll also be able to keep track of their MyBlogLog activity, like when they add contacts, join communities, or add tags. As the MyBlogLog team eloquently put it, they’re helping transform your IM it into a “socially aware RSS Reader.” More here.
• Final for Firefox 3: A while back, we tested the waters with a Firefox 3 extension beta for Del.icio.us bookmarks. And now it’s official. After hundreds of thousands of downloads and copious user feedback, it’s live and kicking (and better and more stable, thankyouverymuch). It’s a great way to search and manage your bookmarks and keep tabs on your Del.icio.us network. More features are coming down the pike. Still using Firefox 2? It works just fine there, too. More here.

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It’s no longer a rumor. We have inked a deal with Google in which AdSense ads can run alongside Yahoo! search results in the U.S. and Canada.

Our strategy to fully realize Yahoo!’s potential is based on the convergence of search and display — the next big opportunity in the rapidly growing online ad industry. This agreement helps us capitalize on that. We’re moving full speed ahead to execute with speed, commitment, and passion.

It’s also in keeping with our open strategy — WebMD sells their audiences on Yahoo!, Yelp can customize how their local search results appear using Search Monkey, advertisers and publishers will buy and sell in an open marketplace with our upcoming AMP! from Yahoo!, and we’re now opening our paid search results to Google.

I wanted to put this arrangement in perspective and comment on what it is and what it isn’t. First, it does not signal that Yahoo! plans to exit paid search. Quite the contrary. Through the financial benefits of better monetizing our search traffic, we’ll be investing in search services and ad platforms, including Panama. An independent search business is critical to our future. We will retain complete flexibility and will call the shots on where and how often Google ads will appear. While Google has better advertiser coverage in some query areas, we still have the ability to provide Panama ads where they are most valuable.

Second, this deal is good for competition. It may seem counterintuitive that doing a deal with a competitor would improve our competitive position. But as search and display continue their convergence, it puts Yahoo! in a better position to innovate and compete aggressively with Google and others for ad dollars. It also offers advertisers more choice and publishers gain better distribution and monetization to grow their business.

Finally, this agreement is non-exclusive. We remain completely free to display any paid search listings across our properties — whether from Yahoo!, Google, or any other third parties.

We’ve done something important today. We are directly addressing one key element in Yahoo!’s strategy to lead the way in search and display. I believe it puts us on a faster track to creating stockholder value and strengthening our advertising leadership.

It is, of course, just one step. We’ll continue to look at all of our alternatives to advance our strategies and enhance growth and profitability.

Jerry Yang
Chief Yahoo and CEO

Our annual meeting of stockholders is about seven weeks away (it’s Friday, August 1st). Given that proxy contests usually generate goodly sums of materials for stockholder consideration, I’d like to direct you to a dedicated annual meeting site that our investor relations folks have created to help you stay current on Yahoo!’s perspectives, proxy materials, press releases, and SEC filings related to the meeting. That’s where you’ll want to go for the latest (not here).

With that out of the way, we can return to our regularly scheduled corporate blog content.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Seventy-five years ago today, a guy in New Jersey advertised his new movie theater with: “The whole family is welcome, regardless of how noisy the children are.” That’s because he was pioneer of the drive-in movie. After you finish feeling nostalgic about flicks al fresco, check out what we put up on the screen this week:

• Flickr groupies: If you’re a Flickr user who loves to share and share alike, you’ll dig the new groups feature that just debuted. Now when you visit any group, you’ll see an “Add Photos” link that launches a new tool that lets you add up to 6 photos or videos at a time from your photostream, your sets, tagged items, geo-tagged items, items uploaded on a specific date, etc. It makes it a whole lot easier to participate in groups that float your boat — whether you’re into photos of Utrecht, spiderwebs, backpacking the Northwest, polydactyl cats, or altered street signs.
• Opening your address book: Personal information geeks just scored big time. We’ve released the API for Yahoo! Address Book. What, you’re not schooled in browser-based authentication? Well, let’s just say the developer world is going to have a lot of fun building useful products and features for you by gaining authorized access to Yahoo! Address Books. Imagine taking your Address Book with you whenever you shop for gifts online. Or confidently allowing a third-party social network site to make it easy for you to send invitations to your contacts. Or being able to look up phone numbers for mobile applications. We can’t wait to see what those developers come up with.
• My (green) Yahoo!: With oil reaching an historic $140 a barrel, who doesn’t want to become obsessed with greener alternatives? Time to populate My Yahoo! with pertinent goods. The Hybrid Cars module lets you stay on top of all things Prius, plugin hybrid, and beyond. And the green-travel module from Yahoo! Groups lets you keep tab on tips from other environ-enthusiasts. It’s good for you, it’s good for the Earth.

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Remember SearchMonkey, our new open initiative to let developers and site owners mashup helpful data with Yahoo! Search results? If you want to be among the first to experience these enhanced results, you need to check out the latest element in the SearchMonkey rollout: The Yahoo! Search Gallery. This beta feature lets you choose the content modules that will appear in your results. (Did I mention it’s in beta? We had a few bumps out of the gate but have since addressed them.)

Here’s how to personalize it: After logging in and conducting a search in any Yahoo! Search box, you’ll notice a “Customize” link to the right of the yellow “Search” box. Select “Browse Gallery” in the pull-down menu and you’ll be taken to a list that, at last count, includes nearly 40 different options for enhancing Yahoo! Search. For example, if you select “Yelp,” your search results will include things like a preview of photos, reviews, rating, address, and phone number. If you select “Epicurious,” your search for pumpkin pie will include links to specific recipes from the popular foodie site. By selecting “Facebook,” any time you search for a name, you’ll get a thumbnail of that person’s public Facebook profile right within your search results. Other great enhancement options include LinkedIn, Howstuffworks.com, MTV.com, WebMD, Amazon, and a host of Yahoo! properties like Finance, Real Estate, Health, Autos, Local and Shopping.

We’ve set a few initial defaults for you with Yahoo! Video, Flickr and Yahoo! Travel and we’ll add to that list once we see which applications are most useful and popular. For the time being, if you want to see SearchMonkey results when you search, you need to add Enhanced Results and Infobars from the Search Gallery.

And, of course, this is just the beginning. It’s only been two weeks since we unleashed developer creativity on all of the possibilities SearchMonkey has to offer. There are plenty more innovations to come and a bunch of applications in the works.

Check out our Search Blog for more skinny and go here if you’re a developer ready for some monkey business.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor