I don’t imagine that anyone from Southeast Louisiana will ever forget August 29, 2005. I was in California, glued to the TV, watching as the monster hurricane pummeled my hometown.

I spent the following days calling my parents who had evacuated to Memphis and combing the Internet for clues on how friends were doing, and trying to find out what might be left of my parents’ home of 25 years. I finally found refuge in a Yahoo! Group for people from my hometown who were trying to locate loved ones and assess damage from the storm. I spent hours on this site, which became my virtual home-base for information relating to Katrina.

Meanwhile, I had just graduated from business school and was in the process of weighing job offers. Needless to say, corporate responses to Katrina figured significantly into my decision. The day Katrina struck, Yahoo! created a Yahoo! Store for the American Red Cross and raised $57 million in donations. Shortly thereafter, Yahoo! created a search tool that combed multiple missing persons sites and the company sent a team of volunteers to the Astrodome to help refugees navigate the Internet. Here was a company with the tools, values, and reach to enact positive social change on a scale few organizations — for-profit or non-profit — could rival. My decision was made.

Over the next months, I spent nearly every evening on the phone with my family and friends as they struggled to rebuild their homes and careers. My parents’ home had seven trees through the roof and 13 inches of water. Each day brought more challenges for my parents, from crooked contractors who took their money but didn’t show, to insurance companies not wanting to pay up, to 6-month long waiting lists for basic home necessities like toilet fixtures. It was 11 months before my parents’ home had a working shower. I felt completely powerless living so far away. It’s tough at times like these not to bring your personal life to work at least a little bit. So my Yahoo! colleague Terra Carmichael and I decided to do our part for the recovery efforts.

A lot of the press and government attention were focused on the human tragedy of Katrina, which was absolutely staggering, but meanwhile little attention was being placed on economic recovery. According to The New York Times, less than 4% of federal aid earmarked for Louisiana Katrina recovery will be used for economic development, and only $38 million has been set aside for possible grants to small companies.

We asked our management teams if we could go to the region to help spark economic recovery, especially among small businesses, the Gulf Coast’s economic lifeblood. They agreed almost instantly. Thirty Yahoos, including Chief Yahoo and Louisiana native David Filo, plus our friends from BellSouth and e-commerce partner Solid Cactus, flew to New Orleans to give away our small business services — with hands-on-training and $1,500 in free services. More than 200 small businesses participated, and 150 brought their businesses online that day. It was inspiring to meet so many entrepreneurs devoted to rebuilding the Gulf Coast. I encourage you to check out some of the great sites started that day, such as Authorized Optics, Silk Road Furniture, and Syble Fine Jewelry. As Authorized Optics’ Chris Wisecarver said, “I don’t think people understand that economic recovery is directly tied to the human recovery.”

On this anniversary, please consider the following:

1) The region needs your support: DonorsChoose and Network for Good are among the many superb non-profits helping out.

2) Press your employers: There’s so much corporations can do to help. What is your company doing? Ask them and press them to do more!

3) Visit the region and buy its goods: As one of my high school friends so eloquently stated: “If you visit New Orleans, and celebrate its existence, you will make the city live again.”

Whatever you do, please do something. A year later the region is struggling to rebuild and recover. It’s up to all of us to play our roles in saving this unique and culturally important region of our country.

Melissa Chaika Sobel
Louisiana native and Yahoo! Small Business marketing manager

Gulf Coast entrepreneurs learn how to put their businesses online at Yahoo!’s Back in Business event after Hurricane Katrina uprooted their lives

When I was in college, I remember a few guys getting awfully excited after sending a message (something about pizza) via a VAX system in the library over to the physics lab. I was mystified—c’mon, are you that lazy? Those were the days: Communicating with a professor meant signing up for office hours at 2:30 on a Thursday, and getting a paper in on time meant sprinting to the computer lab with a diskette to wait frantically as the dot-matrix printer took its sweet time swinging from side to side. Suffice it to say, the Internet as we know it was the stuff of dreams back in the late 80s.

That’s why I was fascinated as I listened to seven of our beloved summer interns (ages 17-34) banter on about the Internet’s role in academia today during a recent roundtable discussion. (If you missed the first one on social media, catch it here.) I discovered that a site called SparkNotes has replaced the bumblebee-colored Cliff Notes we all hid from our teachers. And that the Dewey Decimal System has been marginalized by sites like Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, Google Scholar, Digg and Howstuffworks — though I was heartened to hear predictions that the good old-fashioned library won’t soon go the way of the buffalo. Language translation sites like Babel Fish are helpful resources but continue to suffer lazy fools gladly. The rumor mill about which professors give droning lectures has been replaced with RateMyProfessor and the like. Lousy note-takers now have salvation with ZeroHomework. And in spite of easy access to papers published online, kids are vigilant about plagiarism, thanks to sites like TurnItIn.

All of our interns have since returned to dorm rooms, cafeterias and library carrels around the world. They leave me wondering how different high school and college would’ve been with DSL juicing my life. Clearly it’s benefited this smart bunch.

• Click here to listen to (and download) the discussion.

• Click here for the full transcript.

Front row (L to R): Gaston DeVigne, Richard Crowley, Chen Yang
Back row (L to R): Doreen Bloch, Nate Ebrahimoon, Addy Lee, Brianna Satinoff

About a year ago, we received the following note from Nikki Pope, one of our wonderful Yahoo! Groups users:

I just wanted to tell you how much my family has relied on our Yahoo! Group to keep us updated on where all of our displaced relatives have landed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. We’ve had our group for years and it’s seen us through births, deaths, weddings, moves, graduations, and our biannual family reunions. Not until the past two weeks, however, did we realize just how much we’ve come to rely on our Message Board to keep us in the know.

We’re one of the luckier families. Although many of my relatives have lost everything they own (we hail from New Orleans and the surrounding area), no lives were lost. Everyone is accounted for (finally) and we can all breathe a little easier. Now that the scary part is over, we’re using our Message Board to help our family members find housing, jobs, and comfort.

Thank you so much for this wonderful service. Oh, I almost forgot, we’re having our next family reunion in July 2006 right here in the Bay Area. Of course we’ve been using Yahoo! to coordinate the event (it’s always a huge blast). I know this sounds crazy, but if you or someone from Yahoo! would like to stop by while the family’s here, I know we’ll want to thank you in person…

We didn’t think that sounded crazy at all! Joanna Stevens and I, both of Yahoo! Corporate Communications, were more than happy to attend the recent Smith family reunion in San Jose, California. In fact, we learned a little more about just how useful Yahoo! Groups can be. Nikki’s extended family (all four generations descending from Lena and John W.B. Smith, who had 11 children!) has been using Yahoo! Groups for many years to share photos, plan reunions, and generally keep track of each other as they scatter farther around the globe.

As soon as we arrived, Nikki gave us our very own reunion shirts (with the Smith family logo, no less) and said we could be honorary Smith Family members — yay! And then, the storytelling began, and we heard firsthand accounts from cousins Rhonda Greene and Henry Turner of the family’s experience after Hurricane Katrina.

After being stuck at the Superdome in New Orleans for over a week, Henry was finally able to make his way onto a bus heading to Dallas. Only when he got to Dallas was Henry able to call Rhonda, who lived nearby. The whole family was sick with worry about Henry by this point, and Rhonda was relieved to end their agony by posting a quick message on the family’s Yahoo! Group saying, “We found Henry!” — probably the most meaningful message ever received by the more than 100 relatives who were Group members.

After meeting everyone and taking some photos, we had a yummy lunch catered by Uncle Frank’s BBQ. The brisket, Cajun corn, and cornbread were D-licious. I love being around big, fun, welcoming families like this one. Maybe I can find a way to make it to Houston for their next reunion.

Meagan Busath
Senior PR Manager for Yahoo! Groups (among other things)

I love my job, I really do. But sometimes we get so wrapped up in the cerebral that we forget why we do what we do. Events like our recent Purple Act of Kindness remind me why I work in Yahoo! for Good.

My department started Purple Acts of Kindness this spring so we could reach Yahoo!’s local communities with unexpected, generous acts to surprise, delight and, in small ways, make the impossible possible. We’ve committed seven Purple Acts so far, including going on personalized shopping sprees for underprivileged schools in California and India, taking New York City and Los Angeles high-school students to screenings of “An Inconvenient Truth,” hosting hundreds of YMCA kids at a San Francisco Giants game, and flying a severely injured veteran to participate in his battalion’s homecoming from Iraq. When I told my mom we do these every month, she said they reaffirmed her belief in corporations… I think it’s because this is the only part of my job she actually understands.

Our latest Purple Act was for the Bayview Hunters Point Center for Arts and Technology (BAYCAT), a nonprofit that teaches art and technology to underserved youth and adults (ages 13 to 24) in one of San Francisco’s toughest neighborhoods. BAYCAT’s goal is to educate, empower, and employ its students. This summer, 50 of them got free training in video production, animation, and graphic design, resulting in creative productions that examined everything from social justice to images in the media.

After learning BAYCAT was staging a graduation ceremony, our Purple Acts team descended on the center to transform the event into a mini-Oscars. We erected a white-and-purple balloon arch, poured flutes of sparkling cider, and laid out platters of elegant hors d’oeuvres. Students and families expecting a casual affair instead found themselves walking a glamorous red carpet into an evening celebrating their talents. Knowing how kids these days love the bling bling (well… me too), we gave each of them a blinking flower lei and sunglasses to up the cool factor.

And it didn’t end there. As no awards show is complete without a “schwag bag,” we handed out art supplies, cameras, and picture frames to help maintain artistic inspiration. But we saved our biggest surprise for BAYCAT itself: two professional-quality SLR digital cameras and a color photo printer! The program director actually fell to his knees in gratitude.

At show time, you could just feel the pride. I don’t think any of us expected the energy and inspiration of the students’ productions. We all laughed hysterically over “Flip the Script,” a video demonstrating what would happen if gender stereotyping was reversed. Just picture it: young men imitating hoochy mama moves while auditioning for a dance video before leering female music executives. Another personal favorite was a mock news broadcast with headlines like “White kids’ test scores are plummeting” and “Income levels of blacks continue to rise.” It really made you think.

During the presentation, BAYCAT CEO Villy Wang asked the students how the program had influenced their lives. One answer summed it all up: “No matter how small you are, you always have a voice.”

I left with my blinking lei and a reminder that perhaps Yahoo! for Good focuses on helping communities. But that day the community helped me remember why I love my job. I get to interact with real people doing really cool things in amazing organizations. And I can make a big impact. In a way, we all can, right?

Erin Carlson
Senior Manager, Yahoo! For Good

Television talent show junkies out there know that a pigtailed, yodeling 11-year-old named Taylor Ware was a finalist on NBC’s “America’s Got Talent” last night. Well, we’re here to tell you that we discovered her first.

(And we honestly don’t mean to obsess about yodels… but this shtick was too good to pass up.)

During the summer of 2003, we hosted the Yahoo! Yodel Challenge — a quest to find “America’s Favorite Amateur Yodeler.” We soon discovered there are many more closet yodelers than one might imagine. A posse of Yahoos — joined by singer, songwriter, rancher, horseman and none-other-than the voice behind our yodel, Wylie Gustafson, who hosted the proceedings — traipsed across the country to select eight finalists among hundreds of auditioning contestants from New York, San Francisco, Kansas City, Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Austin. I remember serving as a judge on a particularly warm Seattle morning, the air filled with yodels ranging from delightfully mellifluous to sounds that might emanate from ailing livestock.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, an unassuming brown package arrived at our headquarters from Franklin, Tennessee. Tucked inside was a grainy VHS tape with a little gingham-bedecked girl yodeling her heart out in a barn before an audience of horses. We all looked at each other in knowing silence after watching this phenomenal performance (or maybe we were just thinking back on all those airport check-in lines, hotel breakfasts and staging setups and takedowns). What a voice! And from a four-foot-nothing body! We knew this yodeling protégé had everything it took to win this gig.

And win she did… earning an appearance in a Yahoo! TV ad and a $10,000 prize, which she said would be allocated toward a puppy, pierced ears and a college degree. Oh, and Taylor was invited to be one of the 1,773 people who helped us break the Guinness record for the world’s largest group yodel in our cafeteria.

Check out a little video montage below that we pulled together to demonstrate just how cute those pigtails were three years ago (and here’s our Flickr set with Taylor, Wylie and more contestants).

Taylor, congrats to you. Whether you win tonight or not, can we have your autograph?

We recently invited Reid Hoffman, founder and CEO of LinkedIn, to Yahoo!. Rather than asking Reid to give a talk at a podium, we opted for a “fireside chat” format, and I had the privilege of serving as the “chatter.”

Reid’s resume is almost absurd. In addition to having a lot of old school Web 1.0 cred (as an executive at PayPal), Reid is involved as an investor with just about every category-defining Web 2.0 company out there: Digg, Flickr, Facebook, Technorati. He also sits on the boards of Six Apart and Mozilla. When asked what a good investment strategy for Web 2.0 is, he responded “to invest in Web 2.0 in 2003.”

The first question I asked was of the audience: “How many of you are not registered members of LinkedIn?” Of the perhaps 125 people in attendance, maybe one or two sheepishly raised their hands. This kind of penetration is typical in high-tech companies, according to Reid. LinkedIn (for the two non-LinkedIn members reading this) is a social networking site where you use your business relationships and networking capabilities for hiring, relationship building, business development, reference checks, and so on.

Given that Reid and Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield hold philosophy degrees (from Oxford and Cambridge, respectively), I asked Reid whether he felt this contributed to his bent for social software. (Answer, paraphrased: Philosophy helps you think, thinking is good, so — yeah, sure — it probably helped.) One of Reid’s criteria for evaluating companies is asking, “Which of the seven deadly sins does it appeal to?” (For LinkedIn, it’s “greed.”)

One of Reid’s most interesting responses came when he was asked why, if LinkedIn was a social network, there weren’t photos of the users on the site. Great question! Photos, he said, were complex in the business world. They could even lead to discrimination based on age, sex, and race, and LinkedIn didn’t want to facilitate that. Reid thinks there’s a place for photos in a professional context, but LinkedIn is still figuring out the right social balance.

The event was part of a speaker series hosted by our TechDev (Technology Development) group, which is run by Caterina Fake, she of Flickr fame. The team has the broad charter of facilitating and harvesting “grass-roots innovation” within Yahoo! and the TechDev Speaker Series (one of many at Yahoo!) is designed to provoke new thinking. In addition to hosting entrepreneurs like Reid and Philip Rosedale, CEO of the company that produces the multiplayer online game Second Life, we’ve brought in pundits like Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of “The Long Tail”; information architect Thomas Vander Wal, who coined the term “folksonomy”; and leading academics like Judith Donath and John Maeda of MIT Media Lab. But perhaps the most fun and surprising speakers were industrial performance artist Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories, renegade mashup pioneer Mark Hosler of Negativland, and Ken Waagner, who runs digital distribution for the band Wilco.

Now that we’ve whet your appetite with some unabashed name-dropping, we’ll try to get you in on the action by putting video footage of future speakers online. Whenever we get permission from these visitors, we’ll put the files up on Yahoo! Video. It will be way cool. Stay tuned.

Bradley Horowitz
Vice President of Product Strategy

Nowadays, every young person I know seems to be afflicted with a “connection infection” that just won’t go away. Ironically, most don’t want to cure their social networking fever… Why? Because these days, to many young adults, it seems that without their very own profile on some sort of social networking web site, they pretty much don’t exist.

I invited a small group of Yahoo! summer interns to chat about this booming Internet trend. After all, who better to talk to about social networking sites than the Yahoos who are part of the largest demographic of users?

Ranging in age from 18 to 26, from high school to graduate student, they joined me to share their experiences and observations about social networking – from using Facebook to learn more about a crush, to parents creating MSN Spaces profiles to “spy” on their kids, to wondering about a future where a Presidential candidate has to contend with the legacy of having a MySpace page.

• Click here to listen to (and download) the discussion.

• Click here for the full transcript.

Front row (L to R): Paul Stamatiou, Phil Freo, Brianna Satinoff, Richard Crowley
Back row (L to R): Chen Yang, me, Will Urich

We’ve been fielding a fair share of questions lately about the large purple cow that made a cameo in our fun video tour of Yahoo!. And rightly so…

Large purple cows are a rarity anywhere, let alone in the heart of the Silicon Valley. Well, for inquiring minds, here’s the scoop (no pun intended — for those of you who’ve ever stepped into a barn):

The cow in question, affectionately known to us all as Yahoo! Moo Mail, grazes peacefully in the reception area of Building D on our bucolic Sunnyvale campus. But unlike other bovines, this one’s the world’s first Internet-connected cow. Yes, its bright yellow saddlebag sports a computer where Yahoo! guests can check email as well as browse the Web, scan the Farmer’s Almanac online, whatever.

For history buffs, Yahoo! Moo Mail came about as part of CowParade New York 2000. It was front and center in a herd of more than 500 life-sized cows dotted strategically across the city. These cows were created by artists and regular Joes (although we have to wonder just how “regular” someone who creates a life-sized cow in their living room really is…) as part of a unique public exhibit showcasing New York’s rich arts community. The event benefited New York’s arts community, school children, and public parks (OK, I stole those lines from a press release — busted!). Yahoo! Moo Mail was corralled at South Street Seaport all summer, where it was seen, browsed, and invariably climbed on by some 10 million people (and possibly a few love-struck cows?).

The 600-pound fiberglass Yahoo! Moo Mail has graced our Sunnyvale campus ever since, where it continues to delight guests and scare the living daylights out of more than a few small children. She did make a quick trip to Georgia in the summer of 2003 for CowParade Atlanta. (And yes, Yahoo! Moo Mail is an anatomically correct “cow girl.”)

A side note for die-hard trivia fans: Our beloved Yahoo! Moo Mail actually has a twin sister. The other old gal is rumored to be in the backyard of an unnamed Yahoo! employee, but no one’s talking.

L. Bennett Porter
Senior Buzz Director

Today marks the last day of my summer internship at Yahoo!, so I thought I’d commemorate the occasion by going on a quest worthy of a fourth “Lord of the Rings” installment. I set out to single-handedly solve the most perplexing of Yahoo! mysteries: Who are the interns? Where do they come from? What are their experiences, and what have they been doing this summer at Yahoo!?

Time was certainly not on my side, so rather than spying on the rookie Yahoos in their cube-shaped habitats, I put together a detailed survey and forced the interns to answer my questions. (Frodo would’ve been proud.)

And here are the results! I present to you: Interns — by the numbers:

4 – Number of interns at Yahoo! headquarters who accidentally walked into the wrong bathroom in another building. (A bit of trivia: When the architects designed Yahoo!’s headquarters, they simply flipped the blueprints for Building B, a mirror image of our other buildings, rather than redrawing them. This means the men’s and women’s bathrooms are on different sides than in the rest of the buildings!)

5 – Number of high-school interns. (Start ’em young…)

16 – Number of interns for whom this summer marks their second internship at Yahoo!. (Maybe we’ll see the number go up next year?)

31 – Number of interns who’ve been at work in the middle of the night at least once this summer. (Yahoo! never sleeps.)

35 – Number of interns who still don’t know what the acronym “Yahoo!” stands for. (For those of you still scratching your heads, it stands for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.”)

38 – Percentage of interns working at Yahoo! headquarters who had never been to Silicon Valley until this summer.

45 – Percentage of interns who participated in a Yahoo! for Good activity.

49 – Number of interns who were involved in a product launch this summer.

71 – Number of interns who blog.

85 – Number of interns who played foosball at least once every week during their internship.

127 – Number of interns who were not born in the United States.

135 – Number of technical Yahoo! interns.

156 – Number of interns who are in graduate school.

229 – Number of interns legally old enough to drink beer in the United States. (I’ve still got three years to go!)

260 – Number of interns working at Yahoo! this summer. (More than 180 of these interns work at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. The rest are at other Yahoo! campuses like Burbank and Santa Monica, California; Toronto, Canada; or New York City.)

317 – Sightings of cofounder Jerry Yang by the interns so far this summer.

537 – Sightings of cofounder David Filo by the interns so far this summer. (Jerry’s got some catching up to do!)

1,090 – Cups of free coffee consumed by the interns each week. (Don’t worry! That’s only about 4 cups a week per intern — although one fellow did report drinking an average of 20 cups each week!)

And lastly…

12,875 – Days worked collectively by all interns this summer. (That’s the equivalent of one Yahoo working more than 35 years!)

Doreen Bloch
Yodel Anecdotal Intern

Editor’s Note: Fare thee well, Doreen — possibly the most fearless 18-year-old I’ve known. Good luck at Cal (Go Bears!) and thanks for all the research, writing, moderating, and keeping us connected with our inner cool. Yodel on.
- Nicki

Last week, Yahoos from company headquarters were invited to lick lollipops that propelled crawling baby dolls, run their fingers through grass to control videos, and observe a virtual sheep market. These curiosities were all part of University Design Expo 2006, a program sponsored by Yahoo!’s User Experience & Design (UED) group and Yahoo! Research to encourage and stimulate out-of-the-box thinking.

We called on students from five universities around the world to propose some innovative design prototypes for future-facing social, mobile, and media experiences. Teams from leading graduate design programs at New York University, London’s Royal College of Art, UCLA, ESDI Graphic Design in Brazil, and California College of the Arts came to present their work. The result was a series of very unusual yet inspiring designs that illustrate future uses and user desires for technology services and devices — some more far-out than others. Marveling right along with me were legends of the design world, including Don Norman, author of “The Design of Everyday Things,” and Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path, a premier user experience consulting company. Incidentally, he’s also the man said to have birthed the term “blog.”

The program is the brainchild of Joy Mountford, who recently joined Yahoo! as senior director of UED. She dreamed up the concept 17 years ago at Apple and then took the program with her to Interval Research, Microsoft, Mattel and now here. Joy estimates that about 1,800 students have participated since its inception.

In “Edible Interface: The Lick Races” project, students embedded photo sensors into lollipops that were used as event triggers to race toy babies — the faster I licked, the faster my doll crawled to the finish line. Another student created “Feelers,” which allowed me to experience nature through the eyes, body, and mind of an insect via motion sensors embedded in fresh grass. Every time I touched the grass, a toy insect changed path and software sensing my touch chose different video and audio to play.

Other student projects included “(Geo) Phone Tag,” which allowed mobile phone users to leave and retrieve contextually relevant messages about points of interest in their vicinity. “Chatsum” gave users a way to chat with other people while looking at the same web page. The “Sheep Market” leveraged Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system to employ thousands of Internet workers and create a database of 10,000 sheep drawings that were bought and sold. “Deadends” used the online-map interface to trace dead-end streets in L.A. and let people email videos or photos of dead-end streets through their camera phones. Here’s a short video of some of these inspiring prototypes and check out the Flickr photo set.

After the tent came down, I had a chance to sit down with Joy to get her thoughts on the event, the status of design today, and the next generation of designers. Catch our conversation here.

Larry Tesler
VP of User Experience & Design