It’s officially winter and we’re keeping it short, so you can climb back into bed or return to your holiday celebrations.

• Take it for a spin: Want to beta test our new Yahoo! Music video player? You’ll dig its customizable video lineup, sleek new design and ability to search for your favorite artists and videos from within the player. Have suggestions on the beta? Let us know. And Mac lovers across the world can now also dance to Fergie’s latest video. Read more here.
• Less scrolling means more time to date: View potential dates side by side on Yahoo! Personals to easily find your ideal match. Have some deal breakers? Create a checklist of traits that are definite no-no’s and take advantage of the personalized view to see the most important attributes up top. Curious who’s been checking you out? The “Who’s Viewed Me” feature will come in handy. Go on with your bad self.
• Spreading holiday cheer: Watch the Yahoo! elves as they create your personal holiday snowman greeting, otherwise known as Yahoo! S.N.O.W (Simulated Niceness of Winter). Use one of our fun pre-recorded greetings or create your own, then send your snowman to friends, family, and colleagues around the globe. It’s S.N.O.W.-licious!

We’ll be hibernating next week, so see you in 2007!

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I’d like to say something about our founders, because they’ll never say it about themselves: They’re nice guys. Quintessentially nice guys. Every year Jerry & David reach into their own pockets to buy gifts for all good little Yahoos around the globe. Never mind that those Yahoos are brushing up against the 12,000 mark. And that Jerry & David hand-deliver to as many of those as possible.

It’s a wonderful tradition everyone looks forward to. Since I joined Yahoo!, I’ve received a purple North Face sleeping bag (back when sleeping under your desk was en vogue), a Compaq MP3 player (it was 32MB, but it was so rad at the time), two jackets (with clever messages on the label), a wool blanket with snowflakes constructed from Y’s, and a purple gym bag (were we working too hard?).

This year’s choice was decidedly different. In a really good way. David handed me an envelope with a card inside that said:

“A sleeping bag. A blanket. A jacket. Just a few of the gifts we’ve given you through the years.”

Inside, it said:

“This year we’re helping you give all those things and more to someone in need. Yep, we’re finally giving you something you’re supposed to re-gift. A hundred bucks to be exact. Go ahead, spend it all in one place. (And feel good doing it… after all, it’s for charity.)”

How cool is that? You could choose from over a million charities (under four partner organizations – Network for Good, DonorsChoose, GlobalGiving and Yahoo! Employee Foundation India/Parikrma) and were invited to share your donation story on a special internal microsite to inspire others or rally group impact.

I’ve discovered the coolest part about this gift is reading up on all the causes we Yahoos from around the world are into… and the personal stories that go with them. From big national charities (American Cancer Society) to the more esoteric (Bay Area Doglovers Responsible About Pitbulls). From low-income kids (The Princess Project) to nature (California Native Plant Society) to animals (The House Rabbit Society). From music (Mr. Holland’s Opus) to math (MathCounts Foundation). The donations are as diverse as Yahoos, though it appears the Yahoo! Employee Foundation India/Parikrma is considerably closer to its goal of building a new elementary school. Witness the difference a sea of conspiring cube-mates can make.

David apparently got the inspiration for this idea last summer when some employees asked if they could forego the 2005 holiday gift and donate the cash to Hurricane Katrina victims instead. It was too late by then — thousands of jackets were already on order — but it got him and Jerry thinking.

Well over a million dollars later, Yahoos around the world are feeling particularly good about re-gifting… and about our nice-guy founders.

Nicki Dugan
Editor, Yodel Anecdotal

When banner ads started cropping up on the Internet in the mid-’90s, the term “hit” was all the rage. A “hit” (as in, a hit to a server) was the reigning measurement of a site’s popularity. Hits attempted to show how many times a page was viewed by a user. As the online measurement industry evolved and site designs grew more complex, “hits” fell out of favor because they included all server calls, even those where users ditched a page before it fully loaded. Counts were therefore inflated.

It also became apparent that some independence was necessary to have believable performance numbers. Over time, engagement with a site evolved to measuring “page views,” which were typically collected from independent, third-party sources. When combined with the “unique visitor” count, page views (or PVs) provided a metric of who saw the site and how much content or how many ads they consumed.

Enter the first measurement dilemma: There was no industry standard for how a page view was measured. Different firms used different methodologies, which differed still from how sites’ internal logs were measuring traffic. No one was right or wrong, just different. Do you count PVs from outside the country? From spiders and bots? Do you count when the page is requested, or when the page is fully loaded? Although the industry has radically improved standardization in recent years, many questions remain about the efficacy of the page view as a method for tracking engagement or impressions.

Before I joined Yahoo!, I was President and CEO of comScore Media Metrix, where we spent years grappling with the challenges of measuring a dynamic web environment. It’s 10,000 times more complicated than measuring television, and it’s only gotten more complicated in the last year or so, with the adoption of cool technologies like Ajax and Flash and the growth in video. They’ve changed the way Yahoo! and other companies are designing products for consumers, but they will also translate into page view declines.

When you view our new Yahoo! Maps, for example, Ajax allows you to drag the maps around and zoom in and out without having to wait for the page to reload. But for all that convenience, the new experience translates into just one page view. Our users tell us they much prefer the new maps to those of old, so suddenly counting page views seems far less important.

Yahoo! has long reigned in page views. But we knew we’d eventually cede this honor as we incorporated more consumer-friendly technologies into our products. And that’s OK with us, if it means our services will be better built for how people want to use the Internet today vs. in 1998.

Page view counting has been a key measure for a decade but just because it was once the obvious solution, doesn’t mean it’s the best one now. A couple of reasons why:

• PVs aren’t a good reflection of web activity in 2006 and beyond. It’s a broadband world and page views are irrelevant to some of the most frequently used Internet services like instant messenger, VoIP, or video, in addition to technologies such as Flash and Ajax. More page views might actually reward sites for poor site design in light of these new technologies.
• PVs have never been consistently measured by third parties or by sites themselves. Everyone has a different definition of when and how a page is counted.
• PVs don’t represent ad inventory. In the early days of the Internet, page views were used to represent available ad impressions, but the reality is that page views and ad impressions are actually counted in different ways and don’t correlate. PVs also have little to do with available inventory with the different types of ad units available today using text, audio, video, etc.

The bottom line is that the page view has outgrown its usefulness. The industry needs to embrace change and develop new metrics that measure this new world more accurately. We all need to help to wean the industry off the crutch of familiar metrics in favor of more accurate and representative ones. We all need to be smart about these new metrics — the measurement companies, major publishers, and advertisers.

I remember a quote by Albert Einstein, who said something along the lines of: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” We can’t oversimplify complex web measurement. We need more innovative ideas and execution to measure new technologies and incorporate user behavior into measurement standards.

At Yahoo!, we’re working closely with the measurement firms and our internal analytics teams to ensure we’re creating the most accurate representation of user activity on our sites. Nobody has all the answers, so we need everyone pushing.

Peter Daboll
Chief of Insights

James Surowiecki, a staff writer and business columnist for the New Yorker and the best-selling author of “The Wisdom of Crowds,” finds it hard to introduce the topic of prediction markets without talking about jellybeans.

Prediction markets are a growing phenomenon that use a stock market model to predict the future popularity of everything from new movies to news issues to high-tech topics. Based on the “wisdom of crowds,” these markets tend to do better than pollsters and pundits at forecasting all kinds of outcomes — political elections, sporting events, sales trends within companies.

Surowiecki describes an experiment he’s done many times: Ask a roomful of people to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar, add up everyone’s guesses, and take the average. You’ll get a better result almost every time than you would if you asked any single person. (Surowiecki qualifies this slightly — he’s heard about a physicist in Michigan who’s a jellybean-counting genius.)

Something about the folksy American candy maps well to the populist idea that the wisdom of a diverse group of people is more accurate and rigorous than the forecasts of experts. Surowiecki, who speaks to his subject with a “gee whiz” kind of enthusiasm, describes the physical “thrill of fear and doubt” he experiences each time he does the jellybean experiment.

Surowiecki explains: It’s the thrill of disruption. Prediction markets challenge our notions of authority. In the process, they make it easier for companies to access the knowledge that lies untapped within the organization as a whole. Sometimes, what is revealed runs counter to deeply held assumptions about decision making and existing hierarchies of command and control.

These were some of the opening ideas presented by guest moderator James Surowiecki on Wednesday night at confab.yahoo, the first installment of a free conference series organized by Yahoo!’s Technology Development Group. The series aims to share ideas openly across companies, move the Web to the next level, and “talk about important nerd topics.”

Over 250 attendees came to Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale campus for the first TechDev confab. Journalists, developers, designers, entrepreneurs, hackers, students, venture capitalists, economists, and executives listened to leading thinkers in the field. Robin Hanson, economics professor and conceptual father of prediction markets, urged companies to deploy prediction markets internally to tap valuable employee insights for solving the organization’s deepest and most important challenges. Stanford economist Eric Zitzewitz described some strategic uses of betting markets for financial forecasting and modeling within corporations.

Bo Cowgill from Google, Leslie Fine from HP, and Todd Proebsting from Microsoft spoke about their experiences with different types of prediction markets within their organizations and in collaboration with clients. David Pennock of Yahoo! Research spoke about the Tech Buzz Game and the recent evolution of yootles, an experimental currency system.

The evening concluded with presentations from Chris Hibbert, open source developer of Zocalo, a software toolkit for building prediction markets, and Adam Siegel, a co-founder of Inkling, which offers an online service for individuals or organizations who want to run their own markets.

Watch a webcast of the confab and view photos.

Read some of the other coverage:
* Prediction: Predictive markets will be a next big thing
* Yahoo’s Confab on Prediction Markets
* Tech lessons learned from the wisdom of crowds
* Prediction Markets at confab.yahoo
* Prediction Markets at Yahoo! ConFab

We haven’t cooked up our next confab yet, but check back at confab.yahoo.com for our next installment. Hope to see you there.

Havi Hoffman
Influencer Marketing | Social Media

We’ve had a busy week, but we won’t take too much of your time so you can get back to celebrating Hanukkah or National Underdog Day.

• The bottomless gift: It’s the stocking stuffer that keeps on giving. Give the gift of a Flickr Pro account to your friends and family — unlimited photo uploads, storage, bandwidth, and photosets! Feeling scroogy? That’s OK. We’ve upped the limit for free account members from 20MB to 100MB.
• A tailored search engine: Finding, organizing, and accessing information from your company intranet and the Web just got super easy. Send this link to your resident IT expert so your organization can get set up with this new data search tool. Best of all, it’s free!
• Keeping things up-to-date: Be our eyes and ears on the street and help us keep the listings current on Yahoo! Local. If you’ve ever gone to a restaurant and found that it’s actually closed on Sundays or visited a boutique that sold only lamps instead of rare Pokémon cards, tell us! Click on the “Edit This Listing” link and help others avoid making the same fruitless trip!
• Gone with the old and on with the new!: Calling all Sponsored Search newbies. Now you can sign up for Yahoo!’s new Search Marketing platform. What does this mean for you? You have full control of your campaign so you can get the biggest bang for your buck.
• Yahoo! Answers turns one!: Join us, as we celebrate with the 60 million of you who use and love Yahoo! Answers. And take the opportunity to share all you know about being green with Leonardo DiCaprio!
• Second helpings: More ABC News videos on breaking news, features, and interviews are a Yahoo! News click away. The expanded selection allows you to check your local news, get the latest weather report, and watch a clip of your fave GMA host Diane Sawyer.
• We have a winner: Rex Hermogino, a graphic designer and songwriter from San Diego, snagged $50,000 and the chance to produce or star in his own Yahoo! show. If you haven’t already seen his “Love on the Internet” music video, check it out to see how he sang his way to web-celeb status, beating out over 5,000 video submissions to the Yahoo! Talent Show .

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At some point in time, you’ve probably had the pleasure of meeting someone from the Philippines. It could have been a nurse at the hospital or a software engineer at a pub in the Valley. But what you might not have realized is that the person is likely among the 15 million Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) who’ve left home to work in more than 190 countries around the world so they can support their families.

When I came to Yahoo!’s Southeast Asia territory a few years back, I became keenly aware of the OFW phenomenon and how it impacts Filipino families. Nearly every person I meet in the Philippines knows someone living overseas. And while this amazing global migration has made the Philippines a more global community, it has also created some emotional hardships, exacerbated by lack of affordable and easy-to-use communications tools.

I know what it feels like to be separated from friends and family. After all, I’m an overseas worker too, and I’ve been separated from my family for 18 years! It’s not easy keeping in touch with loved ones over various time zones with our busy lifestyles. I’m sure many of you can relate to sending a simple one-liner email just to let people know you’re thinking of them.

The ease in which I use email, messenger, and photo-sharing services — and all of these on my mobile phone — encouraged my team and me to see how we could apply these tools to help OFWs.

This month, Yahoo! Philippines launched Pinoy Connect, a Yahoo! for Good initiative to help OFWs connect with their families. (BTW: “Pinoy” is a commonly used term for people of Philippine descent.) The objective is to encourage new and would-be Internet users in the Philippines to take advantage of iCafés and school computer labs to connect with OFW family members abroad, and vice versa.

I think we’re really on to something that will have a big social impact in the Philippines. A recent Yahoo!-OMD commissioned study revealed that 33% of Filipinos believe the Internet — specifically instant messaging — improved the relationship between parents and children. Also, with the Yahoo! Time Capsule, I witnessed a fury of online activity as Filipinos uploading nearly 7,000 photos, audio, videos, text messages, etc. In fact, the Philippines was the third most active country-community participating in the project, after the U.S. and Mexico.

Pinoy Connect includes a downloadable bilingual “passport” that shows you how to use free services like Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Photos, Groups, and Mobile services to stay in touch. Pinoys can also register for updates from the Overseas Worker Welfare Administration (OWWA), which prepares and looks after OFWs abroad. There’s also a video tutorial narrated by famed Filipino American comedian Rex Navarrete, whom you may remember from his story about Maritess the Filipina maid.

I look forward to strengthening more family bonds as Pinoy Connect evolves. Stay tuned.

Reza Behnam
Managing Director, Yahoo! Southeast Asia

I’ve been accused of having a green heart. That’s why I’m so pleasantly surprised by what seems to be a major shift in public opinion on climate change. And we can definitely thank Al Gore for that.

My team, Yahoo! for Good, had the privilege of previewing An Inconvenient Truth as a result of our Earth Day efforts in April. We even got to hear from Al himself — he was a surprise guest at a theater filled with only 50 people. He was so passionate and, get this, witty. Where was that in 2000?

Our team left the theater truly transformed. We wanted to ensure that the most people possible saw this film. We even arranged for hundreds of low-income high-school students in Los Angeles and New York City to see it opening week.

Fast-forward to the DVD release. What a no-brainer to make the film available to the youngest (and sometimes most powerful) influencers. So we donated more than 220 copies of An Inconvenient Truth to high-school science teachers in neighboring communities of Yahoo! offices — from California to Oregon to New York. After all, it’s required viewing for all students in Norway and Sweden.

After hearing that the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) rejected a donation of 50,000 DVDs from the movie’s producers allegedly for fear of losing corporate funding, we knew this Purple Act of Kindness was more important than ever. It seems tragic that education is such a low public funding priority in the U.S. that the NSTA has to worry about risking capital campaign contributions from the likes of Exxon Mobile for simply educating kids about global warming. But alas, that’s another story…

In the meantime, Yahoo! will continue to put the environment front and center and educate people on how they can protect it. It’ll do my heart good.

Erin Carlson
Senior Manager, Yahoo! for Good

It’s December 8th, which of course, means pausing to honor Kazakhstan’s Day of Green Pea and Jim Morrison’s birthday. Then check out what we’ve packed all this week – things you can read, hear and do.

• And the (best) answer is: What makes a tire bulge? Does casual dress improve workplace morale? How long can you freeze meat? How can you keep your cat out of your Christmas tree? Which off-the-beaten-path Parisian café has the best hot chocolate? Answers to these user questions and more have been tallied up for your reading pleasure by our Yahoo! Answers team. Check out more of the Best of Answers 2006.
• Rumor has it: Wanna know whom the Yankees are courting or where next year’s NASCAR’s Nextel Cup awards banquet will be? Football, baseball, hockey and more — find out all the titillating gossip on Yahoo! Sports’ new “rumor” section.
• Finance gets visual: If you’re more of an audio-visual person, the latest FOX videos on business news, market reports, and personal finance are now within your view — literally. Get your triple-sensory fix at Yahoo! Finance.
• Tapping the wisdom of crowds: What do you get when you combine a free public forum with industry and academic experts from across the country? A conversation series (confab.yahoo.com) that brings together visionaries from Yahoo!, Google, HP, Microsoft, startups, and academia to discuss the next generation Internet. First up: prediction markets (a kind of stock market for ideas, products, or information). Sign up here or join us next Wednesday at our Sunnyvale headquarters.
• The right place at the right time: Yahoo! News and Reuters takes “eye witness” to another level by inviting you to submit your photos and video clips of events as you see them. Whether from a camera phone or camcorder, your shot could be tagged to a news story featured on Yahoo! News. Go forth and be camera happy!
• More is merrier: If you thought connecting with your MSN buddies over Yahoo! Messenger was pretty neat, we’ve just added a new category of friends to instant message. Coming soon, your friends on Lotus Sametime will be able to send you fun chatter over Yahoo! Messenger. How will we ever get any work done?

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Yahoo! PR Director Terra Carmichael makes me tired. She has 19-month-old twins boys. She writes a clever mommy blog. She commutes two-plus hours a day. She works (nearly) full time. And somewhere in there, she’s finding the time to mind her new online baby store, FlyingPeas.

When she handled public relations for Yahoo! Small Business, she watched thousands of individual merchants launch online stores as side projects to their day jobs, and that got her thinking. “They were seeing wild success selling everything from singing garden gnomes to fridge magnets, processing orders after dinner,” she says. “I decided this was something I’d like to do eventually. I’ve always wanted to have my own store but never wanted to leave Yahoo! to do it. This seemed a perfect hybrid.”

After her twins arrived, this hip mama discovered the vast majority of baby boy gear came in a soft powder blue, devoid of attitude or personality. “Whenever I rarely came across products that were both high-quality and hip, I was ecstatic. So, I decided to take it upon myself not only to find these products, but to let the world know about them… and buy them,” she explains.

A month after launching FlyingPeas, Terra is already on a first-name basis with her UPS man. Merchandise includes skull and retro robot baby blankets, sassy baby duds, polka-dotted piggy banks, personalized books and art, mommy jewelry, chic baby furniture, and stuffed animals with attitude. You’ll see from her customer showcase page that I’m a big fan. Hosted on the Yahoo! Store platform and built by Yahoo! partner Solid Cactus, FlyingPeas now eats up Terra’s little remaining spare time (when she’s not scraping mac’n'cheese and veggie burgers off the floor). She’s come a long way from the girl who didn’t know what web hosting was.

Perhaps the best gravy is the connection Terra’s making with customers, particularly those reading her blog. “One woman confessed she’d spent about an hour reading before starting her shopping spree.” A few people even emailed with healthy thoughts when they read that Terra’s son was in the hospital with pneumonia last month. “Dealing with the customers (so far!) has been so rewarding and encouraging. Even though I haven’t sat on my couch to watch TV in weeks and my mail/bills pile is reaching an all-time high, it’s exactly how I’d hoped it would be.”

When I first started at Yahoo! in 2000, the only mothers around here were those who didn’t return from maternity leave. Today, we’re a fast-growing demographic, making the crazy balancing act work. And, in Terra’s case, doing it enviably well.

Nicki Dugan
Editor, Yodel Anecdotal

When I joined Yahoo! five years ago, I found a company with incredible assets (huge audience, strong brand, healthy balance sheet), great potential, and a team filled with determination and a fighting spirit. But the company faced challenging economic conditions that pummeled the Internet sector and was itself losing money. Yahoo!’s original strategy of “get big fast” (building audience and brand) needed to change. Yahoo! was ready to enter its second phase. We reshaped our sales organization, beefed up our bench, simplified our management operations, and, over the course of several years, executed several transformational initiatives in areas like broadband, search monetization and algorithmic search. Our changes paid off as we later posted quarter after quarter of record growth in audience and revenues.

Yahoo! is now entering what I call its third phase — one focused on customers. We’re seeing the competitive and advertising landscapes evolve yet again and today we announced a realignment that we believe will let Yahoo! capture the major growth opportunities ahead. Simply put, we’re aligning our business around two key customer groups — our audience and our advertisers and publishers — supported by innovative technology. We’re creating three operating groups — Audience, Advertiser & Publisher, and Technology — to increase our strategic focus and accountability, speed decision-making, emphasize scalable platforms and improve resource allocation. Here’s the press release.

By having our Audience Group 100% focused on creating great user experiences, we’ll also be able to create the greatest amount of value for advertisers, both on and off the Yahoo! network. What does that mean? We intend to expand our global advertising network, creating marketplaces on both Yahoo!’s network as well as across the entire Internet. We’ve already begun demonstrating our value as an ad network for search affiliates and through announced arrangements with eBay, the newspaper consortium and Vodafone. We’ll be able to connect customers with advertisers on valuable properties elsewhere on the web.

As far as our leadership team, I’ve asked our chief financial officer, Sue Decker, to head our new Advertiser & Publisher Group. She already recently expanded her role to take on our current Marketplaces business unit (which will become part of her new group), tapping into her deep expertise in media, publishing and advertising. An expert on far more than financials, Sue has been a terrific contributor to our business strategy. She’s one of the best executives around and the ideal person to fill this critical new role. We’re currently recruiting the leader for our Audience Group.

Zod Nazem, our CTO and a key executive team member, will lead our Technology Group. We intend to focus our engineering investments and move towards more integrated product development teams. We’ve also created a new Platform & Infrastructure sub-group, which will build high-impact, global platforms for everything from advertising to social media.

Missing from this lineup is Chief Operating Officer Dan Rosensweig, who will leave Yahoo! in March… leaving behind a strong legacy. When we recruited Dan five years ago, we brought him on to help revitalize the company. Since then, he’s helped grow our global audience to one in every two Internet users, introduce social media to our users, create a leading mobile infrastructure, attract record numbers of advertisers, and position Yahoo! for its next phase of growth. He’s been one of the key architects of our new structure and he’s leaving Yahoo! with a deep bench of talent that he helped hire — the right people to set us on our course. We’re grateful for all of Dan’s sleepless nights, missed elementary school soccer games and endless Blackberry exchanges. We couldn’t have gotten here without him.

Now, I know what you’re thinking — this is all about peanut butter. Actually, we’ve been orchestrating this plan for a number of months as we envisioned the next phase of growth for the Internet. Following our third quarter results, I very openly discussed that we were going to become more focused and bring about change. But let me stress that we’re organizing the company for growth and are continuing to hire great talent.

Change is never easy. We need a revitalized structure to heighten accountability and streamline decision-making while allowing us to better focus on serving our key customers. This one gets us there. I believe Yahoo!’s opportunity is better than it ever has been. We have the largest and most engaged audience in the world. Thirty billion in advertising dollars will come online globally over the next five years. No one is better positioned than we are to take advantage of that. I believe we now have the right strategy, the right structure and the right people to provide the best experiences and results possible to our users, advertisers and publishers.

Terry Semel
Chairman and CEO