Happy 1st Birthday, Yodel Anecdotal!

Twelve months ago, I stared nervously at the "publish" button on my virgin WordPress admin panel. It was just three weeks after Dell got a less-than-friendly reception to the launch of their corporate blog. Were we next in line for a good skewering? Would anyone care about "Yet another self-serving corporate blog?"

Inhale. Click. An hour later, I started to breathe easier as positive comments began rolling in, including from the likes of Mike Arrington and John Furrier. This gig was actually going to be worthwhile! A top 1,000 Technorati ranking and 79,465 spam-comments later and here we are.

To celebrate our first yodel year, I thought we'd take a quick jaunt down memory lane:

• Most popular video: The Yahoo! Headquarters Tour from our inaugural post. Ok, we were newbies — we thought 8 minutes was a fine length for a web video. (And would you believe we shot it in HD? Can you say compression hell?). But nearly more than 52,000 of you have since sat through it.
• Biggest angry mob: The Yahoo! Suggestion Board debut. Imagine my surprise when I checked the comment queue for this seemingly innocent post after date night to find hundreds of Digg fans ticked off at our new Digg-inspired community-based product feedback mechanism. Luckily, it also became a great example of a self-correcting comment-sphere.
• Best focus group in action: The Yahoo! TV redesign. Lots of you were unhappy with it and weren't shy about telling us so (thick skin, thick skin). But our product team collected and analyzed your, ahem, constructive comments and baked your feedback into the product roadmap.
• Fastest ascent to top of Techmeme: Unlimited Yahoo! Mail storage. Yodel hit the big time when, in lieu of issuing a press release, Yahoo! Mail's John Kremer stopped by to let you know we were nuking mail storage limits. In fact, we were the 5th most linked-to blog that day, according to BlogPulse.
• First use of the word "asinine": Internet Radio Day of Silence. Yahoo! Music GM Ian Rogers took the gloves off when describing the Copyright Royalty Board's web radio rates. Looks like it had the right effect.
• A little self-deprecation is good: Yahoo! is 404. If you can't laugh at yourself…
• Most frequent executive contributor: Chief Yahoo David Filo. He's posted on everything from our first open Hack Day to our commitment to the environment. But competitors that they are, I'd imagine Jerry will give him a run for his money. Which leads me to…
• Best evidence that our founders are good sports: Will wrestle for climate change. As reward for Yahoos reducing consumption of non-renewable resources by 20% during the week of Earth Day, Jerry & David were not only willing to don sumo suits and wrestle each other… they let us post the video.

Been there. Got the T-Shirt.

And what's a birthday without gifts? To score yourself a limited-edition Yodel Anecdotal first-anniversary T-shirt, be one of the first 75 people to email the correct answers to the following. Please include your mailing address and T-shirt size — we'll do our best to accommodate you. And rest assured, we'll shred all your personal info.

1. Who came up with the name Yodel Anecdotal?
2. What color is the Beck puppet's hat in the video Beck's band made for their concert finale at Hack Day '06?
3. What was the final score of the Yahoo! vs. Google "Battle over the Net" tournament?
4. What did our co-founders give to good little Yahoos as a holiday gift last December?
5. The Greenest City in America is also the birthplace of what?

(Hint: You'll find all the answers by doing a blog search from the sidebar)

A big thankful yodel to you, dear reader, for being our raison d'etre. It's been a great ride so far. We've learned a lot and there's plenty we'll do differently. Here's to another year of insights, dialogue, and letting our hair down together.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor