When I started to post my pictures from Myanmar on Flickr in February 2006, I just thought it was a good way of storing my photos at a cheap price. But then I received one comment, two, three… and people even favorited my pics. Mon dieu, there’s someone somewhere who looks at my photos and takes time to leave some messages!

My ego was flattered. I felt like the most important amateur photographer on Earth. Then I received an email from The Economist asking me for an Oman pic to be used in an ad. (What? I can earn money with my pics??? And they even paid!) I went to Papua New Guinea, put my pics online, received comments, faves, you know the story! GEO USA called me: “Hi, we saw your Papua pictures on Flickr. We want 12 pages for GEO Germany, OK?” (Yes, sir!)

A French editor saw my photos and asked me if I was OK making a book. (No problemo!) My book was released this Christmas and was number 10 on Amazon.fr last week! Lonely Planet, National Geographic Russia, Get Lost, UNESCO Magazine, etc. bought my pictures thru Flickr. And then, the leading French photography agency Eyedea (Rapho, HoaQI, Gamma) contacted me and signed me few weeks ago!

So, YES, Flickr works and… well, now, I must leave you cuz I have to pack my bags and go to India for one month to shoot!

I keep posting on Flickr as it remains the most powerful tool to be seen on the Web and in search engines, and I do not want to lose the direct contacts I’ve got with the world jury that comments on my stream.

Thank you, Yahoo!!

Eric LAFFORGUE
http://www.ericlafforgue.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mytripsmypics

“There, Watson?” That’s probably about what Alexander Graham Bell uttered 93 years ago today as he sent the first transcontinental phone call from New York City to San Francisco. Despite the 3,400-mile wire, Bell and his associate heard each other, ahem, clear as a bell. Now tap into the world’s telecommunication networks for our latest roundup:

• Vista IM revisited: Thanks to you bug hunters out there, we’ve squashed some issues in a refreshed version of Yahoo! Messenger for Vista Preview. It’s now more stable and responsive and features enhancements like a new look. There’s more work on the roadmap, but our thanks to the diehards for helping make it a better experience. More here.
• Indie action: Even if you’re not knee-deep in powder, rubbing elbows with moguls of independent film, you can still follow the action at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Yahoo! Movies’ Independent Film Guide gives you an overview of this year’s films, the latest news, and photo galleries of the attending stars. No tickets or Uggs required.
• Idol module: If you love off-key performances, Simon’s barbs, Paula’s tears, dawg encouragements, stunning comebacks, and Kajagoogoo hairstyles, now’s the time to add EW.com’s new American Idol module to your My Yahoo!. You’ll get show recaps, commentary, and predictions every time you log in to your page. Hurry, auditions are underway. Find it here.

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

Our job in Search is to be the starting point for our users to find what they need – and sometimes even the things they didn’t know they needed. To help celebrate all of the cool, useful and quirky things we’re discovering across the pond, Yahoo! Europe hosts an annual “Yahoo! Finds of the Year” awards. It’s where the Europe search team scours the Internet for the most innovative, humorous and useful websites, and with a panel of judges and the greater public, vote on our favourites.

The awards originated in the UK and this year we decided to go European: Yahoo! Germany, Italy and Spain have all launched their own version of “Finds of the Year” – Yahoo! Entdeckungen 2007, Le Rivelazioni del Web and Web Revelación – representing the region’s rich and entertaining Web endeavours.

The UK winners include a social networking site with a twist – a site for dogs and their pooch personalities. Users raved about an eco-shopping site created by a chap named Nigel, full of innovative and wonderful environmentally friendly products. My particular favourite is the staple-free stapler. And the people’s choice winner was Move Me, a site that captures a to-do list for when you move house and adds it all into a neat calendar for a step-by-step guide to a stress-free move!

Germany’s first ‘Finds’ awards, “Yahoo! Entdeckungen,” had great examples of Web 2.0 in action, including a cool new approach to exploring the German capital and sites that capture the essence of ‘friends of the web.’ The online-community hausgemacht.tv was a double-winner: it was a favourite for both the jury in the category “Zeitgeist” and the public vote. hausgemacht.tv delivers convenient DIY videos, ranging from tips on housekeeping to cars and health.

In Italy, if you want math as your friend and not your enemy or are keen to discover and share your passion of shoes with other like-minded souls then Yahoo! Italia’s “Le Rivelazioni del Web” is the place to go.

And with “Web Revelación,” Yahoo! Espana chimes in with revelations ranging from a website reminding you of those little things that your friends and family borrow and never give back, to a karaoke platform to an operating system developed by two young Spanish engineers.

The awards across UK, Germany, Italy and Spain really capture the ingenuity, creativity and fun that are out there on the Web for all to discover. So sidle up to our Search bar and go find something cool today!

Jeff Revoy
VP, EU Search, Local and Social Media
London, UK

Oh, bother. It’s Winnie the Pooh Day. Pause a moment to ponder the wisdom of the Bear of Very Little Brain, and then dig into this week’s product honeypot. TTFN!

Tag, you’re history: Important moments in history made their debut on Flickr through a pilot project with the Library of Congress called The Commons. They’ve added more than 3,000 photos from two of their popular collections — American Memory: Color photographs from the Great Depression and The George Grantham Bain Collection, images from the daily news scene nearly 100 years ago. Your job is to tag them and leave comments to add even more depth to these important archives. More here.

Fearless files: You’ve had that moment of hesitation when being asked to “accept file” when IMing a friend. (Hey, anybody can get a virus.) Fear no more. By teaming up with Symantec, Yahoo! Messenger can now automatically scan files with Norton AntiVirus (if you have Norton AntiVirus 2007/2008 and Norton Internet Security 2007/2008 installed on your computer). More over here.

Of flab and football: January can only mean two things: diet resolutions and football mania. That’s why you need to head to My Yahoo! to add the Diet Tracker module and Football Page. The Diet Tracker doubles as your personal trainer and guilty conscience, letting your track your daily weigh-ins against a target date. The Football Page is just that — a pigskin-filled tab with nothing but news, stats, photos, blogs and more. Pass the (low fat) chips.

Music blog remix: Yahoo!’s Media Innovation Group just released an experimental (”possibly dodgy”) desktop application that lets you mix together blog posts and MP3s from your favorite music blogs. Save your favorite posts on various music blogs, build your personal remix, save the results for future reference, make it into a playlist, podcast, or feed, or just share what you’ve mixed together with pals. It’s a proof of concept for now, but a cool concept nonetheless… more here from the developer himself.

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

Ask just about anybody that’s used the Internet and they’ll most likely agree; I have too many accounts to keep track of. Not only do I have to keep track of my username and password for every site, I usually have to go through the same find-my-friends dance for the places I go as well. There’s got to be a better way to define who I am on the web.

When I first started searching for a solution to this problem I looked long and hard at what was out there already. That’s when I found OpenID. Over the past 5 years I’ve been active in the world of open source and identity and as the current Chairman of the Board of Directors for the OpenID Foundation, we’ve been working hard to make the web a more “open” place. OpenID is an open technology (developed much in the same way that Mozilla’s Firefox or the Linux kernel is) that has been built by an amazing group of individuals. The goal was simple; create something that allows users to quickly and easily login to any site with just one username and password.

Today’s announcement by Yahoo! supporting OpenID is the realization of three years of hard work from this extremely passionate community of developers. I have never met a more committed set of people focused on doing “the right thing” all the time. In the coming months, the community will continue to formalize around the OpenID Foundation. It’s the home of OpenID and a place for this community to thrive.

Yahoo! has really made a big leap with the support of OpenID. More than just supporting another open protocol, they are embracing the concepts around the open web; the idea that users not only own their data but that they should be in complete control of their digital identities. Traditionally this has been a difficult concept for companies, sites and users to grasp. The ever-changing reality is that not only is this good for users, its just plain good for business.

I couldn’t be more excited to see this happen and it’s going to open a door of opportunity for users and developers alike. We’re already seeing innovative ways to secure your identity, communicate and even engage in the political discourse. We’re only scratching the surface on what OpenID is going to enable as a key component of the open web.

I know we don’t have all of the answers to how this will all play out. Today is another step forward in the long walk to a better experience for the user. One thing is for sure; the best is yet to come.

Scott Kveton
Chairman of the Board of Directors
OpenID Foundation

The last time we heard from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), they were letting us know what they thought about our use of a primate in our Yahoo! Tech launch event (we apologized). This time, they’ve crowned us with a 2008 Proggy Award for having the most vegetarian- and earth-friendly corporate cafeteria. We feel proudly redeemed.

A Proggy recognizes “animal-friendly achievement in 21st century culture and commerce…contributing to a more humane life for our entire society.” Whether they realize it or not, the thousands of Yahoos fed by Bon Appetit Management Company in our headquarters cafeteria (known as “URLs”) and beyond are provided with made-from-scratch food choices that minimize our impact on the environment. We are availed with dozens of vegetarian and vegan options, organics galore, ingredients from local farms, antibiotic-free meats, sustainable seafood, and biodegradable to-go containers. The kitchen staff even saves the vegetable oil from our fryers to create biodiesel fuel.

While an award for a corporate cafeteria might not seem worthy of great fanfare, it illustrates a big theme we Yahoos care about — finding innovative ways to help the planet. Many of the earth-friendly details are a result of input from Yahoo!’s Green Team, a volunteer army of employees who keep their eyes open for small changes that can make a big difference.

Here’s a quick video tour of URLs with Chef Bob Hart. He didn’t cook for the Grateful Dead, but he serves a mean gardein.

Kate Gerwe
Yahoo! Green Team
Senior Director, Marketing, Corporate Partnerships

What’s your New Year’s resolution? If it’s being a better dancer, get into syncopated rhythm as it’s the 44th anniversary of the first discothèque in the U.S. (keep the polyester pants at home, please). After you’ve done your best John Travolta pose, read on for our fresh new moves.

• Totally wired: If you missed CES, we’ve launched some pretty mobilicious updates to help you stay connected on your crackberries. To start off, the Yahoo! mobile homepage has gotten a New Year makeover with added juice to make the mobile web experience all about you. Make sure to check out the customizable content modules called Yahoo! Snippets for previews of news headlines that interest you, and a new update (since your last visit) of the latest photos on Flickr, recent emails, and the status of your Yahoo! Messenger friends. Also get instant results for your oneSearch queries, including content from Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia. Jerry highlighted in his keynote that we also launched Yahoo! Go 3.0 (beta) with easy access to news, email, and services you want (think widgets that let you mobile bid on eBay or stay on top of celebrity chatter from MTV News). Developers and publishers, listen up. We’ve opened our mobile platform so you can create widgets for Yahoo! Go 3.0 and essentially any mobile browser – write it once and run it everywhere. I did say these were mobilicious updates, right?
• Homeowner’s delight: At no cost to you, brokers and franchisors nationwide including Prudential Real Estate and Realogy Corporation (who owns CENTURY 21, Coldwell Banker, ERA and Sotheby’s International Realty) will be sharing their full catalog of property listings on Yahoo! Real Estate. You now have access to the widest range of real estate information possible online, for free. Not to mention a straight shot to all sorts of new guides for home buyers, sellers, and owners, a cool School Search that helps you find the right school through a map interface, a Foreclosures Center with trends and tips on foreclosure properties, and a Neighborhood Search that gives you the skinny (demographic, housing, education stats, maps, local shops) on the hood you’re moving to.
• e-Post-Its: Stop using crumbled napkins and the backs of receipts to jot down your important thoughts. Add the new “Note to Self” module on My Yahoo! to log your ah-ha moments or reminders to buy milk on the way home. The best part is that you can do it while you’re multi-tasking!
• Music with one line of code: The latest Yahoo! Media Player can be added to your web site or blog to play music from whatever media application your readers already have installed on their computers to play back files – all this with one line of code. Add the Yahoo! Media Player JavaScript to your HTML and the media player will identify and insert play buttons next to any audio links on your page. When you press the play button, the Yahoo! Media Player will appear and voila, music to our ears. Read more here.
• Will this be the year of sequels?: Get some popcorn, grab a seat, and take a looksee at the most anticipated movies of 2008 and their trailers on Yahoo! Movie’s new Year End lists. Or just take a look back at last year’s top ten movies, most popular trailers, and movie stars that shined the red carpet throughout 2007 .

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

Whoa. What happened to Yodel Anecdotal?

New year, new look. We’ve slapped on a new paint job and spiffed up the joint. In addition to a slick new template, you’ll notice we now have a wider post body and a cleaned up sidebar. We also added tagging (the tag cloud lives under the “Archives” tab) and you can now receive posts via email by subscribing just under the search box. Whaddaya think?

We’ve done plenty of QA, but let us know if you discover anything wonky. Just drop us a line.

Props to the guys from cnp_studio (Nick, Sean, Mike & Pete) and Voce Communications (Josh & Mike) for hooking us up with this new haircut. We’ve memorialized the old look here in case you ever feel nostalgic.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

In 2005, as Yahoo! News’ first correspondent, former television news veteran Kevin Sites set out to cover every major war zone in the world for Yahoo!. Iraq, Cambodia, Kashmir, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Haiti, Myanmar, Uganda, Colombia… His mission was to tell the stories that weren’t being told, reporting what he witnessed for a year-long project called “Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone.”

Kevin was at Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale campus today to discuss the book he’s written about his experience, “In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars.” Kevin was here today to share his stories, and I was asked to share a little about my experience “In the Hot Zone.”

You see, during his journey around the world, I was responsible for booking nearly all of his travel over the course of the year-long project. As you may imagine, Kevin is not your typical Yahoo! business traveler, and as a result our relationship has grown into a valuable friendship. And when you have a unique relationship with a “client” like him, it can make for some interesting stories.

For example, over the holidays in 2005 while in the middle of his project, Kevin ran out of cash. A major annoyance for anyone out on the road, but a potentially life-threatening problem for a solo war reporter who happens to be in Iran without money to pay his “fixer” (a foreign reporter’s lifeline who acts as a guide and translator). His American-based editorial team asked if they could pay by credit card or check, and quickly learned that not only was that not an option, but it was impossible for them to wire Kevin money while he was in Iran. Having been born in Iran, I happened to know of some folks who were about to go back home to Iran at this exact time. Because we had already established a trusting relationship with one another, I volunteered to help. The team gave me the cash Kevin needed, and I in turn gave it to my friend, who then took it to Iran and hand-delivered it to Kevin’s translator.

It’s not every day that I help my clients by facilitating the hand-delivery of cash across international borders, but it was definitely worth it. This story didn’t make it into the book, but there are plenty of important stories about Kevin’s experiences, and the people he met that did.

During today’s talk, Kevin took a moment to thank me for supporting the Hot Zone project, which I found both meaningful and unnecessary. Kevin is the most amazing client I have ever worked with, and I am proud to have been a part of the Hot Zone project.

I should also mention that at today’s discussion, Kevin was accepting donations the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), an organization that advocates on behalf of victims of armed conflict. He’s donated a portion of his royalties to this organization, and we raised more than $1000 today! Click here to learn more.

Farah Ravon
Lead Travel Agent
BCD Travel (Yahoo!’s on-site travel agency)

As promised, here’s a video recap of Yahoo! Tech’s Last Gadget Standing showdown yesterday, which whittled down hundreds of the latest cool gadgets showcased at CES to just ten contenders. After some entertaining demos, the ultimate winner was the Eye-Fi, a wireless memory card that gives you a cable-free way to move photos from your camera to your computer or favorite photo-sharing site. Big thanks to the live audience that fed the applause-o-meter to narrow the field.