This afternoon, a diverse group of more than 150 journalists, technologists, and entrepreneurs will descend on our campus for this year’s Silicon Valley meeting of Journalism That Matters: NewsTools2008. Although one might question the wisdom of having media on our campus during a week like this, we’re excited to host this 3-day gathering of kindred spirits, to foster discussion and collaboration between content creators (writers, editors, publishers, bloggers) and content enablers (developers, tool makers, entrepreneurs).

The focus of this event is to explore how new technologies and business models can support journalism and participatory democracy through a “concept/design mash-up.” This is a natural fit for us at Yahoo! — providing the platform for others to convene, share ideas and insights, and discover new ways to make a difference. Discussion topics will include how the concept and practice of journalism may adapt to search and social networks, crowdsourcing, diverse, fragmented audiences and digital, participatory politics. It’s all about best practices and new technologies that can facilitate fact/data-rich, citizen-supported, machine-using, inclusive journalism that promotes accountable government and open institutions.

I’ve been at Yahoo! since we were just a handful of people building a searchable directory of websites. From the beginning, we’ve been driven by sheer passion and enthusiasm for the transformative possibilities of the Web — we couldn’t wait to make it accessible to everyone, because we knew amazing things would happen when others applied their creativity, resourcefulness, and ingenuity. We’ve never had all the answers — the website directory was just a bunch of links to other people’s stuff — but we brought those links together to invite and inspire others to realize the possibilities of this medium.

Promoting freedom of expression and the open exchange of diverse ideas and information — that’s been at the core of everything we do. We believe information is power, and access to information is a democratizing force. And even though we started out merely linking to “other people’s stuff,” we thought a lot about how the mere act of aggregation is creation, and with that comes great responsibility. These very beliefs are at the heart of “journalism that matters.”

It’s these same beliefs, together with our passion for helping others apply their expertise to unlock the power of the Web, that drives our focus on making Yahoo! more open and social. We are creating flexible tools and platforms for others to build on, and look forward to working with like-minded collaborators in an evolving community.

To that end, several members of our news, front page, and central editorial teams will be in attendance this week. As always, we don’t have all the answers. But we can’t wait to see what emerges when we come together with those who do.

Srinija Srinivasan
VP and Editor-in-Chief
Yahoo! Editorial

Anyone who knows me knows that I love sneakers. Ok, you might even say I am sneaker obsessed. From the walk-in closet with 160+ pairs of shoes, to my blog SneakerBlogger, to the custom Nike’s in Yahoo! colors I created for CES earlier this year, I try to find any way I can to incorporate them into my personal and professional life. So when I saw that Yahoo! was going to be hosting a Freecycle-inspired “Free is Good Fair” for employees on campus today (a belated Earth Day swap meet) and that one of the items being donated would be Chief Yahoo David Filo’s signature Adidas sneakers, I started cleaning out my closet.

Much to my wife’s delight, among other things I contributed were five pairs of sneakers and athletic shoes and I was able to actually watch people pick them up and give them a new home. (Yes, people WILL wear other people’s shoes…) Hopefully they will get some great use and their new owners will think hard about what THEY could give up to turn their personal trash into someone else’s treasure.

I’m told Yahoos brought in more than 2,000 items from closets and basements throughout the Bay Area that might otherwise have been destined for landfills. The more interesting things I saw included a vintage map of Silicon Valley businesses from 2000, a red lacy bra (which seemed to disappear quickly), last-generation Tivos, Rockem Sockem Robots, vacuum cleaners, a complete set of Star Trek: Next Generation VHS tapes, bunny slippers, fleeces galore, Yahoo! schwag (Yahoo! Chicago stickers, anyone?), and gently used sporting equipment. Items that had not seen the light of day for years were suddenly adopted by new guardians, who promised to put them into immediate use. Although I think the snow skis might have to wait until next season…

We duplicated this fair in six California, New York, and Oregon offices. And whatever wasn’t claimed was carted away by local charities like the Salvation Army.

So if you see me around campus with size 10.5 Adidas shell-toes, know that they will be well cared for and infused with the spirit of giving.

Hmm… I wonder what size Jerry wears?…

Here are some photos and a video recap:

Lucas Mast
Senior PR Manager
Connected Life

Back in March, I wrote about Seeds for Success, a Yahoo! grant program for women entrepreneurs. Today, I’ve got three finalists for you.

But first, let me explain why this program is so near and dear to me. One word: Mentoring. My own career, including the opportunity to judge on The Apprentice and the upcoming launch of FindingWhatMatters.com (what should be the single largest network of career/life experts and resources anywhere), was built on the advice of wise mentors. They helped steer and cheer me. And now it’s my turn to pay it forward.

The three winners will have access to a host of business experts, including myself; Bobbi Brown, founder and CEO of Bobbi Brown Cosmetics; Cathie Black, president of Hearst Magazines and author of the bestselling book “Basic Black: The Essential Guide to Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life);” and a dozen others who have walked the entrepreneur’s road. We’ll take them under our wings and show them the proverbial ropes.

Each finalist will also receive a grant package that includes $20,000 in cash, $5,000 in website consulting from three Yahoo! Small Business partners, and website hosting from Yahoo!.

Without further ado, I present the three finalists:

Dana Rubinstein (New York, NY): Dana is co-founder of Dapple, a company which produces baby-safe and earth-friendly detergents, cleaners and sanitizers. She and her business partner created these products based on their own experiences of wanting safer, eco-friendly choices for their children. Dapple is ready to launch its first product in NYC test markets this spring.

Abby Port (Woodstock, GA): Abby is founder and CEO of Red Koala, an online purveyor of customizable canvas-based art for everything from home décor to other canvas products, such as shoes, totes and luggage. A veteran of the corporate world, Abby decided to start her own business after the birth of her third child. Work on Red Koala’s website has already begun and the site should be ready to launch in a couple of months.

Karla Duncan (Birmingham, AL): A pediatric speech pathologist, Karla is founder and president of Head2Toe Publications, a company that designs and develops toys and educational materials specifically for special needs children. Karla founded Head2Toe out of a desire to have the products she truly needs in order to care for the children with whom she works. Head2Toe products currently are in development.

These women, painstakingly (truly the roughest part of this assignment!) selected from among 5,500 entrants with compelling ideas, will spend the next six months using the mentoring, hosting and financial resources they’ve won to grow their businesses. The one who achieves the most growth in that time will win a $10,000 bonus grant.

Want to keep up with their progress? Check in regularly to track the finalists and their businesses, and tap into blog entries from them, as well as from Bobbi, Cathie, and me.

Success. It’s all in knowing where to go with what you’ve got. And finding the right someone to point you there.

Carolyn Kepcher
CEO and Co-Founder
Carolyn & Co. Media
fwm:Finding What Matters

I do. And so does everyone else in our Northern California offices. Her name is Danielle Bricker. And she is singularly responsible for getting people out of their gas-guzzling cars and into far-more-pleasurable, alternative modes of transportation (WiFi shuttle buses, commuter trains, light rail, bikes, van pools, carpools, etc.).

With the title of “Commute Coordinator,” Danielle is likely a maverick in Corporate America. She’s not only a cheerleader for a greener way of life (literally walking the walk), she’s there to help every Yahoo figure out the most practical way from Point A to Point B. And she has a good answer for just about every excuse you can come up with: “What if my kid gets sick in the middle of the day and I have no car?” Our guaranteed ride home program won’t cost you a dime. “But I’ll get sweaty on my bike!” We’ve got showers. “No one else works my hours.” Let me check my database of carpoolers.

Here’s a report NBC just ran about Danielle and our commute program, inspired by photos she took on a recent commute from San Francisco.

With fossil fuel flirting with $4 a gallon, you need to get yourself a Danielle.

Props to Paul Stamatiou, former Yodel intern, for his great how-to on embedding Flickr slideshows.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Would you believe it was only 55 years ago today that we first understood how genes were passed from generation to generation? Can you say double helix? After pausing to honor the granddaddies of molecular biology, check out what was in our deoxyribose nucleic acid this week.

• Would you like to touch our SearchMonkey?: If you’re a developer or site owner clamoring for a chance to monkey with enhanced Yahoo! search results, sign up for a developer preview of SearchMonkey or mark your calendar for our May 15th developer launch party. It’s our first step toward a totally new open Yahoo! strategy. Buh bye, links and abstracts. Hello, rich results with data like images, deep links, ratings, reviews, etc.!
• Circle of refinement: Yahoo! Local just made narrowing search results vastly easier with that rockstar of geometry: the circle. Looking for a greasy spoon for breakfast, but want one close to the ocean? Click “expand map” on your search query results and move that circle around to whatever ‘hood you’re looking for and make the radius bigger or smaller. As you move the circle, the business results automatically update. Brings new meaning to search radius. More here.
• Share your Flickr love: See something on Flickr and just can’t contain yourself? In this world of instant gratification, it’s now easier than ever to share photos, videos, sets, and groups with Flickr’s simple new “share this” button. Everpresent on the upper right side, it beckons you to email, link to, blog about, or get the HTML code to embed pictures and videos. What’s more, it will auto-complete screen names of your contacts as you type. All the more easy to spread the love. More here.
• Ain’t nothin’ better than free: You’re about to toss your old bottle cap collection when you realize there just might be a 10-year-old aching for a Nehi Red to complete his. That’s when you go check out our “Free is Good” microsite, launched in honor of Earth Day. It’s based on the old “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” adage and it’s there to help you find reuse groups in your neck of the woods. In addition to the warm feeling you’ll get inside from getting cool stuff and keeping other stuff out of landfills, you’ll have a shot at scoring eco-friendly prizes like a Smart car, a trek to a national park, a trip to an eco-resort, a home energy audit, local organic food or public transit for a year, or even free toilet paper (hey, who doesn’t need that?). Get thee green!
• Gimme your digits: You’ll never have to ask that again with the new MyBlogLog feature that lets you instantly add your MyBlogLog contacts and other members to your address book. They’ve rolled out one-click access to vCards (for Outlook, Thunderbird, Address Book on Macs, etc.) and hCards (for you more sophisticated microformats fan). Your info will reflect whatever you specified in your privacy settings. There’s nothing quite like portable data. More here.

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

You’re a developer. Your dream is to impact an insane number of people with your work. And you’re impatient — you don’t want to start small, dazzling just a few people with your coding wares.

Enter the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS). Imagine a world where you can write code that will meaningfully reach millions of users in a single bound. That’s the promise of an open Yahoo!.

Ari Balogh, our new CTO, just offered a preview at Web 2.0 Expo of a very new kind of Yahoo!. One that invites developers to take advantage of our huge scale to write applications that build on our existing properties (think Mail, Sports, Search, our front page, mobile, My Yahoo!, etc.), tap into millions of loyal users, and make Internet experience more relevant and useful. You’ve heard us hint at this for a while and now it’s right around the corner.

Think about it: Yahoo! serves more than 500 million unique users every month. We serve 120 billion page views per month. Yahoo! users spend 235 billion minutes a month on our sites. More importantly, some 10 billion relationships exist on user buddy lists and in Yahoo! address books. All that represents a mind-boggling audience for developers.

There’s a massive, latent social network within Yahoo!, and we’re going to bring it to the surface. We’re making Yahoo! more social, but we’re not building yet another social network. We already have an incredible social network… we just need to unlock it.

We are rewiring Yahoo!, building platforms that fundamentally change how Yahoo! works. We’re also opening up to developers to take advantage of the social aspects of our many favored destinations, creating what we call “vitality” — a lifeline into what’s happening with your social connections We plan to become open the best platform on the web, where tens of thousands of developers will create applications and features (many we’ve never even thought of) for our network and our consumers.

Of course, lots of Internet companies are on the “open” bandwagon. In fact, the bandwagon is getting pretty crowded (I’ve never actually seen a bandwagon, but go with me on this). Yahoo! has been in the “open” camp for years, starting simple with RSS feeds in 2003. And now Flickr is the second-most popular API on the Web. We’ve also been a leader in industry’s efforts to embrace open development.

A first taste of our strategy is SearchMonkey, which will let developers mash up helpful data with our search engine results. A Japanese restaurant would no longer be a simple link. Instead, it could include a photo, address, ratings, reviews, and links to online reservations. Search Monkey will be available in a few weeks. Make sure you come to our launch party on May 15th.

And it doesn’t stop there. Y!OS will let developers make Yahoo! portable so that everywhere you go, a more relevant, social and useful online experience is available to you. Shopping on a third-party site? Why not have instant access to your Yahoo! Address Book? I know I want it! ;-)

We’ve previewed Yahoo! OS with leading development shops and they’re very excited to do their thing on Yahoo!. In fact, they plan to dedicate a lot of resources to this platform. It all comes back to the size of the opportunity, right?

Today’s just the beginning. There’s plenty more to come in the months ahead!

UPDATE: Here’s a video of Ari’s Web 2.0 Expo keynote from this morning.

Neal Sample
Chief Architect, Platforms

When it comes to the hall of fame of the Web 2.0 world, the CNET Webware 100 Awards is as close as it gets. And here comes the shameless self-promotion… Yahoo! just brought home a fistful of trophies for having the best Web applications represented in 8 out of the 10 categories.

Making it onto this list isn’t easy. After receiving more than 5,000 nominations, the editors selected 300 finalists. Then they took it to the people for the popular vote, selecting the 100 top products in 10 different categories. After nearly two million votes were cast, our friends from Yahoo! Front Page/Search, Flickr, Yahoo! Mail, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Calendar, and Yahoo! Briefcase were all recognized by the community for offering a favorite app. And rest assured, they heart you back.

Check out the whole list of winners here .

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

EDITOR’S NOTE: The earthwise among you know that tomorrow is Earth Day. We are teaming up with Freecycle™ and other popular reuse groups to inspire people to swap stuff they’d normally send to a landfill. In honor of Yahoo!’s “Free is Good” campaign, into which we’ve tucked treasures like a Smart Car, eco-resort vacation, and Sheryl Crow tickets, we’ve asked a Yahoo! user to reflect on what a boon Freecycle has been to her life:

September 19, 2003 should be memorable as my son Davis’ fifth birthday. Instead, we remember it more clearly as the day we started the very long recovery from Hurricane Isabel, which had hit our small Virginia town the day before. We lost just about everything in the bottom three feet of our garage to floodwater.

Several months later, I read about the local Yorktown Freecycle Yahoo! group and quickly joined. I immediately saw how it could help my town in its recovery efforts (which is, I might add, STILL ongoing five years later as friends and neighbors continue to shell out to repair floors and foundations).

The group proved useful just a few days after I joined. I had posted a want for a lawnmower and within 48 hours, I heard from “uubooklady.” When she let me know that her husband had recently bought a new mower to replace their 1985 Toro and that we were welcome to it, I was elated. I’ve always been happy to use hand-me-downs, and Deron Beal’s brilliant idea to use modern technology to share belongings locally via the Freecycle Network was a perfect match for my earth-friendly leanings.

When my husband Jim went to retrieve his “new” mower, lo and behold, his work colleague Ellis came pushing it out of the garage! These men worked mere feet from one another at NASA, yet they would have never made the lawnmower connection if it hadn’t been for Yahoo! Groups and the Freecycle Network.

I started FreecyclePoquoson for my own town that very week and have been happily moderating it ever since. We’ve grown to almost 600 members and we connect neighbors on a daily basis.

I’ve given away furniture, kitchen items, clothing, toys, and office supplies. I’ve received puzzles, games, craft supplies, used egg cartons (we raise hens and reuse cartons), even empty Kool-Aid Jammers (which I sew into very cool purses). I also get nearly-expired bread each week from a guy I met on Freecycle, who rescues it from grocery stores. I’m now known as “the bread lady” because I put a giant stack (we’re talking over 100 loaves) on my porch for neighbors who might be too proud to get food from the food pantry but are happy to keep it from being tossed into the landfill.

There are literally MILLIONS of similar stories about how helpful the Freecycle Network has been in people’s lives. I’ve seen time again how, while Freecycle often begins with an experience of a person receiving, it inevitably turns into discovering the joy of giving.

Freecycle, through Yahoo!, makes every day Earth Day and provides a modern, free, easy to use format to prove true the old adage, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” It sure beats spending hours having a yard sale or trolling sales!

Davis is nine now. He’s never known anything other than listing his old “stuff” on Freecycle. I don’t know when Poquoson will fully recover, but I do know that Freecycle and Yahoo! have and will continue to play an important part in the healing process… both for our community and for Mother Earth.

Traci-Dale
Yahoo! Groups user
Moderator, FreecyclePoquoson

Today marks a 102-year anniversary that fortunately very few people remember… when a 7.9 tremblor rattled streets, buildings, and teeth in San Francisco. After comfortably denying it could ever happen again, check out our earth-shaking updates:

• Your city is big time now: Ever been frustrated that your city doesn’t rank when it comes to online city guides? Seeth no more. Whether you live in Kailua, Kinnelon, Killingworth or Kennebunkport (or any large metropolis around the world, for that matter), you’ll find your city in the new Yahoo! Our City. It dynamically scrapes what’s available on the Net — Flickr photos, news, events, weather, videos, blogs, maps — and melds them together in a single comprehensive snapshot. The fruit of a Yahoo! India Hack Day winner, it’s a city guide of the people, by the people, and for the people. For every citizen around the world. More here and on their blog.
• MyBlogLog Tweets:The team at MyBlogLog is embracing the 140-character Web. They’ve launched their own Twitter account to help keep you up to speed on goings on, as well as make it easy for you to lob over comments and quick questions. So go follow MyBlogLog and don’t skip a beat. More here.
• Even hackers have taste: If you’ve spent time at the Yahoo! Developer Network in the past, you might have noticed its radical face lift. Not only does it have a clean new 21st-century look (we didn’t want to rush anything), it now has “improved navigation and information architecture built to meet the needs of the lazy and impatient developers” among you (their words, not mine). You’ll also find more timely content, with four content tabs about the latest and greatest at all times. There’s also an Upcoming events stream for rubbing elbows with Tech Yahoos and lots of YDN Theater goodness. We even used our own popular YUI library components to rebuild the site. It’s all about eating dog food around here.

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

There’s nothing like a pre-earnings quiet period to keep a corporate blogger on her toes. So I’ve scrounged around for some virtual hold music. And I found it in the form of a brilliant time lapse video that captures a day in the life at our headquarters, our local scenery, and the action around our Times Square billboard in NYC.

It was a little HD experiment created by Brad Williams, the production lead for Yahoo!’s Tech Ticker program. It’s his version of “Koyaanisqatsi” in three minutes.

Beats muzak.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor