Product Pulse - August 8th, 2008

Posted August 8th, 2008 at 4:11 pm by Nicki Dugan, Blog Editor

Number of Comments No Comments / Filed in: Product Pulse

Whether you’re gearing up to watch today’s Opening Ceremony, getting married, waiting for a prophecy to materialize, or taking photos for Flickr 888, the 8th day of August in 2008 is a most auspicious day. If you’re feeling lucky, too, check out how we prospered this week:

Shortcut to Beijing: It’s Olympic fever time. Want to keep up with Michael Phelps’ medal collection? Or find out who’s been disqualified for doping? Or keep tabs on whether Ronaldinho can bring victory to Brazil? Yahoo! Search just launched a shortcut module that gives you all the relevant news in one little tidy box above your search results. If you want a medal count update, just type “Olympics medal count” (and add “Macedonia” to that if you just want medals in that country). Enter “water polo Olympics” if you just want a recap of results and upcoming events for that sport. Type in “Blanka Vlasic Olympics” to keep up on the world champion high jumper and her news, schedule, and results. Gold medal for Yahoo! Search for making it that easy. More here.
My Olympics: And speaking of the summer games, the My Yahoo! team just released an Olympic Games module that gives you an at-a-glance summary of the latest and greatest. You’ll get news headlines, photos, videos, and medal counts for the top countries, all in one place on your My Yahoo! page. For you busy multitaskers, there’s no better way to catch the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat. More here.
Medals to go: Yup. It’s another Olympics feature! This one lets you keep tabs on the run. Not to be outdone, the Mobile team has created two ways for you to stay up to date on game action. If you have Yahoo! Go 3.0, just add the “2008 Beijing Games” widget to your carousel. Otherwise, just fire up your phone’s web browser and head over to http://m.yahoo.com/2008games. You’ll get news, analysis, photos, and can even customize your site to focus just on your favorite sports (judo, fencing, kayaking, what have you). More here.
Photo fix: The next time you upload a batch of photos to Flickr, you might notice a new “Save and Edit” option. Click that and you’ll enter the free and easy world of photo editing with Picnik. Your whole batch will appear in a tray (aka the Picnik Photo Basket) so you can tweak en masse — rotate, crop, resize, fix colors or exposure, sharpen, kill red-eye. It’s like rolling in the thick green grass on a warm summer’s day, minus the ants. Edit away! More here.
See what you wanna see: Imagine visiting a blog that builds you a personal list of headlines that are most up your alley. That’s what the MyBlogLog team just made possible, through a new WordPress plug-in (we’ll get on that next week!). Blog owners who install the Just For You plug-in can deliver custom headlines to visitors who are MyBlogLog members. It looks into the blog’s archives and serves up posts that matching tags or categories listed in the user’s profile. If the reader isn’t a MyBlogLog user, Just for You just presents a list of headlines based on collective tags of recent MyBlogLog visitors. More here.