A month and a half in the saddle and today I have the perfect excuse to get blogging.

I’ve been on a whirlwind tour for the last six weeks, talking with everybody from executive leaders to the guys who configured my laptop. I’ve been in student mode, slowly getting smarter about what makes this place tick. And most recently, I’ve been gathering information on what it’s going to take to get Yahoo! to a great place as an organization –- and one that brings you killer products.

People here have impressed the hell out of me. They’re smart, dedicated, passionate, driven, and really nice. There’s so much great energy and frankly lots of optimism. But there’s also plenty that has bogged this company down. For starters, you’d be amazed at how complicated some things are here.

So today I’m rolling out a new management structure that I believe will make Yahoo! a lot faster on its feet. For us working at Yahoo!, it means everything gets simpler. We’ll be able to make speedier decisions, the notorious silos are gone, and we have a renewed focus on the customer. For you using Yahoo! every day, it will better enable us to deliver products that make you say, “Wow.”

I’ve noticed that a lot of us on the inside don’t spend enough time looking to the outside. That’s why I’m creating a new Customer Advocacy group. After getting a lot of angry calls at my office from frustrated customers, I realized we could do a better job of listening to and supporting you. Our Customer Care team does an incredible job with the amazing number of people who come to them, but they need better resources. So we’re investing in that. After all, you deserve the very best.

We’re also leaning on this team to make sure we’re all hearing the voice of our customers (consumers and advertisers). I’m singularly focused on providing you with awesome products. Period. The kind that get you so excited, you have to tell someone about them. Whether on your desktop, your mobile device, or even your TV.

And that takes a real understanding of what you want/need/love/hate, how you’re using our products, and what you find simple, intuitive, easy and fun. Who wants innovation for innovation’s sake if it doesn’t make your life easier, more efficient, more productive? So expect us to hear you better and take better care of you.

Finally, a note about our brand. It’s one of our biggest assets. Mention Yahoo! practically anywhere in the world, and people yodel. But in the past few years, we haven’t been as clear in showing the world what the Yahoo! brand stands for. We’re going to change that. Look for this company’s brand to kick ass again.

Big thanks to the many of you who’ve reached out with positive comments. It’s clear people want Yahoo! to succeed. I’ll try to pop by here again soon, though probably not too soon. I have a pretty long to-do list.

Carol Bartz
CEO

Tonight, the Yahoo! Buzz team has party hats on in celebration of its first year.

What’s that, you say? You don’t know Yahoo! Buzz? It’s where you go to find the Web’s most remarkable stories, determined by people like you. Chances are you’ve read one of the millions of articles that have been “buzzed up,” commented on or featured on the Yahoo! homepage and across Yahoo! sites over the past year. Since Yahoo! Buzz is open to all publishers, the site features stories from tens of thousands of sources –- from the most prolific sites, to the truly quirky.

What we’ve found really interesting is the way people around the Web are busily interacting with the content on Yahoo! Buzz. People are voting on or commenting on stories every two seconds, and the top Yahoo! Buzz stories featured on the Yahoo! homepage to date have received well over 300 million clicks. And while Yahoo! Updates is still relatively new, we’re seeing more and more people sharing Updates from Buzz with their Yahoo! connections. So, whenever you “buzz up” a story, it shows up on Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger and other relevant places across Yahoo!, providing another way to share your interests with your connections.

Many thanks to the publishers and the community of people who helped shape the headlines for millions by participating in the first 365 days of Yahoo! Buzz. The site already has more unique monthly visitors than any other social content site in the U.S., according to comScore Media Metrix.

For a look at our editors’ favorite Buzz stories from year one, head on over to the Buzz Log.

We hope you’ll keep on buzzing with us as we watch the next year unfold online.

Brian McMullin
Product Lead, Yahoo! Buzz

Photo from Theresa Thompson

Hi, it’s Mark Teixeira here. That’s right – Tuh-sher-rah. If you don’t know my name by now, don’t worry because you will. I’ve got a few things on deck to make this season more exciting than ever: a new team, the new Yankee stadium, and the new Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball 09’ cover athlete. That’s right, you heard me.

I’m also here to tell you why the 2009 fantasy baseball season is going to be the year that I bring you stat junkies a Yahoo! Sports fantasy baseball championship. Get ready to celebrate America’s favorite pastime with ballpark dogs, peanuts and your favorite fantasy cover athlete: me.

As free agents are starting to settle with their respective new teams, this fantasy baseball season will make for amazing and unpredictable baseball both on and off line. So start your draft prep, because spring training is just around the corner and Yahoo! Sports has all of the stats you need to leave the competition in the dirt.

If you don’t believe me, check out the Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball page or pick up a copy of Yahoo! Sports’ first magazine, Fantasy Baseball ’09 Draft Guide. It hits your local Borders or Barnes & Nobles in March. Don’t miss a second of the action with exclusive drafting information, player stats, streaming live games, MLB news, Yahoo! Fantasy expert tips and more.

Now, go round up your friends and family to join you in a harmless game of fantasy baseball. Little do they know that you’ve got all your bases covered to take home this year’s championship. Don’t forget to look for me, Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball ‘09 cover athlete, online at Yahoo! Sports. Let the smack talking begin!

Mark Teixeira
Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball ’09 Cover Athlete
New York Yankees #25

On this day 76 years ago, the U.S. Congress made a proposal that had brewers, vintners, bartenders, wine snobs, and fraternity brothers clinking glasses across the country — the 21st amendment. It would ultimately end Prohibition, shutter the speakeasy, kill profits for organized crime, and make hangovers perfectly legal in all 48 states. Here’s what we toasted to this week:

• Mobile makeover: The gang at Yahoo! Mobile rolled out a beta program this week for a comprehensive new mobile service known as, simply enough, Yahoo! Mobile. It will come to a cell phone near you next month on the mobile Web, as an iPhone app, and as an app developed for smartphones from Nokia, RIM, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola, as well as those running Windows Mobile. It will replace Yahoo! Go and packages a variety of great mobile offerings into one location — search, email, messenger, address book, calendar, news, social networks, and even managing all your favorite non-Yahoo! content. To sign up for the beta, just enter http://mobile.yahoo.com in your phone’s browser (and be patient — it make take up to a few weeks to be admitted to the program). Here’s the press release.
• Ogling at the Oscars: Let’s face it — next to finding out the Academy Award winners, we care most about how everyone looks on the red carpet. That’s why the Yahoo! Search team has built a new Oscar-related carousel for Yahoo! Image Search. After Sunday’s show and parties, enter keywords related to Oscar-nominated films or actors and you’ll find a rolling gallery of the newest photos above the regular search results. Toggle your way through Slumdog Millionaire, Mickey Rourke, and Kate Winslet eye candy. More here.
• Watch with me: Raise your hand if you’ve ever IMed a video link to share a laugh with a friend, only to be disappointed when it takes them a few hours to finally get around to watching it. Wouldn’t it be cooler to watch that video together, at the same time? The scientists and engineers at Yahoo! Research think so and have just released a piping hot new version of Zync, a synchronized video player for Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 for Windows. You can now simultaneously view videos on Yahoo! Video, Flickr and, of course, YouTube — with Yahoo! Music and Yahoo! News to come next week. Just paste the video link into your conversation and click the “Watch With Me” button — share, watch, chat. No download necessary. Now go watch the woman who missed her flight in Hong Kong with someone.

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

The great American love affair with award shows may be ending. That’s the conclusion you might draw after looking at recent television ratings for shows like the Emmys, SAG Awards, and Golden Globe awards. But what’s really at play is that, like with other forms of media, the Internet is starting to steal the show.

Rather than sitting through hours of pomp and circumstance, more American entertainment lovers seem to be heading online to get their fix. Most likely it’s because they can catch the evening’s highlights — teary speeches, Adrien Brody’s fiery kiss, Roberto Benigni’s giddiness, Letterman’s Uma-Oprah tension, the Gold Amex dress — on demand for their water cooler discussions.

Let’s check out the numbers. The 2008 Emmy Awards averaged 12.2 million viewers, down 6% and the lowest ratings ever for an Emmy telecast. Yet the day after the awards, 4.6 million people flocked to Yahoo! TV and generated 103 million page views (nearly doubled year over year). This year’s SAG Awards drew the smallest audience since TBS and TNT began airing them together in 2006 –- with 5.3 million viewers, down 12% from 2007. The next day, 4.1 million people flooded Yahoo! Movies for its best and worst dressed gallery and checked out 83 million pages. And although the 3-hour Golden Globes won a coveted Sunday night time slot, this year’s star-studded telecast drew the lowest ratings in 13 years –- 14.6 million viewers, down from 20 million the year before. The next day, 7.2 million people descended on omg!, taking in an average of about 40 page views per person, driven mainly by an insatiable appetite for photos.

So all is not lost — we’re still just as obsessed with celebrities and their red carpet fashion foibles. Possibly more so than ever. But we’re just turning to a different screen to view it — during and after the show. So don’t cancel your Oscars party on Sunday. Just make sure you have a laptop next to the popcorn.

Sibyl Goldman
GM, Yahoo! Entertainment

One of the best kept Yahoo! secrets is our office at the North Pole — or at least really, really close to it. In the city of Trondheim, Norway, a group of 40 dedicated search engineers work day and night to develop one of our core technology platforms.

A huge advantage of having an office in such a cold and deserted corner of the world is, of course, that there is little else to do than go to work. The hazardous environment is, however, a big drawback — blizzards, temperatures well below even the lowest of comfort zones and, worst of all, the hungry polar bears (isbjørn) that sneak around town looking for food or a warm place to hide.

So while your biggest commuting worry is how heavy the traffic will be, these guys — wishing they had Kevlar coats and rifles on their scooters — have to ask themselves: “Will I even make it to work today?”

Could this be for real? Do these daredevils from Norway deserve high-risk pay and additional insurance packages, or are they just pulling our legs? See their photo evidence at Flickr and let us know what you think.

Eirik Refsdal
Engineer, Yahoo! Search

Namaste! We just spent a few days in the sunny and humid Bangalore to meet and work with the local developer community at the second Open Hack Day in India.

Around 125 hackers answered our call and spent a few hours listening to Tech talks covering Yahoo!’s newest developer offers before going down to some serious hacking for a 24 hour period.

Even if you didn’t get the chance to come, you can get all the information of the event on the Open Hack 2009 Wiki, where you can also find the slide decks of the Tech Talks. Of course the real value of the Tech Talks is the face-to-face time with the experts, so be around next time to get the full experience.

After the information section with tech talks and the first refreshments break, Chief Yahoo David Filo introduced the hack day and started the 24 hour hack period.

Keeping things real and close to the host country, not all was numbers and algorithms though. We had a dance group performing and trying to teach both the hackers and the Yahoo! Hack team some Bollywood and — as it was Valentine’s Day — salsa dance moves. There’s some footage of these already on the Web and lots of pictures on flickr. Please try to overlook my awkward performance in the background should you stumble upon it.

All in all, the Open Hack day was a tremendous success. The hackers formed teams and delivered 66 Hacks, of which 9 were picked as overall winners. The range of technologies used in the hacks was impressive, with the open search technology BOSS being the most used, followed by our mobile platform BluePrint, the location brokerage service FireEagle, OpenMail, and the Yahoo! Application Platform.

The enthusiasm and thoroughness of the hackers was contagious and the helpers and Yahoo! experts stayed up the whole night to help out with advice, code and by pointing people to the right direction.

The main benefit of hack day for Yahoo! is to see how easy it is to use our developer products and where developers get stuck. In that respect the sleepless hours were of tremendous interest for me as it was great to see how fast developers can build something impressive by digging into the documentation of YUI, YQL and BluePrint and simply going for it.

I’ve learnt a lot myself during this period and know now where to alter documentation or provide new and easier-to-understand examples. Nothing beats meeting your audience face-to-face and, in the case of the Hack team and the Yahoo! Developer Network, our audience are the developers in the field.

After 24 hours, the winners of the hack day were chosen by the team of judges (a mix of senior Yahoos of the US, UK and India and a director of an Indian VC company):

• Best Search Inside – Y! Grep (by pi: Ravi Bhushan Kumar & Ravi S. Math)
• Best Gone in 90 seconds – BOSS in 90 seconds (by The Flex Ninjas: Raghunath Rao Thricovil & Harish Sivaramakrishnan)
• Best Social Travel Helpdesk – Travel Assist (by Beanbag-Hackers: Nidhi Chaudhary & Anurag Jain)
• Best Keynote from a Traffic Jam – Slideshare for Mobile (& openMail by scriptease: Kapil Mohan, Sri Prasanna, Mani Kumar & Ciju Cherian)
• Best Crossing the Language Chasm – Translate This (by kroniks: sourabh behra)
• Best Confidential Messages – Redact Mail (by BabuSrithar)
• Best Socially Mobile – Kiva Mobile (by SocialSync.org: Akshay Surve)
• Best Navigation Bangalore Traffic – MyBus (by Parageeks: Pradeep BV, Akash Mahajan, Aashish Solanki & Rohit Talukdar)
• Best Built from Scratch – Search Engine with Hybrid (Human & Artificial) Intelligence (by API [Advancing Predictive Intelligence]: Antano Solar John & Niranjan Prithviraj)

I cannot end this without saying a big thank you to all involved in planning, executing and also taking part in the Open Hack Day Bangalore. It was a blast and I am very much looking forward to the next activities we’ll do in India.

Chris Heilmann
International Developer Evangelist, Yahoo! Developer Network

What do climate change, Kevin Bacon, the snowy tree cricket, Al Qaeda, HIV, the World Wide Web, and your address book have in common? They’ve all played a role in a major science discovery –- the hidden language of networks.

“CONNECTED: The Power of Six Degrees” is a new BBC documentary that unfolds the science behind the popular trivia game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” whose notion that anyone on the planet can be connected in just six steps of association was supposed to be an urban myth.

The film follows two young scientists, Harvard’s Laszlo Barabasi and Yahoo! Research’s very own Duncan Watts, as they work to uncover the pervasive law that nature uses to organize itself. By studying vast natural and man-made networks — from the connections between Hollywood actors to the nervous system of a worm, the U.S. electric power grid and the WWW — they discover that diverse systems share a common blueprint. It takes us from the hunt for Saddam Hussein to the front-lines of cancer research and shows that the Six Degrees principle doesn’t just relate to people but also to viruses, web pages, neurons, species, molecules, and even fashion.

Watts, a former Australian Navy officer with a passion for extreme rock climbing, was a professor at Columbia University at just 29. He launched the explosion in the new science of networks while studying crickets and the mechanism that allows them to chirp in unison. He’s the author of “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age.” Yodel Anecdotal will post a full interview with Watts soon.

“CONNECTED: The Power of Six Degrees” premieres tomorrow night on the Science Channel. Check your local cable listings for times.

Here’s the trailer:

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Each month, Yahoo! For Good unleashes Purple Acts of Kindness to surprise and delight our local communities. In February, we brought extra cheer to hundreds of people in Los Angeles suffering from HIV/AIDS, cancer, and other devastating illnesses by partnering with Project Angel Food. We donated a few Valentine’s surprises to accompany their deliveries of free and nutritious meals yesterday. Here’s an account from their CEO.

By 8am, the Project Angel Food kitchen is already busy –- volunteers putting on aprons staff pulling fresh vegetables from the refrigerator, pre-heating the ovens, moving pots of water to the stoves. More than 1,500 meals will be cooked today for men, women and children struggling with HIV/AIDS, cancer and other life-threatening illnesses.

At 11:30am, the delivery volunteers start to arrive and exclaims of “Flowers!” fill the room as they notice the purple flowers from our friends at Yahoo!. “Do we get to take these to the clients?” they ask, knowing how much this thoughtful gift will mean to our clients. Everyone we serve faces a life-threatening illness and most also face tremendous loneliness. Any gesture of thoughtfulness, of remembrance, is magnified for the people Project Angel Food serves.

Well into the afternoon, bags of nutritious meals are loaded into cars with purple flowers peaking out, chocolate tucked inside and a card with Happy Valentine’s Day wishes from Yahoo!. These gestures of kindness, of thoughtfulness, will be remembered for months to come –- and beautifully represent Project Angel Food’s motto of “for Life, for Love, for as long as it takes.”

Margaret Steele
Chief Executive Officer
Project Angel Food

As many of you know, we started testing new concepts for the Yahoo! homepage last fall, with the goal of helping to simplify the Web for the more than 300 million people around the world who visit the site each month.

We are wrapping up the first phase of our “bucket testing” and have gleaned some great insights from people in the US, UK, France and India who have tried out the new page. We’ve done a number of things to collect input –- from reading your comments here on Yodel to reviewing online feedback forms and customer care inquires to meeting with many of you in person and online. Bottom line is we’re getting closer to the final design, but we’re not quite there yet.

Before I share details around what we’ve learned, I wanted to give a quick recap of some of the functionality we’ve added over the past few months since just a fraction of you have experienced it firsthand.

Back in September, we introduced a new section called “My Apps.” The great part about having apps on your homepage is that you can easily check in and get more done –- from reading and responding to multiple email accounts to browsing local movie listings –- all without leaving the page.

Today, we’ve enhanced that experience and we’re testing more than 25 apps that will keep you updated with whatever you want to know. New additions include apps from eBay, Forbes.com, Wired.com and more top brands. We’ve also beefed up the Sports and Finance apps, for example, providing schedules, team standings, blogs links and more, plus one-click access to your stock portfolios and stock quotes. The best part is that the “My Apps” section is now customizable so you can add and remove apps (check out this screenshot) so your homepage reflects what matters most to you.

Here’s what we’ve heard from our testers:

Positive Feedback

• People are happy with the streamlined look and feel
• There’s lots of love for the applications
• Most testers said they prefer the new homepage over the current homepage

One comment that sums it up nicely:

“Well — I was surprised at first at how little change was introduced, and liked that. Now I’m surprised by how much change actually is packed in, but is more interaction based… Basically it’s deceptively different — looks and feels the same, but much more functionality built in at a new layer.” – Thomas

What We’re Working On
Now that we’ve got a critical mass of input, we’re translating it into updated versions of the page for ongoing testing. Here are some highlights.

• The #1 thing we’re hearing you want is more apps and we’ll be adding many apps in the coming weeks
• Most didn’t like the dark color that we tested initially — see the screenshot below of the new visual treatments we’re testing
• Easier ways to access and preview email and instant messaging accounts are in the works
• It should be easier to get to other Yahoo! services that you’ve come to rely upon

We don’t take changes to your homepage lightly and your input is critical. To help our designers and engineers, tell us what else you think we should consider. Is there a killer app that you’d love to see?

Know that we’re working hard to create a new homepage that you’ll love and we’ll keep you posted as we get closer to launching. Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Tapan Bhat
Senior Vice President, Yahoo! Front Doors, Communities and Network Services