Ever want to go bowling with the President? And if so, which of the current crop of candidates would you want as your bowling partner? Perhaps more importantly, who wouldn’t you want on your bowling team? You can find how Americans answered those questions and more in the first installment of Yahoo! News’ “Political Pulse” Poll. It’s our effort — in partnership with the Associated Press — to break down this election beyond the head-to-head numbers and take a deeper look at what’s actually driving Americans to make their choices for president. What do Americans really care about? Is it the candidate’s looks, policy positions, or some combination?

Over the next 12 months, Yahoo! News will offer eight political polls that examine these questions. We hope to give you a sense for how Americans are feeling about issues like religion, the environment, and even which candidates are considered the best looking? (Clinton, Edwards, and Obama all get the thumbs-up from Democrats. Republicans don’t find the GOP candidates quite so attractive.)

The questions will remain mostly the same for all eight polls and will survey the same 2,000 Americans throughout the campaign stretch so we can see firsthand how their beliefs develop or change. How much will candidates’ “likability” play into who actually gets your final vote? Will the next poll show Republicans know more about Fred Thompson than his role on Law and Order? Stay tuned. The next one is scheduled to drop in early ‘08.

If you’re a political junkie or just like taking polls, input your votes on our interactive poll to see how your views compare to the rest of America.

Ezra Palmer
Managing Editor, Yahoo! News

News of the coup in Thailand broke on Tuesday morning, and toward the end of the day I started looking around on Flickr to see if people in Bangkok were uploading anything interesting. It was so soon after the coup that very few images were available. Still, they were interesting, and I thought I might have a chance to build a small slideshow of some sort. I sent notes via Flickr mail to the photographers asking if they would be willing to have their photos included in a special feature on Yahoo! News, and if they might be interested in being interviewed.

By 7 the next morning there were still relatively few images posted, but those few pictures were really fascinating — pictures of people posing beside tanks, soldiers with flowers… totally unexpected stuff in the context of a military takeover.

By mid-morning, half a dozen Flickr users had responded to my queries. I really struck pay dirt with a guy named Dan Caspersz. A transplanted Englishman working for the United Nations, he was literate and observant, and like me he was struck by the incongruity of the festive atmosphere amidst a coup d’etat. We recorded a five-minute telephone interview on a conference bridge, which spit out a .wav file. Multimedia producer Chris Strimbu and I then boiled the interview down to 90 seconds, Chris illustrated it with our small library of Flickr images.

We posted the feature on Wednesday afternoon, with news still breaking in Bangkok. Very cool!

This isn’t the first time we’ve used Flickr images in news, but it’s the most ambitious effort so far. More to come…

Ezra Palmer
Managing Editor, Yahoo! News