Another year, another reason to celebrate Yahoos giving back around the world! For the past 11 years, the Yahoo! Employee Foundation (YEF) has been empowering Yahoos to give back and make a difference in their community. The statistics below are a reminder of how much they’ve accomplished along the way.

• More than $10 million in grants have been given to 350 nonprofit organizations;
• More than 300 passionate Yahoo! employees have successfully championed grants for their favorite nonprofit;
• At least 1 in 2 Yahoos in the U.S. have donated to YEF.

These numbers blow me away every year because YEF is run solely by Yahoo! employee volunteers. Yahoos donate all of the money, champion all of the grants, and organize all volunteer activities, whether it is hosting a backpack drive or renovating homes. And YEF funds focus on the areas of youth and education, community building and families, and the environment, areas which were chosen by—you guessed it—our employees. One of the best parts of YEF is that by simply donating $50, an employee can champion their favorite organization for a grant of up to $40,000. That’s pretty amazing.

This summer, we’re celebrating YEF globally, in offices from Sunnyvale to New York to London to Taiwan. We’ll also have hands-on volunteer activities in most of our offices: Sunnyvale Yahoos will be putting together educational activity kits for Resource Area for Teachers, while New York Yahoos will be handwriting letters to terminally ill children for Make a Child Smile. This is our way of thanking all the incredible Yahoos who have donated their time and talents to support causes they care about. It is at times like these when I am especially proud to be a Yahoo.

Rachana Choubey
Global Front Doors

Is it Web site, website, or web site? What’s the best on-screen placement for a lead story? How can you better know your site’s audience? Why should you?

The rapid growth of the Web has left writers and editors relying on editorial style guides that are intended for print publishing. But these guides do not focus on writing for the Internet. “The Yahoo! Style Guide” does. It is a must-have book that will help everyone who writes, edits, or creates content for the Internet accomplish their work with clarity and precision.

The seeds of “The Yahoo! Style Guide” were planted fifteen years ago, when writers and programmers at Yahoo!, faced with a lack of industry guidance, began assembling a set of guidelines for Web writing. Their first in-house reference grew in size and company importance as content creators added to it through the years.

Polished and expanded for its public debut, “The Yahoo! Style Guide” covers the basics of grammar and punctuation plus a multitude of topics with a Web-specific focus, such as how to write and edit for an online audience, streamlining copy, basic Web codes, Internet law, and search engine optimization. Before-and-after examples of how to clean up problem copy abound.

The companion website not only features content excerpted from the book but also offers more help and resources from Yahoo! editors.

“The Yahoo! Style Guide” is available in print and digital versions, such as iPad and Kindle. It will be available wherever books are sold beginning July 6, 2010.Read reviews, comments, and endorsements from academic and industry experts. And send us feedback about the Guide.

-Chris Barr, senior editorial director

A click can be a powerful thing. Thanks to the tens of thousands of them from people who viewed our photo of Ben Stiller yesterday, kids in Haiti will now be able to have a new school.

When we took the photo of Ben, Elisa Steele and Jeff Goodby yesterday, we promised to donate to Ben’s StillerStrong charity a dollar per view up to $50,000, the cost to build a temporary school in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. And, whether it’s out of a desire to do good or just because they wanted to see Ben’s signature “Blue Steel,” the clicks came.

Blog posts on Yahoo! and Flickr, a video from Ben (see below) and tweets from Ben, Yahoo! and hundreds of people who liked the idea drove visitors to the photo. Within eight hours of being posted, we had already hit 50,000 views on the two sites where the image was being hosted, flickr.com/stillerstrongyahoo and flickr.com/yahooadvertising. As of posting, the photo has more than 100,000 views–double the views we were shooting for.

People seemed to love the idea, and Ben’s StillerStrong work in general. More than two hundred people commented, saying things like, “This is such a lovely project. Keep it up, man!” and, for the Zoolander fans out there, “Will this be a school for kids who can’t read good and want to do other stuff good too?” (Heh.)

Thanks for clicking and helping to raise money for the school. We hope soon to have another picture to show: a finished school!

—Jeff Sweat, blog editor

Did you know that your click could be worth a dollar for charity? You can raise a dollar for Ben Stiller’s StillerStrong Foundation if you view a photoof Hollywood powerhouse Ben Stiller, Yahoo! chief marketing officer Elisa Steele and advertising legend Jeff Goodby taken at today’s Cannes Lions advertising festival.

Ben joined Elisa and Jeff on stage today in a beyond-packed session that maxed out the festival’s viewing spaces. The three participated in a wide-ranging discussion about creativity and storytelling, which covered how technology is changing the creative process on Madison Avenue and in Hollywood. (For more about Ben, Elisa, and Jeff’s session, check back later.)

At the end of the session, Ben posed for a group photo with Elisa and Jeff and a crowd wearing StillerStrong headbands, and uploaded it to Flickr. He asked everyone to view it and share it with their friends. For every click, Yahoo! will donate a dollar, up to $50,000, to Ben’s StillerStrong charity. StillerStrong is raising money for the Haitian School Initiative, an effort to help provide temporary schools for Haitians displaced by the earthquake in January 2010.

$50,000 will pay for one temporary school. Your view pays for part of that school. So click on it, and pass it on!

With the Yahoo! Widget Engine already available in millions of living rooms globally, today we’re announcing an expanded partnership with Sony, bringing TV Widgets to Sony BRAVIA LCD TVs in more than 100 countries – increasing the number of markets where Yahoo! TV Widgets are available by nearly seven-fold.

In our earliest days of bringing the Yahoo! Widget Engine to TV, we knew that we had a compelling product to address a rapidly growing market of more than 70 million consumers that interact with Internet content while watching TV.  Addressing this consumer need also creates an economic opportunity for TV manufacturers, publishers, advertisers, and our more than 7,000 registered developers.

Launched in January 2009, we have distribution partnerships with five of the top 10 TV manufacturers around the world, including Sony, Samsung, LG, VIZIO and HiSense.  As we look to increase distribution and reach the broadest audience possible, we have partnered with silicon and integration partners including MIPS Technologies and Sigma Designs as well as new OEM partners like ViewSonic – enabling consumers to get the Yahoo! Widget Engine on set-top boxes, media players, Blu-Ray players, DVDs, DVRs and other devices that connect directly to the TV.

As we work to deliver innovative and compelling experiences to consumers, global partnerships, like this one with Sony, drive the industry forward and enable developers to achieve scale and reach engaged audiences on an entirely new level.

Here is a demo of Sony’s experience and more on the news with Roger Urrabazo, a product lead for Yahoo! Connected TV.

If you haven’t visited the new Connected TV blog – check it out today.

“Congressman Manny Pacquiao”. Imagine millions of boxing fans around the world hearing that stirring introduction from Michael Buffer this November. That’s when Manny Pacquiao , the only man in history to win seven world boxing titles in seven weight classes, faces his last ever opponent in the ring, before he swaps the canvas for congress.

Filipinos were already talking about a possible “Congressman Manny” ring introduction on social networks and the Philippine blogosphere as soon as Pacquiao took the lead in the congressional race. He eventually won in a stunning upset in the country’s first automated elections. Which means that after two attempts (his previous try in the 2007 elections suffered a horrible loss) Pacquiao can now add legislator to his long list of accomplishments as one of the all-time boxing greats.

It is a remarkable tale of a boy who grew up in poverty but overcame the odds to become one of the greatest boxers and richest athletes in the world. More than that, however, he is a national hero in the Philippines, where even criminals take a day off and the military and insurgents stop fighting, so they can stay glued to the screens and watch Pacquiao fight.

Yahoo! Philippines has chronicled through the Ringside With Manny microsite which has spread through word of mouth on social networks, such as the Ringside With Manny on Yahoo! Meme. Through Yahoo!’s Ringside With Manny, millions of fans in the Philippines and around the globe could keep themselves updated on latest Pacquiao news, while also participating in Yahoo! Philippines’ live blogs of the fights, such as Pacquiao’s encounters with Miguel Cotto and Joshua Clottey.

In fact, before Pacquiao’s historic win over Cotto – that gave him his seventh world title in seven weight classes – Pacquiao sat down with the Yahoo! Sports team for a Ringside With Manny interview.

More importantly, Yahoo!’s Ringside With Manny offered exclusive content that gave visitors a better glimpse of the man behind the great boxing champ. Whether it was a video of Pacquiao singing and playing the guitar, or answering trivia questions from Yahoo!, the goal of Ringside With Manny was to bring readers closer to the champion.

Yodel Anecdotal had the opportunity to ask Pacquiao a couple of additional questions. Check out his replies:

Yodel: What’s on your iPod playlist right now?
Pacquiao: Mostly love songs and Martin Nievera. My all-time favourite is ‘You raised me up’ by Josh Groban

Yodel: Will you allow your daughter Princess to join show business? (Ed: His three-year-old daughter Princess loves to perform in front of the camera)
Pacquiao: I am not against it. As long as she can finish her studies, I’ll support her on whatever she wants

When asked about his mum, Pacquiao has this message for her: “Thank you for guiding us. I pray to God that you’ll have a long life because we need you by our side…”

Fight fans are still praying that a mega fight between Pacquiao and undefeated Floyd Mayweather Jr. will still push through in what arguably will be the richest and most important boxing bout in history. Whether or not his opponent will be Mayweather, however, Pacquiao has said that he will retire after his fight in November.

In the meantime, check out Yahoo!’s Ringside with Manny to follow our latest updates on Manny Pacquiao.

Post contributors: Joey Alarilla, Priscilla Tan
Social Media Editors, Yahoo!

Predictalot , a massive crowdsourcing experiment cooked up in Yahoo! Labs, is going global. This time, you can predict almost anything your heart desires about the World Cup in South Africa, like whether Germany will advance further than Brazil or a team will win that has never won before. You can compose any of millions of predictions and sell them any time for virtual points, even in the middle of a match, just like the stock market.

We ran the first version of Predictalot in the U.S. for the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament known as March Madness. Nearly 50,000 people placed 100,000 predictions. To our delight, we found that people went well beyond picking ordinary things, like who will win, to construct a huge array of highly customized predictions — selecting 10,000 different kinds of predictions, including almost 4,000 “3-D” predictions that compared one team against two others, like “Butler will advance further than Kentucky and Purdue.”

The latest version of Predictalot, now available for the global audience of World Cup fans, has several new features:

• You can create a group and challenge your friends to play, or join an existing group of like-minded players.
• You can track how your predictive acumen stacks up in each group you belong to and overall across the globe.
• You can watch streaming updates of what other people are predicting in your social circle and around the world.
• You can view live match updates right within the app for your convenience.
• You can choose from millions of predictions, but don’t worry, the on-screen wizard guides you to easily find and customize the exact prediction you want.

Our goal with Predictalot is to take the wisdom of crowds to the extreme by computing what all these different predictions, taken together, say about the likelihood of each of the 28 trillion possible ways the tournament could unfold. Predictalot is an example of what is technically called a combinatorial prediction market, a new kind of market made possible only now that computing power has increased so massively. Predictalot represents the evolution of markets in the digital age, empowering users – in this case football and soccer fans, though this could apply to other types of users like online advertisers –  with extreme customization. More and more, matching buyers with sellers — the core function of markets — requires sophisticated algorithms, including machine learning and optimization. Predictalot illustrates this trend in an entertaining way.

Bringing Predictalot to life has been a truly interdisciplinary effort. On our team we have computer scientists and economists to work out the market math (see our previous write-up for a look under the hood from a science perspective), and engineers to turn those equations into something real that is fast and easy to use. Predictalot is built on the Yahoo! Application Platform, an invaluable platform (open to any developer) that makes it easy to create engaging and social applications for a massive audience.  Yahoo!’s extensive cloud allows us to pull our global content and deliver it quickly to our worldwide audience.

And we owe a great deal of our success and exposure to the cooperation and support of other well-established Yahoo! properties like Fantasy Sports and Games.

We’re excited about this version of Predictalot and hope you join us as the matches begin in South Africa. We invite everyone to participate, though please do keep in mind that the application is in beta, or experimental, mode. (If you prefer a more polished experience, check out the official Yahoo! Fantasy Sports World Soccer game.) We hope Predictalot is both fun to play and helps us learn something scientifically interesting.

Check out the screencast here to see how it works:

Thanks,
David Pennock, Yahoo! Labs

and the rest of the Predictalot team: Mani Abrol, Mohammad Mahdian, Mridul Muralidharan, Sudar Muthu, Navneet Nair, and Daniel Reeves

Michael Arrington hosted Carol Bartz earlier today for a candid fireside chat at theTechCrunch Disrupt event in New York City.

Carol took the opportunity to share some background on the just-announcedglobal deal with Nokia, to share some love for the newly hired executive vice president of products, Blake Irving, and to share her thoughts on growth and innovation at Yahoo!.

QOTD on AllthingsD:

“Evidently, these days if you’re not coming out with some device, you’re not innovating. But that’s not true. There’s a soul to our product.”

–Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz says innovation isn’t dead at Yahoo

Tomorrow, Yahoo! Chief architect, Raymie Stata, will be serving as an expert judge at the Startup Battlefield competition. Follow us on Twitter for updates from the event.

Hip-hip HOORAY! for our Yahoo! Southeast Asia marketing team! The Purple Hunt campaign (a two-month online and offline treasure hunt) drew more than 6,000 participants in the Philippines and brought home a Gold, a Silver and a Bronze at the Asia Interactive Awards.

• GOLD – BEST SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN: For use of Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook
• SILVER – TOP ONLINE PERFORMANCE MARKETING CAMPAIGN
• BRONZE – BEST ONLINE CAMPAIGN OF THE YEAR

Watch our work:

Congrats to the team!

Check out this space for more upcoming news from Yahoo! in Asia!

Bennett Porter
Vice President, APAC Brand Marketing & Southeast Asia

Today we are excited to announce a big new content and marketing program to bring World Cup coverage to vivid life online and offline for its users around the world. As part of the broad program which includes a dedicated and highly customized World Soccer “channel” on the global Yahoo! network, Yahoo! will provide fans with complete coverage of the tournament including customized content across multiple platforms, innovative new products, and special events across the globe.

As hundreds of millions of soccer fans prepare for the world’s biggest sporting event, we are launching our first global initiative, which features microsites, compelling mobile experiences, fantasy games, and Yahoo! Search tools for more than 20 countries in 12 languages. To find out more, go to Yahoo.com and search for “Yahoo! coverage World Cup 2010.”

Shortcuts, Scores, Fantasy Soccer & More!

• New Shortcuts in Yahoo! Search results which will launch in more than 25 markets throughout the summer. These Shortcuts will provide rich information such as photos, videos, schedules, live scores, stats, team information and news, right on the Search results page.
• Real-time scores, schedules and breaking news, all of which fans can have at their fingertips by downloading the Yahoo! Toolbar with World Cup coverage. The toolbar can be customized with a country-themed skin to support any competing team.
• Yahoo! Sports World Soccer 2010, a pick’em style fantasy soccer game, which lets fans select winners for each match of the World Cup at us.wc.fantasysports.yahoo.com/world-cup. This is Yahoo!’s largest global launch of a fantasy product. Fans can play the game in 22 countries in 11 languages.
• Yahoo!’s first online penalty shootout contest  — Yahoo! Penalty Shootout — is set to launch at the end of May and will be available in more than a dozen countries. Soccer fans will be able to compete with friends, other fans, and sworn soccer rivals from around the world for a chance to win the Yahoo! Sports Pass, tickets to any four premier sporting events in the world per year for the next four years.
• Predictalot from Yahoo! Labs, a fun experiment that puts the “wisdom of the crowd” about the World Cup to the test. Predictalot lets fans in every country make millions of interesting predictions, like “How many teams from Europe will advance to the quarterfinals? or “Will a country that has never won before win it all this year?”

Customized Experiences for PC and Mobile Platforms

Continuing our tradition of providing fans with seamless online and mobile experiences, fans can find comprehensive world soccer coverage at (sports.yahoo.com/soccer/world-cup/). Yahoo! enables fans to get breaking news, scores, player stats, live commentary, and video from Yahoo! Sports, the No.1 online sports destination.

Yahoo!’s coverage includes:

• On-the-ground reporting from South Africa by award-winning writers Dan Wetzel, Martin Rogers, and Les Carpenter.
• “World Soccer Roundup,” a daily video news show that will recap top stories and give information on upcoming World Cup events.
• Dirty Tackle, a leading soccer blog from editor Brooks Peck, and contributors Richard Whittall and Ryan Bailey.

Later this month, Yahoo! will launch a comprehensive mobile site covering the World Cup 2010, providing up to the minute scores, schedules, standings, news, player profiles and more.  The site will be available in 40 markets, covering 13 languages and accessible across more than 4,500 types of mobile devices. Simply visit http://m.yahoo.com/worldcup from your phone to keep up to date on the latest.

Covering the Globe

For the first time ever, Yahoo! is hosting special events around the globe for soccer-loving fans in Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Indonesia, Spain, and the United Kingdom. For the events Yahoo! has teamed with some of the sport’s most elite goalkeepers, past and present, to surprise fans worldwide. Fans can find out details about the events via Facebook at facebook.com/YahooWorldFootball. Yahoo!’s cloud is powering Yahoo!’s Coverage of the World Cup and creating a borderless Yahoo! community on the web for this global event.

Offering Advertisers Unique Opportunities

This year’s coverage of the World Cup throughout the Yahoo! network offers new and exciting opportunities for advertising and marketing partners, as well. From co-branding opportunities at Yahoo! offline events through online advertising opportunities at country and international levels, Yahoo! has marketing options to help the world’s biggest global brands participate in the excitement.

So if we don’t see you in South Africa, we’ll see you online at Yahoo.com!