Stephen Colbert doesn’t shave his head for just anybody. But sometimes that’s what it takes to get attention for a worthy cause.

This week, Comedy Central’s Colbert Report is broadcasting from Baghdad’s Camp Victory in support of U.S. troops serving in Iraq. In a show of solidarity, he’s now sporting a high-and-tight haircut. But he’s also putting the spotlight on a different part of the military –- the children who make great sacrifices of their own while their parents serve our country.

That’s where my organization, DonorsChoose.org, comes in. Together we hope to give these kids a leg up. I founded DonorsChoose.org nine years ago after witnessing the scarcity of materials in our country’s public schools, I never could have imagined the extent to which American citizen philanthropists have responded. In that time, we’ve raised over $34 million for public school classroom projects around the country.

As part of our “Support Our Troops” campaign, launched in partnership with Colbert, DonorsChoose.org is running a friendly competition among the Armed Forces –- Army, Air Force, Marines, Navy and Coast Guard — to see which branch’s supporters can have the biggest impact on classrooms. As of today, we have raised more than $130,000, and the Army is barely hanging on to the lead (check out the leaderboard as the tension builds in real-time).

Literally hundreds of projects have been submitted by teachers at military-serving schools across the country. Just a couple to inspire you:

1. Say Sí to the Army!
2. From A to Bravo Zulu!
3. Military Students Travel the World - Through Books!
4. General Lee’s Black Bears

I’d also like to give a shout out to Yahoo! for creating the Colbert Avatars. Now you can dress yourself as Stephen Colbert and accessorize with things like an eagle, bear, Colbert Nation hat, Che Colbert tshirt, fireplace, and a desk, and help us spread the word about the Support Our Troops campaign.

The good news is you don’t have to shave your head to help. Just please go donate to one of the many classroom projects waiting for funding. And if you need further inspiration, check out the video clips from this week’s Colbert Report.

Charles Best
Founder and CEO, DonorsChoose.org

Today marks President Obama’s 100th day in office and the White House has just released a set of nearly 300 photos on Flickr. This first set, Delivering on Change, on the Official White House Photostream gives you “an exclusive, massive, unique look at the President’s term so far” (whitehouse.gov)

It’s a wonderful mix of seriousness, serenity, and whimsy. You get an insider’s view on moments that include inauguration night, meetings with cabinet members in the Oval Office, signing a bill, getting briefed in swine flu, watching the Super Bowl with members of Congress, cheering on youngsters at the Easter Egg Roll, contemplating alone, examining solar panels in Colorado, playing hoops with the education secretary, golfing with Joe Biden, fist-bumping staffers, visiting troops in Baghdad, and clowning around with Michelle, Sasha and Malia. And, of course, even running around the White House with Bo the First Dog.

Have a look at the president you don’t see in press conferences.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Photo from whitehouse

If you’re a foodie and/or you use Yahoo! Search, you might want to grab your TV (or DVR) remote tonight. The Food Network’s “Dinner: Impossible” episode featuring Yahoo! Search premieres this evening at 10:00pm ET/PT.

In “The Yahoo! Search Scramble,” you’ll watch Chef Robert Irvine descend upon our headquarters to receive his mission: make the top 15 dishes most searched for on Yahoo!. After all, he was helping us celebrate the fifth anniversary of Yahoo! Search. But there was a little catch — each dish was randomly paired with a top-searched ingredient!

Was Chef Robert able to pull off an edible meal out of some pretty strange pairings and successfully feed 450 Yahoos in just eight hours (with a little help from some Yahoo! friends) — or will this be Dinner: Impossible?

(Here’s our post and photos after the shoot in January)

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Whether or not you celebrate Easter, who doesn’t love a great Easter egg — that hidden gem of code that makes you squeal like a 5-year-old when you find it? In honor of the Easter Beagle and Marshmallow Peeps everywhere, today we’re going to make your egg hunt ridiculously easy.

Here’s a roster of the hidden treasures you’ll find tucked into corners across Yahoo!:

• Yahoo! Logo Yodel: Click on the exclamation point in our homepage logo to get your yodel fix anytime you need it.
• Yahoo! Mail Subject-o-matique: Stumped for a catchy, evocative email subject line? Just click the “subject” line button when composing or replying to a message, and Yahoo! Mail will cure your writer’s block with a slew of unforgettable one liners (e.g., “My train of thought has derailed,” “Impressive rutabaga!,” and “You! Off my planet!”).
• Yahoo! Messenger Hidden Emoticons: In addition to our dozens of government-issue emoticons, an army of hidden smileys awaits. You’ll find assorted animals, holiday festives, and favorites like “chatterbox,” “not worthy,” “oh go on,” and “I don’t know.”
• Yahoo! Messenger IMVironment: Choose an interactive background, or IM environment, for your Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 IM window and use the BUZZ feature to trigger a surprise.
• Flickr Image Spewing Panda: What could make anyone happier than a rainbow-barfing panda who delivers a continuous stream of interesting Flickr images?
• Flickr Holiday Snow: Wrong season, but if you ever want to make it snow fall on your Flickr photo page, just add ?snow=1 to the end of any photo URL. Like this.
• Flickr Astrometry: Want to find out what planets, galaxies, or nebulae are resident in the starry-night photo you just took? Upload it here. And know that you’re contributing to the open-source sky survey at the same time.
• Yahoo! Maps Sea Monsters: Did you know a quartet of ornery sea creatures lives just west of the Golden Gate Bridge? It’s true. Just go to Yahoo! Maps.
• Yahoo!’s Anti-Values: Not sure if this one really qualifies, since it falls in the shameless-self-promotion category. But while our company values probably aren’t among your favorite bookmarks, don’t miss our covert “What Sucks” list.

Know of other great Easter eggs, on Yahoo! or elsewhere on the Web? Share!

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

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

We were so inspired by the 40 Best Twitter Brands that we decided it was about time to jump off the cliff. Head over to http://twitter.com/yahoo to follow us for 140-character updates on a variety of things Yahoo!. Just five hours in the saddle and we have nearly 200 followers. Welcome!

That said, there are many other Yahoo! Twitter accounts that went live before us, including @yahoo_directory, @yahoosearchdata, @yahoomovies, @yahoo_sports, @YahooNews, @yahoonews_odd, @Yahoogames, @YahooBuzz, @ymailblog, @yahoogroups, @delicious, @OneConnect, @YahooGeo, @YahooResearch, @ydn (Yahoo! Developer Network), @YUILibrary, and @ysearchFE (Yahoo! Search). Check them out.

I’m trying to decide if I like our Twitter page background — does it work, or is it aneurysm-inducing?

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

What do you do when one of your teams hits a milestone anniversary? Host a reality TV show!

The Food Network’s “Dinner: Impossible” crew descended on our campus this week to pull off an episode that honored the anniversary of Yahoo! Search (specifically, the fifth year of our proprietary Yahoo! Search Technology). Celeb chef Robert Irvine arrived at our headquarters early in the morning to be given a seemingly impossible culinary challenge by Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang.

Since the show isn’t slated to air until April, we can’t tell you what we asked him to do, how many people he cooked for, and in how many hours, but let’s just say those of you who searched for food items on Yahoo! last year played a big hand in it. And I can tell you that some serious innovation was definitely required!

And we didn’t let Chef Robert do it alone. We lent him Yahoo! Search SVP Tuoc Luong and VP of Marketing Raj Gossain to help out in the kitchen. Two gourmands with a killer history with hot dogs. The best I can describe it as is sheer and utter mayhem — frenetic chopping, mixing, grilling, slicing, flouring, deep-frying, shouting, accusing, burning… as the hours and minutes ticked away.

Did Chef Robert achieve his mission? Wild horses can’t drag it out of us, but we do hope you’ll tune in to the Food Network to find out. In the meantime, a hearty happy anniversary to the Yahoo! Search Team.

Photos from the production and ensuing party can be found here.

UPDATE: The “Yahoo! Search Scramble” episode will premiere on the Food Network on April 15th at 10pm ET/PT.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Photo from CeciliaC

We have a belated holiday gift for all our loyal readers. Yodel Anecdotal widgets! Now you can check for the latest headlines from the comfort of your own desktop, without having to fire up a browser.

They come in two flavors — Mac OS X and Yahoo! Widget.

To download, just head to the Y! Stuff tab and scroll down to “Widgets.”

• Mac OS X Dashboard Widget – Click on the link to download the .zip file. Doubleclick on the “osx-widget.zip” file and then click on the extracted “YodelWidget.wdgt” file. Confirm that you want to add the widget to your dashboard.
• Yahoo! Widget (Windows & Mac) – Launch the Yahoo! Widget Engine (install the latest version here). Click on the link to download the .zip file. Doubleclick the extracted “YodelAnecdotal.widget” file. Confirm that you want to add it to your Yahoo! Widgets folder.

See you on your desktop.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

A bicycle is a conduit for exploration and a camera is a way to document these explorations. Our Purple Pedals Project took these two concepts and merged them into one. We call it a yBike. It was conceived to be an ambient experience in which a rider could explore their adventures and the bike would do the rest. The rest was to document these explorations and share them with the world.

Think of it as Bikes+Flickr+GPS+Camera=Whoa! This math didn’t come without its challenges. In a nutshell here is what we created. A camera mounted on the handlebars in a waterproof, swivel-enabled housing takes a picture every 60 seconds. Then, the system grabs GPS info, merges it with the picture, and uploads everything to a Yahoo! Map. The system is powered by a series of solar panels and a battery pack on the rear rack .

First, we needed a base to build the technology on, which came in the form of a custom-painted Electra Townie 8. Electra Bicycle Company embraced the project and helped us get 20 custom purple rides to Brooklyn, where software and electrical engineering was being developed.

Uncommon Projects, based in DUMBO, Brooklyn, created the software and hardware necessary to make the system come alive. In a project where the production cycle should’ve been twice as long, Uncommon worked wonders in finding a stable solution quickly. They were able to research, identify potential solutions, build prototypes and produce 20 final products in the time it normally takes to create a production roadmap.

With the technology well underway, we needed to build a housing that was effective but also fit the bikes aesthetics. For this, we looked to Quill Hyde, a designer and metal fabricator with a shop in Redhook, Brooklyn. Quill brought just the right look to the housing. It matched the bike and the technology in a way that kept everything in synch. For me, all the components of the yBike needed to be homogeneous ensuring a Cadillac ride, not a Frankenstein gallop.

With the bike, hardware, technology and housing coming together we looked to our family at Flickr to plot all these images and data on a map. This way you could know where the bike is and see what the bike sees at any given moment.

We then found 14 photographers/cyclists to jockey these purple pedals around the world. Among these riders are Amit Gumpta of Photojojo and Gina Trapani of Lifehacker, who curate their images as they explore.

Four of the bikes will be passed from rider to rider and the 20th bike is destined to be in your hands. Head over to our Start Wearing Purple site on October 1st and tell us why you deserve a yBike and you just might wake up with a special delivery on your doorstep.

Jason Anello
Ideologist, Yahoo! Buzz Marketing

Open Hack Day has just finished up, topping off a frantic two days of hacking with an unexpectedly large number of awards and an unexpectedly small number of leftover doughnuts. Hack days at Yahoo! have always been about taking a great idea from conception to presentation in an enormously short period of time, and the quality of concept and execution throughout from the external hackers has been inspiring. I had planned to live-blog some of the highlights of the presentations while they were going on, but my laptop battery ran out right as they were starting up. However, for those of you following along at home…eleven hours delayed…here’s a rough transcription of my handwritten comments. A huge thanks to all of the organizers and other staff that made this Open Hack Day amazing, and an even huger thanks to the incredible hackers who came out to share these crazy awesome ideas. If you’d like a less free-form recap of some of the day’s memorable moments, you can find the overall list of hacks over at hackday.blorg.

• As 2pm rolls around, the chairs in the audience start filling up and the University Hack Day winners are ushered to the stage to kick off the presentations. It’s been an intense morning of quiet hacking and doughnut consumption to the soothing sounds of microphone checks and hack dress rehearsals.
• Our MCs are Neal Sample and Eric Wu, who provide witty banter along with the top prize categories: Filo’s Technical Merit Award; Most Unexpected; Best User Experience; and Best Overall Hack. There will also be a variety of small prizes offered by specific groups like Y!OS and Flickr. Our esteemed judges? Cheryl Ainoa, VP of Yahoo! Media Engineering; Ash Patel, head of our Audience division; Rashmi Sinha, CEO of SlideShare; David Filo, co-founder and Chief Yahoo; Jeff Clavier, investor extraordinaire; Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress; and Om Malik, CEO of GigaOm.
• Before the presentations began, the Georgia Tech hacker, Roger Pincombe, cozied up to the judges by handing them Xbox games and hardcover books for his hack, DialPrice. It’s a phone interface for comparative shopping that’ll spit back user ratings, price ranges, and local availability for items that you identify by their UPC code, and it comes with a fun map-based visualization to see which items people are looking at around the country. The Yahoo! Shopping API wasn’t mature enough to be used when the hack was initially developed, so all of the data is coming from Goo…er, I mean, “Oogle” Product Search.
• Demograph, by Mattt Thompson of CMU, maps out congressional districts for any given location and also provided the first of several Sarah Palin references throughout the day.
• In a rather bold move, Michael Fischer of Stanford “open-sourced” his FlickrFuse hack to the audience — any changes that the hackers in the audience submitted would immediately be reflected back in the actual application. The results were surprisingly non-disastrous.
• If you want to succeed, try adding “Yahoo!” to your hack name! Consequently, Will Duff of UIUC presented not just “Pages”, but instead the much classier “Yahoo! Pages”, a very polished inline WYSIWYG page editor layered on top of YUI components that he used to quickly throw together an extremely passable imitation of the one of the YUI documentation pages.
• Another thing to keep in mind is that you should always have a contingency plan in case something goes horribly wrong with your presentation. The Psychic Hotline hack, a voice-operated interface to the 20 Questions game put together by Ryan Luecke, Gabor Angeli, and Stewart He of Berkeley, ran into some technical difficulties early on and looked dead in the water. However, the guys quickly switched gears to their backup hack, a hand-made electric guitar on which you would play notes by completing circuits with a copper wire “pick”. While Ryan distracted the crowd with his rendition of “Seven Nation Army” and his unfamiliarity with “Freebird”, the other guys were able to sort out the issues with the Psychic Hotline and start the presentation over again. This time, it went off without a hitch in guessing that the audience had picked “robot” as their noun, except for when Neal was privately thinking about a Null Pointer Exception and they got that instead.
• One issue with the 90 second time limit for hack presentations is that good hacks can get cut short (by our “Girl Talk” cutoff music) and we’ll all miss out on hearing about a really cool idea. However, it does force hackers to really get to the essence of their project without all of the frill, and if the idea is powerful enough, it’ll still grab people.
• Ganzbot, a feed-reading robot hacked together by Jeremy Gillick, is perhaps the most disturbing way possible that I can imagine receiving my stock and weather information as I wake up in the morning.
• Usually, FireEagle is supposed to passively say where you are, once you’ve settled down there. Weather Sets, by Leah Culver and Ariel Waldman, does the opposite in using FireEagle to urge you to go somewhere else, by setting up a location-based game where you win by collecting sets of colored cards based on local weather and Flickr photos.
• Be careful when you solicit suggestions from the audience for, say, a pair of random search query terms. The first suggestion I heard shouted out in reponse — “bacon fiesta” — was strangely passed over in favor of “hack day”.
• Mo Kakwan, something of an Open Hack Day celebrity thanks to his hilarious presentation two years ago, hit it out of the park one more time with his Virtual Moshpit. It’s hard to describe this one without video, so hopefully that’ll be forthcoming shortly. The best I can say is that there was girlish screaming of “Girl Talk!”, physics-based stick figure animations, and Mo’s trademark delivery, all in one monumentally funny package.
• The trio of travel/location oriented hacks that followed really stood out to me. TripIt provided one of the coolest Open Mail integrations with an application that would allow you to drag over any flight/hotel confirmation email in your Inbox and automatically convert it into a detailed trip record in their system. Jesse Baird’s Cell Phone Signal Tracker and Where Are My Drivers, by Wilson Sheldon and Kelvin Ling, both used FireEagle to great effect, the former allowing you to wander around and map out your cell phone signal strength in a region and the latter letting a restaurant keep track of the location of any of their delivery folk to make it easier to reroute or redistribute resources.
• What’s warm and sleeps with you every night? For Mark Rosetta, it’s not his girlfriend, but rather his laptop. But, as he states, both seem to go from hot to cold entirely randomly. He can fix one of those, however, by using iHeater, which is a page of embedded fireplace videos from YouTube that’ll peg your CPU and subsequently overheat your laptop. Future plans include 3D rendering and further de-optimizations
• The final hack, Hack #47, was also one of the most amusing. Niels Joubert and Greg Schechter noticed at the last minute that no one had submitted a SearchMonkey hack, and saw an opportunity. So, Niels closed out the presentations with Speedhack: Writing a SearchMonkey Hack in 90 Seconds, where he spent his 90 seconds on stage actually creating a SearchMonkey enhanced result on the fly. It took two tries due to inaccurate clicking, network latency, missing semicolons, and misleading shouted suggestions from the audience, but we were eventually rewarded with a functional vCard-based enhanced result for YouTube videos. And Niels and Greg were also rewarded with prizes equal in value to the effort they put into their hack — two mint-condition Hack #48 signs.

Given such a high-quality and enjoyable round of presentations, it was inevitable that the judges would relent and offer up more prizes to compensate. Nonetheless, the fact that we handed out nearly 25 prizes altogether, from Flash documentation wall posters to hand-held video cameras, was surprising and gratifying. You can see the list of all of the winners here, and we’ll surely have some sort of grand recap when the official Yodel bloggers get back. For now, thank you again to everyone who came out and supported or participated in this great event, and keep on hacking!

Photo from Tim Trueman.