You’re busy. You read fast. You have a lot more blogs to go today. But before you move on, wanna take two seconds to give us a little feedback? We’ve just added an insta-ratings system to every post, which will help us get a sense for what you dug and what outright bombed (it’s ok, thick skin). In each post footer, you’ll find five dots. Click, boom, done.

To aid you in your rating decision-making, here are some suggested criteria for selecting from one to five dots:

5 — Epic. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.
4 — That rocked. Though it could’ve used a little more je ne sais quoi.
3 — That hit the spot. Thanks.
2 — Meh.
1 — Wow. That sucked. No more of that, please.

Note that you can only rate a post once. So don’t get trigger happy. Thank you kindly.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

EDITOR’S NOTE: The earthwise among you know that tomorrow is Earth Day. We are teaming up with Freecycle™ and other popular reuse groups to inspire people to swap stuff they’d normally send to a landfill. In honor of Yahoo!’s “Free is Good” campaign, into which we’ve tucked treasures like a Smart Car, eco-resort vacation, and Sheryl Crow tickets, we’ve asked a Yahoo! user to reflect on what a boon Freecycle has been to her life:

September 19, 2003 should be memorable as my son Davis’ fifth birthday. Instead, we remember it more clearly as the day we started the very long recovery from Hurricane Isabel, which had hit our small Virginia town the day before. We lost just about everything in the bottom three feet of our garage to floodwater.

Several months later, I read about the local Yorktown Freecycle Yahoo! group and quickly joined. I immediately saw how it could help my town in its recovery efforts (which is, I might add, STILL ongoing five years later as friends and neighbors continue to shell out to repair floors and foundations).

The group proved useful just a few days after I joined. I had posted a want for a lawnmower and within 48 hours, I heard from “uubooklady.” When she let me know that her husband had recently bought a new mower to replace their 1985 Toro and that we were welcome to it, I was elated. I’ve always been happy to use hand-me-downs, and Deron Beal’s brilliant idea to use modern technology to share belongings locally via the Freecycle Network was a perfect match for my earth-friendly leanings.

When my husband Jim went to retrieve his “new” mower, lo and behold, his work colleague Ellis came pushing it out of the garage! These men worked mere feet from one another at NASA, yet they would have never made the lawnmower connection if it hadn’t been for Yahoo! Groups and the Freecycle Network.

I started FreecyclePoquoson for my own town that very week and have been happily moderating it ever since. We’ve grown to almost 600 members and we connect neighbors on a daily basis.

I’ve given away furniture, kitchen items, clothing, toys, and office supplies. I’ve received puzzles, games, craft supplies, used egg cartons (we raise hens and reuse cartons), even empty Kool-Aid Jammers (which I sew into very cool purses). I also get nearly-expired bread each week from a guy I met on Freecycle, who rescues it from grocery stores. I’m now known as “the bread lady” because I put a giant stack (we’re talking over 100 loaves) on my porch for neighbors who might be too proud to get food from the food pantry but are happy to keep it from being tossed into the landfill.

There are literally MILLIONS of similar stories about how helpful the Freecycle Network has been in people’s lives. I’ve seen time again how, while Freecycle often begins with an experience of a person receiving, it inevitably turns into discovering the joy of giving.

Freecycle, through Yahoo!, makes every day Earth Day and provides a modern, free, easy to use format to prove true the old adage, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” It sure beats spending hours having a yard sale or trolling sales!

Davis is nine now. He’s never known anything other than listing his old “stuff” on Freecycle. I don’t know when Poquoson will fully recover, but I do know that Freecycle and Yahoo! have and will continue to play an important part in the healing process… both for our community and for Mother Earth.

Traci-Dale
Yahoo! Groups user
Moderator, FreecyclePoquoson

When I started to post my pictures from Myanmar on Flickr in February 2006, I just thought it was a good way of storing my photos at a cheap price. But then I received one comment, two, three… and people even favorited my pics. Mon dieu, there’s someone somewhere who looks at my photos and takes time to leave some messages!

My ego was flattered. I felt like the most important amateur photographer on Earth. Then I received an email from The Economist asking me for an Oman pic to be used in an ad. (What? I can earn money with my pics??? And they even paid!) I went to Papua New Guinea, put my pics online, received comments, faves, you know the story! GEO USA called me: “Hi, we saw your Papua pictures on Flickr. We want 12 pages for GEO Germany, OK?” (Yes, sir!)

A French editor saw my photos and asked me if I was OK making a book. (No problemo!) My book was released this Christmas and was number 10 on Amazon.fr last week! Lonely Planet, National Geographic Russia, Get Lost, UNESCO Magazine, etc. bought my pictures thru Flickr. And then, the leading French photography agency Eyedea (Rapho, HoaQI, Gamma) contacted me and signed me few weeks ago!

So, YES, Flickr works and… well, now, I must leave you cuz I have to pack my bags and go to India for one month to shoot!

I keep posting on Flickr as it remains the most powerful tool to be seen on the Web and in search engines, and I do not want to lose the direct contacts I’ve got with the world jury that comments on my stream.

Thank you, Yahoo!!

Eric LAFFORGUE
http://www.ericlafforgue.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mytripsmypics

Last fall, Yodel Anecdotal received quite an unusual email:

“Hello - I wanted to leave a comment here about how Yahoo! has changed my life! I was homeless, living on $35 a week, sleeping on friends’ couches, and eating dollar menu in New York City, pursuing a career as a petite model. Without a computer of my own, I started using the Apple Store as my office in February of 2005. I organized my thoughts and experiences, struggles, and pursuits into a document that I saved to my free Yahoo! account. I am editing and publishing my memoir, Almost 5’ 4’’, which is about being the underdog in modeling and striving no matter the odds. Isobella”

But in this short email, Isobella Jade couldn’t hope to explain all the details of her one-of-a-kind story, which began when she was a struggling 19-year-old model. As a student at the New York Institute of Technology, she went from photo shoot to class to track practice to photo shoot. It was only time before Isobella’s mother found nude pictures of her daughter on the Internet. Ultimately, Isobella changed her birth name and decided to pursue modeling after graduation without looking back.

Isobella used the Net to self-promote, and decided that before her 25th birthday, she would be a published author, writing about the experiences of being an aspiring model, trying to break into the fashion industry, and being only 5’4’’ at that. Living out of a suitcase, she wrote her memoir (standing in heels between shoots) at the Apple Store on Prince St. in SoHo (check out the video they helped her make) and saved her work to her Yahoo! Mail account. And now, months shy of her self-imposed deadline, Isobella Jade’s work Almost 5’ 4’’: Confessions of an Unconventional Model is available at Borders and Amazon.com.

“Unlike some girls scouted to model or raised around fashion and glamorous life, modeling for me started with curiosity when I discovered a free Internet modeling site and it evolved into me becoming my own business,” Isobella said when we spoke on the phone.

She said she didn’t always have Yahoo! in her life. “My first email was on AOL, but when I started going for my dream I couldn’t afford AOL. I discovered Yahoo!, and suddenly saving my work, my rejection letters, my acceptances, everything, was one less thing to worry about.”

How’s life for her now? She’s finding success as a “body parts” (think knees, shoulders, and elbows) model and getting plenty of notice, but life is still a flurry. “I’m doing more legit work now [from a shoe ad campaign to doubling for a Christina Ricci movie poster], but I’m still rushing arund,” she said.

And as for Mom? “The book captures a time when our relationship was not so great. My mother is a teacher, and it was difficult for her to cope with me pursuing a career that has to do with my body. But now our relationship is great. She’s very, very proud.”

As she should be. Congrats, Isobella!

Doreen Bloch
Yahoo! Intern

It’s difficult to travel through the state of Nebraska without spotting the phrase “Go Big Red” somewhere along the way; but today, “Go Big Green” seems much more appropriate because Hastings, Nebraska, has gone green in a major way!

As noted on this very blog yesterday, Hastings beat out hundreds of other cities to earn the title of the “Greenest City in America” per Yahoo!’s “Be a Better Planet” promotion.

If you haven’t heard of Hastings, it is located right in the middle of the United States, is the birthplace of Kool-Aid, and also just happens to be home to every relative I have going back several generations. Initially, I was shocked to hear (overhear in the hallway actually) that Hastings was going to be victorious. But really there is nothing surprising about their big win at all. This is exactly the kind of community making exactly the kind of effort that Yahoo! hoped for when issuing our “Greenest City in America” challenge. Not to mention that people who live close to the earth may just care the most about it.

Hastings’ charge was led by the unflappable Mayor Matt Rossen and his staff. They saw an opportunity to highlight and extend an effort Hastings was already making and they aggressively set out to engage the entire community. They got the word out in a major way and via all available means: emailing the local businesses (who in turn encouraged their entire workforces to participate), leveraging local media, making numerous phone calls, even going door-to-door. With so much effort going into the “Greenest City” challenge, you might think Mayor Rossen has a lot of time on his hands. He doesn’t. For his service as mayor he receives $9,600 a year, so mayor is just one of two jobs he holds in this town.

Another Hastings resident who made time for the challenge was Jane Staley, who despite coming off a series of difficult surgeries, managed to find the strength to answer twenty-nine environmental questions on Yahoo! Answers. Jane was (and is) motivated by her desire to ensure we leave a world where “our grandkids and their grandkids can see rainforests and polar bears in their natural environments.”

Jane was one of over 2,000 Hastings residents who joined us Monday night for the “Greenest City” celebration (those 2,000 celebrators comprise nearly 10% of the entire Hastings population). It was a night of music, food (served on corn-based biodegradable plates), dignitaries, and the afore mentioned Kool-Aid (green for the occasion). It was also a night where a small team of Yahoos learned first-hand just how much this distinction meant to the town. From the marquees celebrating the victory all over town to the keys to the city we were honored to receive, it was clear this town couldn’t be prouder or more appreciative of the “Greenest City” title.

Chuck Conrad, Hastings resident and loyal Yahoo! user for 10 years, told me he had a good feeling that Hastings might win and noted that it was the topic of conversation the past few weeks. As for what this means to Hastings, he said, “We were ‘fly-over’ country before. We knew what we had here, but now hopefully other people know now, too.”

Here’s what we know Chuck: Hastings is officially the “Greenest City in America” and as such, will be receiving a quarter of a million dollars to continue greening their city. (Yeah, we initially offered up hybrid taxis but there’s not much need for taxis in this town).

To everybody in Hastings and all of the Yahoo! users who participated in the challenge, we thank you and we share your passion for protecting our planet.

Stay green!

Heidi Burgett
Yahoo! Evangelist

What do you do when your father’s arthritis prevents him from attending your sister’s backyard wedding? Haul out your webcam, position it outside your sib’s home office on a tripod, pray for the wind to die down, and fire up Yahoo! Messenger.

That’s what Jessica Greenhood recently did for her sister’s wedding. After learning her father wasn’t up for the trek from Florida to the Midwest, Jessica investigated ways to capture the nuptials for him. She had an old camcorder, but its battery was defunct. Finding a replacement battery in Miller, Kansas (pop: 12 houses), proved a distinct challenge, and a new camera was more than Jessica could afford.

Remembering how effective her Yahoo! Messenger webcam had been for monitoring her family’s shop after-hours, she MacGyver-ed together a low-tech, low-cost solution that brought the ceremony to her father — and tears to his eyes.

“I’m a kid in a candy store with Yahoo! Messenger. I’ve been using it for years to communicate with family and friends. Everyone lives so far away — can you say big phone bill? I’ve always found it really easy to use. Even here in Kansas, where I’m on dial-up that really only gets speeds of 24.4K,” she said.

Thanks for writing with your story, Jessica. And congratulations, Naomi and Eric!

Nicki Dugan
Editor, Yodel Anecdotal

Last year for Yahoo!’s 10th birthday, a cross-functional team created the Yahoo! Netrospective — a collection of the Internet’s 100 greatest moments in the 10 years since David and Jerry founded Yahoo!. The project was notable as much for the choices we made (yes, we featured the dancing baby and other web moments, great and small) as for the design by artist Jonathan Harris, one of the great digital designers of our time.

Today we unveiled a project that’s been percolating for years: A digital mosaic of our users’ lives and times in whatever form they want to submit — video, images, words, drawings, or sound. I had personally long envisioned users sharing their contributions and engaging in conversations before we’d seal everything up, maybe encase the hard drives in Lucite, and entrust it to a museum somewhere, somehow for a decade or so.

In other words, we’re creating the world’s largest Internet time capsule.

For the next month, we’ll be asking users from around the world to submit expressions around love, anger, fun, sorrow, faith, beauty, past, now, hope and “you.” They will create a massive electronic anthropology project, which we’ll open up on Yahoo!’s 25th anniversary in 2020. Our Customer Care team will review every submission — in 10 languages — truly a Herculean effort. And people will be thanked for their contribution by helping Yahoo! divvy up a $100,000 donation (courtesy of Yahoo! for Good) among seven global charitable organizations. When it closes, we will be presenting the Time Capsule content to the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings archives.

To bring it all to life, we signed Jonathan Harris again. When his design arrived, we were stunned to see a work of remarkable simplicity and universality. Jonathan explains it best in his artist statement:

“When the time capsule opens, it displays the 100 most recent contributions, which form the spinning globe. The 10 themes orbit the globe in a pinwheel pattern. At any moment, any individual tile can be clicked, causing the globe to fall away and the selected tile to expand, revealing detailed information about the tile and the person who created it… Viewers can specify the population they wish to see, exploring such demographics as “men in their 20s from New York City” and “Iraqi women who submitted drawings in response to the question: What do you love?”

So the Time Capsule is now open. Will the world love it? Ignore it? Will the Time Capsule demonstrate what separates us, or what binds us together? What will this digital mosaic reveal about our lives and these fast-moving times?

We’ll all find out together in the next 30 days.

Bill Gannon
Senior Editorial Director & Managing Editor

Joshua Schachter and the rest of the del.icio.us posse invited fans to help blow out candles tonight in honor of the popular social bookmarking site’s third birthday. They also happen to have just registered their one millionth user, more than three times the number del.icio.us started the year with. So much to celebrate! Congrats to the team and all ye who bask in its del.icio.us-ness. Here’s to more candles.

Founder Joshua Schachter flanked by del.icio.us birthday celebrants.

Photos by Scott Beale | Laughing Squid. More photos here.

Could there be any finer compliment than having a song written about you? It’s happened to Yahoo! a few times, and we’ll admit it — we blushed. I caught up with two songwriters who’ve penned songs in which Yahoo! plays a major role to find out how we ended up in the mix.

The Stephen Davis Project came out with a toe-tapping single called “Yahoo Girl.” It’s about a hapless guy named Bob in a dead-end job who’s smitten with a woman he spies crossing the street at Yahoo! headquarters (in front of his dented Honda). To him, she represents optimism, happiness, and coolness. Have a listen or check out the lyrics.

Turns out the song is a bit autobiographical for songwriter Harry Lockwood, who’s worked at a neighboring Sunnyvale aerospace company since well before Yahoo! took up residence at the corner of Mathilda and First Avenue. I invited Harry over to Yahoo! for some free coffee and to unveil the mystery behind the Yahoo! girl (on the condition he wouldn’t write any songs about me).

Harry is a systems engineer who’d grown increasingly frustrated by the off-schedule and over-budget program he’d been working on. Every morning, he’d sit stewing at the stoplight, watching Yahoos walking blithely between buildings. “People were all in such a good mood. I just remember being in awe of them,” he recalled. When he saw a particular young woman crossing Mathilda Avenue, he said the song started developing in his head.

“I have a masters in English, and songwriting just became sort of a creative outlet for me,” he explained. Ironically his brother-in-law, Stephen Davis, a programmer for a major aerospace company in Washington, had been struggling to find lyrics for some chords he’d been playing with on his guitar. The two ran into each other at a wedding in Vegas, and their needs collided like peanut butter and chocolate.

“We wrote the whole song via the Internet. Steve would call me and say, ‘What’s Bob thinking?’ to help put him in the mood. Then he’d send me an MP3 file. I’d work on it on my end and email back some verse. It was the first song I’d ever written.” After hearing the song, Harry’s daughter asked if he was having a midlife crisis. Harry, don’t worry — we understand.

The second song is by a 20-year-old singer who hails from a small town in Western Ukraine. Mika Newton came out with “Yahoo.com” (listen here) earlier this year. (Read about her here if you speak Russian) It, too, is an autobiographical song about unrequited love. During a recent visit to London, Mika befriended a local guy and spent the day sightseeing with him. Since they were living in different countries, they exchanged email addresses instead of mobile numbers. But when she returned to Ukraine, Mika had lost the piece of paper and any chance of reconnecting with him. Heartbroken, she wrote a song about this beautiful stranger. (You can guess who hosts his email account.) Here are the lyrics. Mika has toured around Ukraine singing since she was nine and is currently recording her second album in London. We hope she’ll run into her Prince Charming again.

And to round out our list of love songs, we leave you with a custom version of “A Public Affair,” the title track from Jessica Simpson’s new album. Listen carefully and see if you can identify the object of her affections.

Got a ditty? We’d love to hear it.

About a year ago, we received the following note from Nikki Pope, one of our wonderful Yahoo! Groups users:

I just wanted to tell you how much my family has relied on our Yahoo! Group to keep us updated on where all of our displaced relatives have landed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. We’ve had our group for years and it’s seen us through births, deaths, weddings, moves, graduations, and our biannual family reunions. Not until the past two weeks, however, did we realize just how much we’ve come to rely on our Message Board to keep us in the know.

We’re one of the luckier families. Although many of my relatives have lost everything they own (we hail from New Orleans and the surrounding area), no lives were lost. Everyone is accounted for (finally) and we can all breathe a little easier. Now that the scary part is over, we’re using our Message Board to help our family members find housing, jobs, and comfort.

Thank you so much for this wonderful service. Oh, I almost forgot, we’re having our next family reunion in July 2006 right here in the Bay Area. Of course we’ve been using Yahoo! to coordinate the event (it’s always a huge blast). I know this sounds crazy, but if you or someone from Yahoo! would like to stop by while the family’s here, I know we’ll want to thank you in person…

We didn’t think that sounded crazy at all! Joanna Stevens and I, both of Yahoo! Corporate Communications, were more than happy to attend the recent Smith family reunion in San Jose, California. In fact, we learned a little more about just how useful Yahoo! Groups can be. Nikki’s extended family (all four generations descending from Lena and John W.B. Smith, who had 11 children!) has been using Yahoo! Groups for many years to share photos, plan reunions, and generally keep track of each other as they scatter farther around the globe.

As soon as we arrived, Nikki gave us our very own reunion shirts (with the Smith family logo, no less) and said we could be honorary Smith Family members — yay! And then, the storytelling began, and we heard firsthand accounts from cousins Rhonda Greene and Henry Turner of the family’s experience after Hurricane Katrina.

After being stuck at the Superdome in New Orleans for over a week, Henry was finally able to make his way onto a bus heading to Dallas. Only when he got to Dallas was Henry able to call Rhonda, who lived nearby. The whole family was sick with worry about Henry by this point, and Rhonda was relieved to end their agony by posting a quick message on the family’s Yahoo! Group saying, “We found Henry!” — probably the most meaningful message ever received by the more than 100 relatives who were Group members.

After meeting everyone and taking some photos, we had a yummy lunch catered by Uncle Frank’s BBQ. The brisket, Cajun corn, and cornbread were D-licious. I love being around big, fun, welcoming families like this one. Maybe I can find a way to make it to Houston for their next reunion.

Meagan Busath
Senior PR Manager for Yahoo! Groups (among other things)