Yahoo! takes special note today of the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The most sweeping and emancipating civil rights legislation ever passed on behalf of the 60 million kids and adults with disabilities in the United States, this landmark law recognizes that every individual must be able to participate fully in all aspects of society. For example, the ADA requires that brick-and-mortar locations that serve the general public be fully accessible to individuals with disabilities by making improvements like curb-cuts in the sidewalk (which, while commonplace today, didn’t exist when the ADA was signed), Braille labels on ATM machines, ramps, sign-language interpreters, service dogs allowed in restaurants, and so on.

But the ADA isn’t fundamentally about removing obstacles and ensuring access. It’s about the impact of accessibility on the quality of life of individuals with disabilities. It’s about dignity and respect. It’s about engagement and empowerment. It’s about opportunity and choice.

The ADA is a celebration of independence.

When he signed the ADA into law 20 years ago, President George H. W. Bush remarked from the White House lawn, “This is indeed an incredible day.” As we have worked with disabled individuals around the world to make Yahoo! as accessible as possible, we’re finding that for many, incredible days are now occurring on a regular basis.

We’ve been asked many times whether the accessibility mandates in the ADA extend beyond physical spaces to Internet places. Not surprisingly, they don’t. In fact, the Internet is not even mentioned in the ADA. Twenty years ago, few people grasped how central the Internet would become in the everyday lives of individuals. But Yahoo!’s Global Accessibility Team has never waited for legal requirements to ensure online accessibility. Together, with the hundreds of engineers and designers with whom we’ve partnered for the past five years, we’ve been working to make Yahoo! accessible for a different reason: It’s simply the right thing to do.  And today, we are proud to launch the Yahoo! Accessibility blog, which will highlight new accessibility developments and trends, perspectives from experts and influencers, and dialogue from the community.

So happy anniversary to the ADA, and congratulations to all who work tirelessly to make sure that individuals with disabilities—online or otherwise—are able to say, “Now I can do it myself!”

-Alan Brightman, Senior Policy Director, Yahoo! Inc.

It took a few years to grow Yahoo!’s network of 80 smart, savvy, influential women bloggers, but it took less than an hour for them to have two trending topics—Elisa Steele (proud mom and CMO keynote speaker) and #ymotherboard—on Twitter in San Francisco as they live blogged and tweeted from the Yahoo! Mother Board Summit on Friday, July 16^th.

For the first time ever, Yahoo! invited this diverse group of women—who cover topics ranging from living a vegan lifestyle to the impact of political issues on moms—from across the U.S. and Canada to Headquarters for a day (and a couple nights) of inspiration, education and fun. Dubbed “the mother of all conferences”, conversations were sparked between the 62 attendees and Yahoos from Shine, Flickr, Yahoo! Safely, Yahoo! for Good, Yahoo! Green, Social Products, Yahoo! Editorial, Yahoo! Accessibility and Ad Products.

The small group setting allowed for interesting insights, personally relevant conversations and honest, actionable feedback. Yahoo! was able to showcase practical products, services and areas of expertise that were immediately helpful to the bloggers. And the bloggers were able to connect with various Yahoos to tell us what they’d like to see from our products and how Yahoo! can be even more relevant to them as bloggers, moms and consumers. Like each moment of the day, the success of the event and Yahoo!’s relationship with this vital audience, was summed up in a tweet and a couple blog excerpts:

Caffandaprayer: Brands wanting to a) create brand enthusiasts & b) educate tech-savvy users about new/updated products could learn from Yahoo #ymotherboard.

Beccarama, a Yahoo! Mother Board member from New York wrote, “Yahoo! Takes Women Seriously. Yes they wanted to hear from us the mom-blogging community, but they also have an incredible amount of savvy, funny, smart women leading and managing their company.”

Suddenly Single Journey, a Yahoo! Mother Board member from North Carolina wrote, “Oh how I loved loved loved our morning breakout sessions. We worked with Flickr and Shine. How many people can say that? And everyone wants to help us be even bigger and better. How often do you have a corporation like Yahoo! urging you on to success, backing you and supporting you every step of the way.”

Read more about the event and see what the attendees had to say at YodelingMamas.

Yahoo! Indonesia also partnered with content providers KapanLagi, Tempo Interaktif, Antara, Okezone, Vivanews and AsianPlus, to provide comprehensive, up-to-date and exclusive celebrity entertainment stories and interviews.  On top of that, some popular Indonesian celebrities such as Maylaffayza, Joko Anwar and Raditya Dika are engaged to blog and provide Indonesian fans a glimpse of the latest and most exclusive celebrity news.

On 4 July, to celebrate the launch of OMG! in Indonesia, Yahoo! also bought to life the thrill and excitement of the World Cup season at an OMG! celebrity Shoot For Good (Gol Untuk Amal) futsal event. The event gave Indonesians the chance to team up with their favorite celebrities and raise money for charity by participating in various exciting events taking place in an OMG! themed celebrity village.

The OMG! themed village featured hands-on product experiences and guided tours to all things Yahoo!. Other exciting activities include fashion shows from Adidas showcasing the latest apparel, a chance at 5 seconds fame on the longest purple catwalk, plus opportunities to score goals with the National Futsal Team in a football clinic.

Watch video of the event:

Yahoo! pledged to raise a maximun of USD10,000 at the event with a donation of IDR100,000 going to Artha Graha Peduli, for each goal scored during the celebrity  game. Indonesians attending the event could also do their part to raise money for Artha Graha Peduli by participating in a separate penalty shoot-out against goalkeepers from the National Futsal team that ran thought-out the day.

Click to see more event photos. Enjoy!

Pontus Sonnerstedt
Country Manager, Yahoo! Indonesia

I’m getting psyched for my first big developer event with Yahoo!. Tomorrow we’re hosting the 3rd Annual Hadoop Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. “What’s ‘Hadoop,’” you ask, and why is it so important as to have its very own summit? Hadoop is an open-source technology that lets companies like Yahoo! crunch unimaginable volumes of data — I’m talking about 16 terabytes every day. And why does that matter? Well, it’s what makes it possible for us to create highly relevant online and mobile experiences for the 600 million people around the globe who visit Yahoo! 11 billion times a month. In short, Hadoop is the magic behind every click at Yahoo!.

I’m honored to have the opportunity to stand in front of a thousand or so Hadoop technology leaders and developers to talk about how Yahoo! uses Hadoop and the cloud to deliver the right content and the right ads to the right people every second of every day. As the world’s largest user of Hadoop, there’s no doubt in our minds here at Yahoo! that it brings us significant value and is ready for mainstream, enterprise use. In fact, we believe Hadoop will play a big part in the future of the Web.

Everyone knows that the volume of content being published and shared on the Web is growing at a crazy pace. At Yahoo!, we want to help filter out the noise by bringing you the content that’s most personally relevant to you. But doing that requires us to make sense of this BIG data and do it superfast, which would simply be impossible to do if we didn’t have the major data processing power of Hadoop. In the amount of time it takes sunlight to reach the earth (8.3 minutes), Hadoop processes more than 300 million calculations with our data.

And that’s just one example of what Hadoop can do — we’re thankful for the passionate and brilliant Hadoop community and the supportive sponsors of this week’s Summit, all of whom are doing amazing things with this technology as well. Should be a great summit — for those of you who are just dying for more geeky details, follow #hadoopsummit on Twitter, or look for our photos on Flickr.

—Blake Irving, EVP, Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!

Follow Blake Irving on Twitter: @blakei

This weekend marks the 40^th anniversary of the first official gay pride celebrations – originally grassroots marches in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Atlanta, created to commemorate the first anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising.

Pride celebrations have come a long way since June 1970. What began as small, vocal demonstrations in a handful of large US cities has since grown to hundreds of major parades in most metropolitan areas around the globe, as well as countless smaller celebrations, film festivals and cultural events that attract people in cities and towns all over. To find events near you and to explore the most comprehensive online map of LGBT pride anywhere, head on over to the Pride Event Finder at pride.yahoo.com.

Yahoo! is celebrating Pride again this year with messages on our corporate billboards in Times Square, New York City and San Francisco. We’re also thrilled to be a Premier Sponsor of Frameline, the 34^th Annual San Francisco LGBT Film Festival. The Yahoo! logo has been up on the marquee of the historic Castro Theatre throughout the 10-day festival and we couldn’t be happier!

The past year has seen some important developments for Yahoo!’s tens of millions of LGBT users. In the United States, the nearly decade-old proposed legislation commonly referred to as the “Matthew Shepard Act” was enacted this past October, extending federal hate crime protection to victims based upon sexual orientation, gender identity or disability. It was the first federal law of any kind to extend to recognition of transgendered individuals in the country.

Outside of the US, pride celebrations have continued to flourish, growing in number particularly throughout Asia and South America. Sao Paulo, Brazil continues its record of having the world’s largest LGBT Pride Parade, with an estimated 3.2 million attendees last month. It is second in popularity only behind the annual Formula One races in that city.

The LGBT community has also recently seen same sex marriage legalized in the state of New Hampshire, in Mexico City, and in Portugal and Iceland. India decriminalized homosexuality for the first time since British Colonial rule imposed the law in the mid-nineteenth century. Bans on gays in the military were ended in Argentina, Philippines and Uruguay. Iceland elected the first openly gay head of state in the world when Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir became Prime Minister. And Annise Parker was elected mayor of Houston, Texas, which made that city the largest in the United States to have an openly gay leader.

Congratulations on all the advancements for the LGBT community in the past year and we look forward to celebrating further improvements with you in the future.

Yahoo! wishes you and your loved ones a happy LGBT Pride season 2010!

As a star of three World Cups, David is looking forward to sharing all the excitement of the tournament with the Yahoo! family of readers. Beckham brings a wealth of experience, real-life history, and enthusiasm to Yahoo!’s coverage of the World Cup. His exclusive content thoroughly enhances our already stellar line-up of offerings, including 16 global soccer sites, mobile experiences in 40 markets, rich search tools and a comprehensive writing and video crew in South Africa.

You won’t be able to miss David’s involvement with Yahoo! as he’ll be fronting the company’s World Cup advertising campaign. I offered my own face for use on the billboards, but we decided it was better to stop traffic for all the RIGHT reasons. I’m certain soccer fans everywhere will appreciate learning how one of the biggest names in soccer uses Yahoo! for news, views and up to the minute information when the big events happen.

As I write this in the shadow of Soccer City, the showpiece stadium which hosts the final on July 11, the vibrant and mystical nation of South Africa is raring to showcase its passion for life and soccer to the world. With David joining our award-winning group, Yahoo! Sports is the only place to be for World Cup coverage. Check out our in-depth stories, features, columns and videos, and try your hand at the Yahoo! Sports World Soccer 2010 fantasy game.

And most important of all, enjoy the World Cup, the tournament where the beautiful game captivates a global audience for one wonderful month.

Martin Rogers, Yahoo! Sports

Today, we give a big Yodel to an exceptional tech Yahoo!, Raymie Stata, who today was named Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President. Raymie joined Yahoo! in 2004 and has led major tech initiatives across Yahoo! from re-imaging our technology stack, to spearheading search and advertising development work and architecting our massive private cloud.

As Yahoo! has grown, so has the company’s infrastructure needs. As Chief Architect, Raymie led transformative efforts to rewire Yahoo!, moving from a set of vertical silos to a horizontal platform infrastructure. As this strong foundation is laid, we’re ready to leverage the world’s most diverse collection of content to create innovative, more personalized consumer and advertiser experiences around the globe.

And as our business has expanded in scale and complexity, Raymie has provided technical insight and direction throughout the engineering organization. With his leadership, technical Yahoo’s have focused on core challenges like creating a stable, agile development environment, extracting value from masses of unstructured data, developing scalable global experiences, and architecting a cloud to serve as the foundation for every click across our network.

As CTO, Raymie reports to our Chief Products Officer, Blake Irving and will drive technology roadmaps in partnership with both Chief Scientist Prabhakar Raghavan, who oversees science and research at Yahoo!, and David Dibble, who leads Service Engineering and Operations.

Yahoo! has always offered the best content on the Web and allowed people to publicly interact with it by sharing their own unique contributions and content. You can rate songs, review movies, Buzz articles, share photos on Flickr, post remarks on message boards, ask questions, and provide answers. Some of the best content on Yahoo! comes directly from you. We want to make it simpler and easier for you to find out about things that other members of Yahoo!’s vibrant global community are contributing on our network every day. We do this through a feature called Yahoo! Updates.

Yahoo! Updates is simply a stream of people’s activity, based largely on public content they’ve created on Yahoo!.  For some time now, we’ve been adding Yahoo! Updates into more of our products like Yahoo! Mail, Messenger and Profiles. This phased integration has been happening over the past year so we could understand what users like and don’t like and then integrate feedback. Our users are using Updates and we’re happy to report that we have had overwhelmingly positive feedback.

With each new roll-out, we have been evolving and improving the Updates feature. For example, in Yahoo! Messenger, people can see Updates from all their Messenger friends.  However, in Yahoo! Mail, people have only seen content from their Connections across Yahoo!. In the coming weeks, we’ll be expanding Yahoo! Updates in Yahoo! Mail to enable you to see public updates from some of your Messenger friends and Yahoo! Contacts in addition to your Connections. Before long, we’ll also allow you to start sharing your Updates with friends on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks if you want – another great improvement and big step forward.

Before Yahoo! Updates is expanded to Yahoo! Mail where many more people will see their Contacts’ activity, we want you to explore your Updates settings and make sure you know who can see what you’re publishing. Even if you are among the many Yahoo! users who haven’t ever generated an update, we want to encourage everyone to actively manage these settings. Because the majority of events listed within Updates are inherently public activities, our defaults are set to allow anyone to see them (that is, for people over 18; we have different defaults that are age-appropriate for people under 18 – learn more in our FAQ). But you can easily limit who sees your Updates stream either by editing the controls for each specific activity (i.e. sharing photos on Flickr or commenting on Yahoo! News articles) or by turning your Updates stream off entirely in one simple step. We’ve made sure this control is easy to find by putting it at the top of the page and that there is a single on/off check-box, with more granular controls for people who want their settings somewhere in between.

We’ve also been placing reminders across our site in the places where you do or share something that will be visible through Yahoo! Updates. We provide links for you to manage who can see them right where you publish the content.

Our commitment at Yahoo! is always to give you great products, and we know that great products include a foundational commitment to your privacy.  We’ve created an FAQ page that answers not just what Yahoo! Updates is but also explains what it isn’t, and we welcome your continued feedback.

Anne Toth, Vice President, Global Policy & Head of Privacy
Cody Simms, Senior Director, Yahoo! Social Platforms and Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN)

Earlier this week, Yahoo! participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City.  The conference brought together web innovators, thought-leaders and executives to talk about the constantly changing web and how to turn this “disruption” into opportunity.  Even our fearless leader, Carol Bartz, spoke in a fireside with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington.

Most fascinating was the Startup Battlefield, where 20 new companies competed in front of influential judges over the course of three intense days for the chance to win $50,000. Yahoo!’s Chief Architect, Raymie Stata, was on the judging panel. While there were many interesting start ups, it was art.sy, a place to discover and share fine art online, which deserves the Yahoo! Rookie Award!

Yahoo! is a company that was started fifteen years ago by two rookies, Jerry and Dave, who created Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle during their graduate days at Stanford.  They were two people who saw a need, jumped in and created something that worked for an ever growing group of people. Today, Yahoo! is a multi-billion dollar media company that uses technology to push the boundaries of the digital landscape, creating captivating experiences, content and programming.  We support innovators with big ideas and determination; we’ve been there!

During TechCrunch Disrupt we wanted to find a startup that showed promise to succeed where others have tried and failed.   This industry is about success and yes, failure.  Creating technologies and products that allow people to do things they didn’t know they wanted to do and to do things online that they traditionally did offline – like buying fine art.

We believe the marrying of online and offline behavior is one huge area for disruption. Carter Cleveland, founder of art.sy, has demonstrated a passion and a purpose for his startup.  It’s evident that he has passion for art, as does everyone on his team, and the product they’ve created demonstrates a new approach to tap into an industry that has traditionally resisted disruption AND that shows great promise to marry online and offline behavior.

Congratulations to Carter and the art.sy team who received the Yahoo! Rookie Disrupter Award and the opportunity to exhibit at the next TechCrunch event in San Francisco. Disrupt away!

At Yahoo!, we’ve been helping you get your game on with online board games, video games, card games, and more on Yahoo! Games, as well as lots of other fun stuff like fantasy sports competitions — and we just couldn’t just stop there…

Today, we’re announcing a partnership with Zynga the developer of hit social games such as Farmville, Mafia Wars, and Fishville. In the coming months, you’ll be able to play your favorite Zynga games in multiple places across Yahoo! like the homepage, Games, My Yahoo!,  Messenger, and many others sites, using your Yahoo! ID.

So get ready for some exciting and engaging new titles coming to Yahoo! that you can easily play with your friends, family, and fellow gamers and share with your networks across Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga!

For our developer friends,  this means Zynga will be deeply integrating its apps onto the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP), Yahoo!’s OpenSocial container, helping to optimize Yahoo!’s distribution channels in ways that other developers can also take advantage of. There will be a set of new open notification channels and other benefits for developers coming to YAP soon!

In the coming months, you will be able to come on over and get your game on with Yahoo! and Zynga!

Cody Simms, senior director, Yahoo! Social Platforms and Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN)

Just as Berkshire Hathaway stockholders and fans of Warren Buffett descended upon Omaha, NE for the annual meeting, Yahoo! employees, and their generous hearts, provided inspiration by welcoming some of the world’s most vulnerable…refugees…our newest neighbors from a faraway land! I am extremely honored to have been a witness to the kindness and giving spirit of the Yahoo! employees in Omaha!

At nearly midnight on April 29, 2010, 14 Yahoo! employees, friends and family members braved the cold gusty wind and rain to travel to the Omaha airport and provide an enthusiastic greeting to the Saw Joy family of five of Burma (by way of a refugee camp in Thailand). The family’s ethnic background is Karen. The adults fled their native land Burma in January of 1987 to the safety of a refugee camp in Thailand.  Father Saw Joy is 41 years old and mother Ta Ler Poe is 32. The ages of their three daughters are 15, 10 and 2. All three children were born in the refugee camp.

As the family arrived exhausted from the long trip…the sleepy-eyes of the three children brightened as Yahoo! employees greeted them with “Hello Kitty” and doggy stuffed toys, pinwheels, balloons and US flags! A group of Karen (Burmese) Community of Omaha was also there to welcome them. I wondered what was going through their minds as they gathered their four small bags of belongings….all they have in the world…not much for a family of five. They intently followed Rocky, the Lutheran Family Services of Nebraska (LFS) staff member who interpreted for them. Then, the family joined the Yahoo! group and LFS staff as they escorted, via a car caravan, the family to their new home where the family was served their first hot meal. It was heart-warming to witness the delight of the children as they saw and touched their beds and abundance of toys….a far cry from the tents of the refugee camp they have known.

I know they must have been exhausted from the long trip, but the family patiently listened as Lutheran Family Services of NE staff, in their own native language, oriented the family to their new surroundings including showing them how to turn on the water facet, turn on the lights and stove, lock the doors, use the shower, etc.   They expressed gratitude…I could see it in their eyes. It was a beautiful ending for all of us….but it is the only beginning of the journey for this family. The language is a huge barrier for them. They must find employment, learn to ride the bus, learn to pay bills, and enroll the children in school. For those of us who are so blessed to “live just another day in paradise”…. it was truly eye opening for me to realize how we take for granted.

How did this outpouring of generosity begin? About a month ago, Lutheran Family Services of Nebraska, a non-profit which resettles refugees in Nebraska, received a phone call from a Yahoo! employee. Being new to the Omaha area, Yahoo! employees wanted to give back to the community. After researching Omaha community needs…..they decided they wanted to help those most vulnerable…refugee families. Refugee families need friends and mentors who can provide support and guidance enabling them to navigate a new and complex US culture. After meeting the LFS staff and some refugees, they were motivated to action! They decided they wanted to sponsor a refugee family…and in fact, a family was arriving in a few days! They decided to take on the challenge…not a small feat! They collected many household items furniture and cash donations from Yahoo! employees. In preparation for their arrival, Yahoo! employees and some family members of employees joined LFS staff to prepare the new home for the refugee family. The Yahoo! employees delivered donated toys, home furnishings, furniture, kitchen supplies, bedding, beds, mattresses, rugs, clothing, and many essential items which families need. They stocked the refrigerator and cupboards with food. They also set up the furniture in the apartment, stocked the closets with clothing, and unloaded a truckload of items including wall hangings to make the new home cheerful for the family. Yahoo! employees plan to assist the family with support for a period of time following the families’ arrival. They have expressed an interest in assisting more families.

I want to thank the Yahoo! employees for providing inspiration and hope. They have touched and changed the life of a family…..and inspired me to want to do more for those who need a helping hand. Thank you for making me pause and think differently….about how I need to give back too…and “remember” that my great grandparents arrived here in the US with nothing…not able to speak the language either. Thank you Yahoo!….we at Lutheran Family Services of Nebraska look forward to working “hand in hand” with you to provide human care to those who are vulnerable and in need.

-Ruth Henneman, VP of Development, Lutheran Family Services of Nebraska

In the wake of last year’s Ideological Search success, the team at Yahoo! Labs did our best yesterday to further our understanding of deep April Fool’s science.  We used sophisticated methods from context-insensitive grammars, nonlinear pessimization and pseudorandom variables.

Or, to put it another way, we built a spoof website called ZOMG where you could put you and your friends into celebrity news stories “mad-libs” style and send them around to everyone you know.

We had a blast coming up with the storylines, designing the viral propagation and building the site over the last couple of days. And we hope everyone who had a chance to play with ZOMG enjoyed it as much as we did (we were helped by Carol, who got the game off to fun start herself).

We do a lot at Yahoo! Labs to try and understand the scientific phenomena underlying the Web. We’re always devising complex experiments, testing algorithms, machine learning and designing markets according to cutting edge economic concepts. Math, code and technical jargon abound at our lunches. But eccentricities aside, in our hearts and minds, we’re just like everyone else. We long to imagine ourselves as being “seen about town” and caught up in celebrity intrigue with Megan Fox. Well ok, some of us do.

All that being said, we did in fact learn a few things yesterday with ZOMG. We were curious about how transient flash interests like April Fool’s jokes disperse on the Web. What are the patterns of influence or rules of distribution, for example? We don’t have a full picture yet, but here are some very preliminary data (and watch for more in time, at the Labs website):

• By mid-afternoon, we had crossed 14,000 user-created stories
• The three top story categories were Baby Bumps, Seen About Town and American Idol

We’re starting to get used to this April Fool’s tradition and there’s no doubt the Web is a great playground to try stuff out on. And since we can technically pass off all of our jokes as sincere inquiries into the inner-workings of Internet science and culture, you’d better look out.

Wait until next year,
-Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo! Labs

P.S. One more interesting fact: if anyone is curious about who got the most fooled by ZOMG, the big winner is Tim Morse, Yahoo! CFO. Last night he was ready to throw our CMO Elisa Steele under the bus when she sent him the pretend FCC Fining Carol story as an urgent FYI. Congratulations, Tim!

I’m sure some of you’ve seen the news about Carol today – especially because it’s running on zomg!.

It’s no secret that she lets loose a swear word from time to time. But now the FCC is taking a closer look to see if what she said during a recent TV interview violated current broadcasting standards and could warrant a fine.

Is what she said really worth all the time and attention? You be the judge, but here’s what Carol had to say about it in a recent message to Yahoos worldwide:

“I never thought I would be in the same company as Howard Stern but my hope is that all of this will blow over and be resolved soon so that we can focus on more important things.”

Couldn’t agree more. But we promise to keep you up to date if this story actually has legs and the investigation progresses further.

Your bracket’s shot. Your alma mater has been eliminated. You’ve watched so much basketball in the past week that there’s a permanent groove in your couch. So why should you deprive yourself of fresh air and sunlight for another four days of NCAA tournament action this week? Well, first of all, we’ve got your bracket issues covered with our Yahoo! Sports Second Chance Tourney Pick’em game. And second, there are just too many good match-ups you won’t want to miss.
Here’s a look at the five most intriguing storylines as the NCAA tournament begins its second week:

Are Kentucky and Syracuse on a collision course?

With No. 1 overall seed Kansas bowing out in the second round, fellow No. 1s Kentucky and Syracuse have assumed the role of co-favorites. The Wildcats won their first two games by a combined 59 points and the Orange clobbered their two opponents by 22 and 23 points, respectively.

Can any remaining Cinderella pull a George Mason?

Only three teams seeded ninth or worse have ever made the Final Four, the most recent being George Mason in 2006. This year alone, ninth-seeded Northern Iowa, 10th-seeded Saint Mary’s, and 11th-seeded Washington and 12th-seeded Cornell are each still alive and intent on adding another name to that list.

Hometown heroes?

One year after Michigan State defied the odds to earn a berth in the Final Four in nearby Detroit, Sweet 16 qualifiers Butler and Purdue are trying to repeat the hometown feat. Butler’s campus is five miles from Indianapolis’ Lucas Oil Stadium, while Purdue is approximately an hour to the Northwest.

Is Duke back?

Duke hasn’t made the Final Four since 2004, but there’s plenty of optimism in Durham that this might be the year the Blue Devils end that drought. An improved interior game, a favorable draw and the scoring of stars Jon Scheyer, Kyle Singler and Nolan Smith propelled Duke to two easy victories in the first and second round.

Will the Big Ten stand strong?

Whereas the Big East and Big 12 were touted as the nation’s toughest conferences entering the NCAA tournament, it’s actually the Big Ten that has fared the best so far. Ohio State, Michigan State and Purdue are all still alive, giving the Big Ten more Sweet 16 entrants than any other conference.

-Yahoo! Sports blogger Jeff Eisneberg

The multi-purpose room on the campus of Cal State University Northridge was too small for the number of people and wheelchairs and white canes and guide dogs assembled for this first annual CSUN Conference on Technology and Disabilities. I was introduced as the Keynote speaker and weaved through the crowd as I delivered my remarks. I weaved because there wasn’t a podium. There was only a floor. And very little space.

It would have been a pretty good speech (I think) if I hadn’t stepped on the tail of that sleeping dog.  That’s when I learned that in addition to barking and howling, dogs can also shriek. I also learned that dog-shrieking can significantly alter the rhythm of a presentation.

This year, on its 25^th anniversary, the CSUN conference will be held at the Grand Hyatt in San Diego to accommodate the more than 4,500 people from around the world expected to attend.   The growth of this annual conference has been stunning, reflecting accurately the energy and innovation we witness everyday in the fields of assistive technology and rehabilitation.

The Yahoo! Accessibility Team—from Sunnyvale and London and Bangalore–is preparing to participate again in this year’s CSUN Conference. And as before, our presence will be notable. We are delivering 2 presentations showcasing the accessibility of Yahoo!’s Homepage and the business benefits of accessibility.  We are also participating in an international tweetup, a number of private sessions with our strategic partners, a videotaping on the history of assistive technology, press interviews, and, of course, excessive eating.

This year we’re also trying something new and unprecedented. Building off an innovation originally created at a Yahoo! developer Hack Day, we’re giving everyone at CSUN and around the world an opportunity to experience the conference from an entirely new perspective, that of a guide dog (how fitting) named Pecan. With her owner, Lucia, Pecan will be carrying a camera on her harness that will take pictures of CSUN every 30 seconds and send them wirelessly to our photostream at: www.flickr.com/photos/seeingy.

Pecan. A guide dog. And now, Yahoo!’s roving reporter. I plan to walk carefully around her.

-Alan Brightman, Sr. Policy Director, Yahoo! Inc.

P.S.  A big thank you to Victor Tsaran, Ted Drake and Robyn Tippins for their creative thinking and making the guide dog camera concept a reality.

Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search iPhone App

Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search makes search even easier, without typing keywords or thinking about search terms. You simply draw a boundary on your phone’s map to discover local businesses within that location. Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search delivers robust local content without people needing to know the neighborhood. Initially available for restaurant searches in the U.S., Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search will launch additional local categories on an ongoing basis and will extend to international markets in the near future.

Yahoo! Search iPhone App

Maximized for speed, the Yahoo! Search iPhone app revolves around an innovative interface that delivers contextually relevant results quickly and efficiently. A rich set of features — tightly embedded maps, localized query suggestions that display as you type, intelligent search history, voice search, and rich content and information from Yahoo! and other sources that appear directly in the results — creates an optimal experience for finding exactly what you need. The Yahoo! Search iPhone app is available in 22 markets across North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia, and will continue to roll out to additional locations.

Head over to the Yahoo! Search Blog and the Yahoo! Mobile Blog for more detailed information and features on these two new apps.  Both apps are available starting today from the iTunes® Store at http://itunes.com/apps/yahoosearch and http://itunes.com/apps/yahoosketchasearch.

Photo: “Scott Beale/Laughing Squid”

Yahoo! Jellytalks is a monthly speaker series aimed at developers, designers and entrepreneurs. Each month a relevant speaker attends a Jelly (casual co-working space for collaborative work) and they are streamed live. Tune in online: http://jellytalks.yahoo.com/

Here’s how it works

1. We’ll invite an interesting speaker to a local Jelly, have ‘em talk for 30-45 minutes.
2. We’ll stream the talk live so Jellies around the world can tune in.
3. After the talk, anyone watching can ask the speaker questions via live chat.

Through a Meebo chat in page and a Twitter feed the global audience can ask questions and receive answers by using the Twitter hash tag i#jellytalks

Gary Vaynerchuk will talk about personal branding, consumer branding and business equity. He will touch on how he used social tools to engage his audience and how you can do the same from yourself or your business.
March 19th, 2010 – 2:30pm EST

More on the speaker:
Gary Vaynerchuk is a New York Times bestselling author and American businessman who was born in Belarus and immigrated to the United States as a young child. Gary’s entrepreneurial instincts took over at a young age, when he owned a franchise of neighborhood lemonade stands and made $1,000 a weekend selling baseball cards. Much to his dismay, his father Sasha pulled Gary into the family business, a local liquor store called Shopper’s Discount Liquors. Before long, Gary recognized that consumers collected rare wines just like people collected baseball cards, and he was off to the races. Gary transformed himself into a wine expert, rebranded the store as Wine Library, launched a retail website in 1997, and by 2008 he had raised annual revenue from $4 million to $60 million. In 2006 Gary achieved one of his life-long goals when he was caricatured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in an article about online wine sales.

In the past month, Yahoo! Sports has proven that it is the destination that sports fans turn to when news happens.  Not only did the site surpass all of its competitors to become the #1 online destination for the Winter Olympics, it also set a traffic record, generating more than 39 million unique monthly users in February (comScore, February 2010).

And now, Yahoo! is announcing that it has entered an agreement to acquire Citizen Sports, a leading social media company.  Home to the #1 fantasy football app on Facebook, Citizen Sports engages and unites fans across the globe around their favorite sports and teams.

As Yahoo! pursues our social strategy of enriching, aggregating and distributing social content from across the Web, Citizen Sports will strengthen how we go about doing this in the Sports category and beyond.  The combination of these two powerhouses will make the Yahoo! experience more personally relevant, create new opportunities for users and advertisers across Yahoo!, mobile and social networks and thrill sports fans everywhere.

Yahoo! Sports’ best in class news and information will be integrated into Citizen Sports’ range of products and applications for football, hockey, soccer, baseball, racing, rugby, hockey and cricket.  In addition, Yahoo! Sports users will be able to broadcast their allegiances, create or join a conversation with friends and fans and cheer for their teams through Citizen Sports’ applications.

So…what are you waiting for?  The race is on.  Go get your March Madness on with the Bracket Challenge by Citizen Sports app and Yahoo!’s Tourney Pick ‘Em!

– Jeff Kinder, SVP, Media Products & Solutions

We invite you to join a new experiment we cooked up at Yahoo! Labs called Predictalot, a game that takes NCAA tournament pick ‘em to entirely new extremes.

Here’s how it works. You can invest virtual points on almost any prediction you can think of about the men’s college basketball tournament, like “Duke will advance further than Texas,” or “Every final four team’s name will start with the letter U.” For example, you can invest one point predicting that “there will be exactly 2 upsets in the Elite Eight” and, according to the current Predictalot odds, you’ll win ten points if you’re right.

You can keep your predictions and see how they turn out, or you can sell them at any time, even while you’re following the action on the court. How does that work? Think of your predictions like stocks that can be priced, sold and traded (for virtual points, of course) just like you’d buy and sell stocks, options and futures on the financial exchanges of the world. Predictalot offers hundreds of millions of such predictions, constantly computing prices for them all.

Throughout the tournament, the prices of all the predictions in the system will go up and down based on what’s actually happening in the tournament and on what everyone else thinks those predictions are worth. Based on the value of the predictions you invest in you’ll accumulate points and climb your way to the top of the Predictalot leader board.

In technical terms, Predictalot is what is called a combinatorial prediction market. Some of us at Yahoo! Labs, along with academics like George Mason University professor Robin Hanson, have been studying and writing about them for quite some time, and dreaming about trying them out in the real world. We built the first version of Predictalot during an internal Yahoo! Hack Day. And this year we used the Yahoo! Application Platform to finally build a public version of the game. Like any Yahoo! App, you can install Predictalot to play right on the Yahoo! homepage. (Note that we’re not special in that regard: anyone can develop a Yahoo! App that’s available to millions of Yahoo! users — there’s good sample code, it supports YUI and OpenSocial, and it’s easy to get started. Seriously, try it.)

After some fits and starts, a few late nights, and eventually a few all nighters, we’re proud and excited to go live with Predictalot, version 1.0. I can’t rave enough about the talent and dedication of the research engineers who gave the game a professional look and feel and some real production speed. They turned a very pie-in-the-sky idea into a reality. We have a lot feature ideas in mind for future versions, but the core is in place and we hope you enjoy the game.

With 9.2 quintillion outcomes, or nearly as many as the number of individual insects on Earth, Predictalot is to our knowledge the largest prediction market ever built. We hope that with your participation it will prove a great test to the limits of what the wisdom of crowds can produce.  We’d also like to pave the way for the serious use of combinatorial prediction market technology in a host of other arenas down the road.

Smarter markets will be extremely valuable in a variety of applications, especially online, where markets and exchanges decide prices and allocations for all kinds of goods and services, including advertising inventory. And more and more, the matching of buyers with sellers – which is the core function of any market – is requiring sophisticated algorithms, machine learning and optimization technology. Predictalot attempts to help us better understand these dynamics while also giving us the great satisfaction of picking Duke to go all the way.

(Duke alum) David Pennock and the Predictalot Team:
Mani Abrol, Janet George, Tom Gulik, Mridul Muralidharan, Sudar Muthu, Navneet Nair, Abe Othman, Daniel Reeves, Pras Sarkar

P.S. If you’d like to learn more about the technology hidden in the engine and the scientific factors at play, read our post about Predictalot on the Yahoo! Research website. And don’t forget to also check out all of Yahoo!’s fun tourney experiences.

Key Scientific Challenges, Entry #6: Machine Learning

On January 27, we announced the kick-off of our 2010 Key Scientific Challenges Program.  To highlight the scientific challenge areas included in the program, we launched a series of guest blog posts on Yodel Anecdotal. Our most recent post covered Web Information Management.

Another big challenge our Yahoo! research scientists are continually examining is machine learning. In this entry, John Langford from Yahoo! Labs shares some thoughts on how Yahoo! is driving research into machine learning and why it’s a fascinating field.

When I wake up in the morning, I can’t resist checking my email and browsing the Internet to see if anything has come up. Then I get to work thinking, writing, searching, finding, and learning various things, all using an Internet that’s powered by machine learning in dozens of ways. When I go to sleep at night, I smile because I know that in addition to using machine learning throughout my day, I’ve also done my part to advance machine learning technology, many others have done likewise, and that by doing so we’re making a major impact on people’s lives.

Even though machine learning has such a broad influence on the Internet, it can be quite difficult to recognize. This is primarily because machine learning’s benefits are often hidden — they are the spam emails you don’t see, the uninteresting news articles you don’t see, and the irrelevant search results you don’t see, just to name a few. In this sense, machine learning is like an invisible hand. It’s also sometimes easier to recognize the flaws in a machine learning system – like “Why did my email end up in my friend’s spam folder?” – than it is to notice its benefits. But despite these quirks, machine learning is one of the best technologies we have for solving some of the biggest problems on the Web.

The problem of spam is representative of why machine learning is so effective. Spammers are constantly changing and adapting their strategies and technology to evade even the most capable filters. Machine learning attacks this problem by aiming to build an automatic system able to stay ahead of the game and continually refine itself in response to its environment. We haven’t completely achieved that goal yet, but progress is steady. Machine learning systems can always get better, learn more, work faster and in ever more ways, because people will always want less spam and more interesting and relevant news articles.
Naturally, this reality means we’re constantly running into both the empirical and theoretical boundaries of machine learning and statistics. How do I learn from so much data that we can’t fit it on a machine? How do we extract evidence of what the best decision was? What if the best decision changes? How do I minimize the need to know the best decision? How do I effectively use the incredibly large quantities of information available on the Internet? And how do I fit it all together in an automatic way that is useful to someone? And how do you know it’s useful?

Good answers to these questions can improve the life of just about everyone, which is the core reason why Yahoo! is sponsoring the Key Scientific Challenges Program. If you are a graduate student working on these questions, you understand how exciting and challenging this field is. And if you aren’t, consider the satisfaction associated with changing fields. :-)

John Langford

Yahoo! Labs

March is here, which means college basketball tournament time, one of my favorite times of the year, when even the mildest of fans start keeping up with every single game. When the Virginia Techs and the Daytons are crossing their fingers every single week that they stay inside that coveted bubble. When Facebook and Twitter status updates explode every time a top-10 team gets stunned or a star player makes an amazing dunk.

Facebook and Twitter—those sure weren’t around when I was playing in the Championship game 20 years ago against Duke. I’ll never forget the thrill of that victory, all the memories from the entire season, playing alongside Stacey Augmon and Larry Johnson—broken jaw and all.

I’m not on the court anymore, but that’s one of the beautiful things about the NCAA Championship Tournament: With every correct pick, every upset we call, every favorite team that advances, we (the fans) get to share in the thrill. One million dollars certainly doesn’t hurt, either—which is what Yahoo! is offering one lucky fan for submitting the perfect bracket. No perfect bracket in the end? No problem. The best bracket in the KFC- sponsored Yahoo! Sports Tourney Pick ‘em contest wins $10,000 (just ask Michael Lemon—he’s been enjoying his winnings from last year), and there’s even a second-chance contest from TIAA-CREF for the majority of us that must reluctantly accept our busted brackets.

Starting today, on-the-go fans will have access to a great new mobile experience for staying on top of their bracket selections. Yahoo! has created a mobile site where fans can play the Yahoo! Sports Tourney Pick’em game right on their mobile device at m.yahoo.com/tourneypickem. In addition, they’ll be able to get live scoring, game stats, updated schedules, news, and expert analysis from the Yahoo! Sports editorial team.

And it’s even easier these days to get your friends involved (and we all know the real satisfaction comes in beating that one friend who is so sure he’s going win) with Facebook and Twitter integration. Plus, you can be a die-hard fan without having to invest all the time and research. Yahoo!’s Bracket Wizard and Scenario Generator help fans with those quick decisions and allow them to see at a glance which teams to cheer for along the way to ensure that big W.

One of the perks of being a member of the Yahoo! Sports team is that I get to pitch in and offer my best (and presumably spot-on) advice to the masses. For those last-minute updates, fans can tune in to Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Bracket Live, a live and interactive web-show from the folks who brought you the Emmy®–nominated Yahoo! Fantasy Football Live. Tune in on March 17 as Jason King, Brad Evans, Larry Beil and I give you a final rundown on all the immediate updates affecting your teams. Viewers can even send us their bracket, and there’s a chance we’ll help you out with it on our show.

I know you guys are as excited about the next few weeks as I am. If you haven’t already, you better get in the game soon. Tip-off is only 8 days away, and it can’t get here soon enough!

-Greg Anthony, Yahoo! Sports College Basketball Analyst

“Hollywood’s Biggest Night” is just around the corner and Yahoo! is ready to take you down the red carpet and get you through the evening with up-to-the-minute information and all the news, photos, and juicy gossip you can handle.The 82^nd Academy Awards are at 8 ET / 5 PT Sunday, March 7, 2010 at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood and will be hosted by Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.  While the show will be broadcast on ABC, Yahoo! once again is THE place where you can weigh in on all things Oscar, from the fashion faux pas to the surprise winners and the heartfelt speeches.

We’ve dedicated an entire section of Yahoo! Movies to this year’s awards show with the idea that Yahoo!’s Coverage of the Oscars starts with you! Let your voice be heard and make sure to cast a vote in our poll: “What do you want to see most when you watch the Oscars?” As of right now, 43% of you want to see who wins the big awards. You can also weigh in on who you think deserves to win Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Director.

Interested in seeing what the stars are wearing? We’ve got you covered with our Oscars Photo galleries including fashion photos from the red carpet, insider photos from the before and after parties, photos of the nominees, and photos from the many events taking place Sunday.

We also have a Featured Videos section, a News section, and an ongoing Oscars Blog.

Coverage of the 82^nd Annual Academy Awards is already underway with both OMG! and Yahoo! News feeding into the Oscars frenzy.

Want to be the best informed on this year’s likely winners and losers? We’ve broken down the Academy Awards by category to help you get a leg up on your friends in picking who will win Oscar gold, in How To Win Your Oscars Pool.

Find out why Sacha Baron Cohen (aka Ali G/Borat/Brüno) went from being a presenter to sitting the award show out and watching from home!

Want an expert’s opinion? Who’s more suited to give Oscar picks than OUR favorite Oscar–namely Oscar the Grouch? Sesame Street’s seminal crab-apple took a few minutes to answer some questions on who he thinks the winners will be on Sunday. Check out Oscar the Grouch’s Oscar Picks.

Criticisms of this year’s hottest movies and highest contenders are outlined in Yahoo! News’ Controversies big and small dog Oscars contenders. Find out why there’s been outrage over Sigourney Weaver’s role in Avatar.

Red-carpet style predictions and fashion alerts are revealed in OMG!’s Glam Slam: Oscar Style!

Have your own opinion on the big winners and major upsets? Want to weigh in on some of the fashion wins and fails? Then we invite you to join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

On Facebook, be sure to check out the Yahoo! Movies fan page (Yahoo! Movies) where you can write captions to photos of your favorite celebs. We’ll be uploading fashion photos of the movie stars from the red carpet, and we’re asking you to submit your most witty captions via comment.

On Twitter, follow @YahooMovies for real-time info on Academy winners. Follow @YahooOMG for updates on fashion from the red carpet. Follow @YodelingMamas for a Mom-blogger’s point of view on the evening. And of course follow @Yahoo for an overall perspective.

See you on the red carpet–and may the best man, woman and picture win!

What do Jennifer Lopez, live animals, giant bananas, and a guy sitting on a couch watching TV have in common? They all contributed to the success of Yahoo! TV’s Primetime in No Time, which just streamed its 500th episode!

But the real contributor to the success of PiNT has been you, dear viewer. Because of you, our popular TV recap show has even more reasons to celebrate…we’ve reached more than 365 million streams, 12 million of which were on one day for Jennifer Lopez’s fall during the American Music Awards. Note to celebrities: please fall down more often and feel free to interrupt Taylor Swift any chance you get. Man, I love LIVE TV! And you guys are spending an average of 6 minutes on our page. Our show is only 3 and a half to 4 minutes long. This is why we love you!!!

We’ve had some good times on PiNT. Remember when Donald Shultz from Wild Recon brought live animals on the set? And who doesn’t love the skits where I get to sing and dance. And of course, my personal favorite — the Steelers winning the Superbowl. It’s their 6th by the way!

But it wasn’t all good times, for me anyways. My least favorite moment was getting sucker punched, falling off of some giant bananas and more torture all in the name of good television as a guest on ABC’s hit show Wipeout. As you are reading this, know that I am still in pain but will continue my TV watching duties. Hopefully I will still be able to have children after my final crash.

Let’s not forget to thank the many special guests who visited the PiNT studio in Los Angeles including the Glee Kids who were really jealous of my voice; reality show contestants from Survivor (thanks for showering before coming in) and The Bachelor/ The Bachelorette; actor Harry Hamlin and comedienne Margaret Cho.

But back to you, dear viewer. Thank you for watching Primetime in No Time on Yahoo! TV, for following me and Yahoo! TV on Twitter (@franknicotero and @yahootv), and for making us THE most popular online video show.

-Frank Nicotero

Surfing the Data Wave: The Problem of Managing Events and Updates for Hundreds of Millions of Users

Key Scientific Challenges, Entry #5: Web Information Management

On January 27 we announced the kick-off of our 2010 Key Scientific Challenges Program.  To highlight the scientific challenge areas included in the program, we launched a series of guest blog posts earlier this month on Yodel Anecdotal. Read our previous post on online advertising, “The Art and Science of Advertising.”

Another big challenge our Yahoo!’s research scientists are continually examining is Web Information Management. In this entry, Brian Cooper from Yahoo! Labs shares some thoughts on how Yahoo! is driving research into information management and why it’s a fascinating field.

A Torrent of Data
Sites like Facebook and Twitter demonstrate that users really like to know what’s going on with their friends. At the same time, the popularity of blog readers and personalized RSS aggregators like MyYahoo! and iGoogle show that users also like up-to-date news. Although social networking and content aggregation seem like different applications, at the core they share a key mechanism: collecting the most recent content from a set of producers, and distributing it to a set of consumers. In the case of social networking, producers write status updates or post links, and consumers (their friends) get a list of the updates. In a news aggregator, the producers are news sites or blogs, and the consumers are the readers that want the content.

The core mechanism that takes content from producers and redistributes it to users is actually quite hard to get right, and is an example of the really tough problems that fall under the Key Scientific Challenge area on Web Information Management (and its sub-topic Data Management)

The main problem is the multiplicative explosion of updates. Consider a popular user of a site like Twitter. Ashton Kutcher, for example, has over 4.5 million followers as of February 18, 2010. Every time Ashton tweets, his words of wisdom have to be propagated to the feeds of all those millions of followers. Even if the average user has far less followers, their tweets may have to be propagated to hundreds of users or more. Suddenly, even a short 140-character message can consume a lot of server resources. It’s for this reason that Twitter notoriously found it difficult to scale and stay up at the same time. Some of the challenges in doing so have been described by Twitter engineers.

At Yahoo!, we’ve been aggregating and distributing content for a long time, and we’re increasingly distributing social updates too. Products such as Yahoo! Mail and Messenger show you recent updates and activities by your friends on Yahoo!. Plus, services like Yahoo! Updates provide tools for developers to feed a variety of different user activities and updates that happen on their sites into Yahoo!’s products (and vice versa). As we build our infrastructure to support both content and user updates, we run into many of the same scaling problems that other companies have been reporting. To address these challenges, we took a step back and looked at the whole architecture needed to support these “user event feeds”.

The Push or Pull Dilemma
I’d like to talk about one aspect in particular, as it directly addresses the intersection of building Internet-scale databases and dealing with social data. When distributing updates from producers to consumers, you have a fundamental choice: should you “push” updates to consumers, so that when a user logs in their feed is already constructed and ready to go? Or should you wait until a consumer logs in, and then “pull” updates from producers to construct the feed on the fly?

Pull ensures that we construct feeds only for users that actually log in, but it has a downside: the time a user spends waiting for their feed can be quite long because the system needs to collect and sort all of the updates from all of the people or news sources that the user follows. Many sites face this tradeoff between doing potentially unneeded work to always be ready on the one hand, and the strain of delivering on demand performance on the other. Digg recently reported moving from a pull to a push model for one part of their site, resulting in a huge increase in the amount of “pushed” data that had to be stored, but a significant decrease in response time for users.

Threading the Needle
At Yahoo! Labs, when we thought about this problem and tried to figure out whether push or pull was best, we realized something that should have been obvious all along: neither push nor pull is best.

Consider a producer named Alice that posts a new status update once an hour. We need to include her updates in the feeds we produce for her friends. Thus, when her friend Bob logs in, he should see some of Alice’s recent events. But we only really need to show Bob some of his friends’ events, because there is only room on the screen to show him 10 at a time. Now imagine that Bob only logs in once a week. In that week, Alice may have produced 80 or more updates. If we pushed all 80 to Bob’s feed, at least 70 will have fallen off the front page (replaced by newer Alice events or newer events from other friends) by the time Bob logs in, and all the resources (network bandwidth, disk I/O, CPU time) spent on pushing those 70 updates would be wasted. Multiply that waste by millions of users, and you can see where this is heading.

Alternatively, consider Carl, another one of Alice’s friends. Carl loves to check his feed and updates it every five minutes (he’s an over-sharer). In this scenario, a push model makes more sense: rather than querying the database every five minutes for Alice’s updates, we should push Alice’s events to a pre-computed page for Carl, and just serve him that same page over and over until a new Alice event arrives and updates the page. That way, Carl’s experience is great for him AND no servers meltdown!

The key insight is that we should do push for some producer/consumer pairs and pull for others. Deciding whether to do push depends on the relative frequency of the producer’s events
compared to the consumer’s logins, as well as the relative cost of push versus pull. We can minimize resource usage by only pushing for producer/consumer pairs where the consumer logs in frequently enough that the cost of pushing, plus serving the pre-computed page, is less than the cost of retrieving the event repeatedly from the producer’s queue.

It’s a challenging model to develop and put into place. It can be complicated by an almost endless array of variables, and the challenge of implementing this approach in the midst of hugely popular events, like Barack Obama’s inauguration, or Michael Jackson’s death, which caused huge surges in status updates, makes it even more difficult. It’s also what makes it utterly fascinating.

More details about this challenge, the techniques, arguments and the real-world experiments we’re developing at Yahoo! Labs will be available in our upcoming SIGMOD paper, “Feeding Frenzy: Selectively Materializing Users’ Event Feeds” written by Adam Silberstein, Brian Cooper and Raghu Ramakrishnan, as well as Jeffrey Terrace from Princeton, who was an intern here at Yahoo! Labs last summer. You’ll be able to find the paper on the Yahoo! Labs site later this year and take a look.

Brian Cooper

Yahoo! Labs

We’ve had the unique opportunity to help create an industry and shape the online world, and will continue to focus on the values that brought us here —working hard, having fun, being passionate about your ideas, believing in each other, and always trying to invent the future.  And as we celebrate 15 years today, we are even more excited than ever about what lies ahead, and the potential of Yahoo! and the Internet.

Of course, we didn’t set out to start one of the world’s largest Internet companies or be leading a movement that has changed the world. We were just a couple of Stanford graduate students doing our research (supposedly) while our professor was on sabbatical.

More interesting than our research was our total fascination with the web and all the cool stuff it suddenly made available. But it was incredibly hard to keep track of the thousands of great websites sprouting up everywhere.  We thought it would be fun to catalog the sites by developing a simple directory. So all this began with nothing more than a hobby to help other early Internet users.

Amazing things happen when we’re doing what’s fun.

We soon learned a huge lesson just as relevant today as then: change and growth on the Internet happen at warp speed—especially if you’re filling a need. With the proliferation of websites and with hundreds of thousands of people accessing our guide, it was simply impossible for us to continue doing this on our own.

Taking big steps takes belief in yourself—and in others.

After many late nights and a lot of pizza, we decided to take the big leap, turn our hobby into a business, raise money and devote ourselves totally to building a company.  This was no sure thing.  For example, 15 years ago, we wanted a free service that was ad-supported. But the conventional wisdom was that our business needed to be subscription-based. Few people thought that advertising could be the key revenue generator for the Internet. Of course, the conventional wisdom was wrong and so today we know that August, 1995, the month our first ad went live, was a critical milestone in the history of Yahoo!, as well as the history of the internet.

Focus on the future: it still looks phenomenal.

Internet growth continues to be simply phenomenal, and we’re nowhere near done.  Fifteen years ago, there were 18,000 web sites and fewer than 10 million people globally on the Internet—less than one third of a single percent of the world’s population at the time. Today there are more than 200 million websites with 90,000 created daily. There are estimated to be 1.6 billion people on the internet today—about 25 percent of the world’s population.

These numbers are astonishing, but even more important and more exciting is the impact that the Internet is having on so many people around the world.  From socio-economic opportunities to more accessible health care to educating the next generation and beyond, the Internet has changed the way we live, work and learn.  It has overcome geographic and political barriers and has made it possible for people to raise their voices as they seek greater economic opportunity and freedom.  And Yahoo! has been a leader in enabling these tremendous technological advancements every step of the way.

Let’s aim to be even prouder fifteen years from now than we are today!

All this in just 15 years. Yahoo! has been built by thousands of dedicated employees, hundreds of millions of loyal users and scores of advertisers who envisioned a future that was exciting, challenging and at times daunting.  To work in the sandbox that is Yahoo! and the evolution of the Internet is truly amazing.

And yet as fast as the Internet and Yahoo! have grown and as remarkably our lives have changed, we are just at the beginning of this great transformation.

The Internet still has enormous and untapped potential.  There are billions of more people we need to drive online, and then provide them with relevant content and opportunities that they’ve never dreamed about before.

We are confident that 15 years from today, we will look back in marvel  at how far you, and the Internet have traveled in such a short time. Just as we are doing today.

Jerry Yang and David Filo

Co-Founders & Chief Yahoos

The Art and Science of Advertising

Key Scientific Challenges Blog Series, Entry # 4:

Late January, we announced the kick-off of our 2010 Key Scientific Challenges Program, what we hope is a thought-provoking series of guest blog posts here on Yodel Anecdotal that offer a quick overview of these scientific challenge areas. Check out our last post on microeconomics and social systems.

Today, we cover advertising, which is yet another important topic related to the Web. We’ve recruited Vanja Josifovski from Yahoo! Labs to give you a glimpse of how significant advertising is to the online world.

If you’ve seen Mad Men, you’ll know what it’s like to develop an infatuation with the 1960s advertising world – the fashion, the glamour, the old technology. While we’ve come a long way since then, advertising continues to remain a large part of our daily lives and a permanent fixture of our online experience. Here at Yahoo!, we have a special appreciation for the undercurrents of online advertising because it supports a large swath of the Internet ecosystem.

Generally, web advertising closely follows the same two major models of traditional advertising.

First, there is direct advertising, which simply means that the goal of the ad is to get a direct response from the viewer. A good example is sponsored search where ads are shown beside a search result. The most difficult thing with this type of advertising is making sure the ads are relevant. If you searched for the word puzzle – did you mean jigsaw, crossword or Legos? These are complex issues we have spent a lot of time thinking about – and not in the Mad-Men-sit-back-with-whiskey way, but more of a microeconomics, super-computing way.

And then there is brand advertising, which aims to create a favorable impression about a brand or a product. In this construct, ads are usually served up by graphical means, in what we call display ads on web pages. The challenge is matching the placement/context of the ad with behavior of the viewer, both of which also introduce a stunning number of variables and data points.

In both modes – search and display – some complex learning algorithms are needed to provide relevant ads to a user. In a nutshell, it is this problem of relevance that makes advertising one of our Key Scientific Challenges. And it’s also central to the somewhat newer concept of computational advertising — a scientific discipline we developed at Yahoo! Labs that aims to formalize the problem of finding the best ad for a given user in a given context.

It sounds logical enough, right? Can we really build a system that serves the most relevant ad to a user every single time? Can we bring advertising into the realm of the other “computational” sciences? Well, we think so and we’re working hard to tackle that kind of personal relevance. It’s simply going to take some hard core science, some persistence, and continued sharp thinking and hopefully more programs like those at universities (Stanford has a leg up) and our own Key Scientific Challenges to crack it.

Vanja Josifovski
Yahoo! Labs

P.S. If you’re curious about just how big a deal Computational Advertising is, one of Yahoo!’s foremost experts in the field, Andrei Broder, was just elected to the National Academy Engineering. That’s pretty good testimony that advertising is a little bit art AND science.

This week at the University of Washington we are thrilled to be kicking off the second half of the 2009-2010 Hack U™ season. The University of Washington hack will be followed by events at Georgia Tech, UT Austin and UC San Diego throughout March and April.

During each of these hack events, Yahoo! developers teach passionate CS, HCI and engineering students about the latest and greatest open tools and technologies and web programming tips in a series of tech talks, then spend 24 hours with them to help them build their dream hack for the competition held at the end of the week. In true Yahoo! style, the all night contest is filled with fun, free food, schwag, prizes, Wii games and plenty of caffeine!

At the end of the season, the winners from each university will be flown by Yahoo! to our University Hack Showdown, which is normally held in conjunction with Yahoo!’s Open Hack Day, where they will hack it out for street cred, cool prizes and the opportunity to get their hack noticed by web industry judges, including VCs, web entrepreneurs, Yahoo! execs and technology gurus.

“The close of 2009 marked the third year of the Hack U™ program and it’s been amazing to watch the innovation, spirit and quality of the hacks continue to grow, said Jamie Lockwood, program manager for Hack U™. “The students used to just mash up as many open technologies as they could barely thinking about UI or what problem the hack solves, but today we see ideas and prototypes coming together that are more and more sophisticated and in some cases almost ready to go to market.”

The winning Hack U™ students from last season had no problem holding their own against the experienced developers that showed up at the Yahoo! Open Hack event in NYC, winning half of the categories including best overall hack.

The program has definitely caught the attention of Yahoo!’s internal open tech leaders, as well as the external web community. The Hack U™ winners from Toronto even snagged an interview at Y Combinator with their hack idea.

You can read more about the program and view some of the other hacks that have been developed at universities across the country and the world (we had our first India Hack U event at IIT earlier this year!) on the Yahoo! Developer Network site.

Hack U events have been held at some of the best engineering universities around the country including UC Berkeley, Stanford, Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, University of Washington and University of Illinois and we’re always on the lookout for other universities that want to be part of the growing Hack U community We also want to keep the technology topics fresh, timely and up to speed with the latest web industry innovations so feel free to send us requests for specific speakers or ideas for suggested topics.

Check out the website for more information, updates and details about the upcoming 2010 schedule.

– Yahoo! Academic Relations and Hack U™ Team

By Travis Reiman, Dean of Students at W.L. Henry Elementary School in Hillsboro, OR

Editor’s Note: Each month, Yahoo! for Good unleashes Purple Acts of Kindness to surprise and delight our local communities. In February, we brought extra cheer to classroom teachers in Hillsboro by delivering purple flowers and gift cards for Valentine’s Day arts and crafts projects. Here’s an account from their Dean of Students.

Last Thursday, the classroom teachers here at W.L. Henry Elementary School in Hillsboro, OR got a special surpise. As vases of beautiful purple flowers were delivered, there were plenty of smiles and lots of confused looks. Is my husband just trying to be sweet??? Did I finally win the lottery??? No one has ever sent me flowers before!!!

Everyone was shocked and excited when they discovered they were the beneficiaries of Yahoo!’s Purple Acts of Kindness Program. In addition to the bouquets, all 19 classroom teachers received $100  gift cards. The gift cards were meant to be used for the school’s Valentine’s Day celebrations so that students could have an extra special day.

This special gift was a great reward for all the hard work and effort W.L. Henry’s students put into learning this year. For the teachers, this opportunity to give their students an afternoon of special arts and crafts projects, candy, gifts, and fun put huge smiles on their faces. Thanks so much, Yahoo!.

Measuring the Unmeasurable

Key Scientific Challenges, Entry #3: Microeconomics and Social Systems

On January 27 we announced the kick-off of our 2010 Key Scientific Challenges Program.  To highlight the scientific challenge areas included in the program, we launched a series of guest blog posts earlier this month on Yodel Anecdotal. Read our previous post on privacy and security, “Data, Data Everywhere, but How to Keep it Safe.”

Another big challenge are Yahoo!’s research scientists are continually examining is microeconomics and social systems. In this entry, Sharad Goel from Yahoo! Labs shares some thoughts on how Yahoo! is tackling the new opportunities for research into the social sciences that the Web is making possible and why it’s a fascinating field.

What do your friends really know about you? How much do they influence your decisions? How often do we stray from the cultural herd? How do groups organize to solve complex problems?

Answers to such fundamental questions about social behavior have often eluded us. With microscopes we peered into the intangibly small building blocks of life, and with telescopes we found our place in an unimaginably expansive universe. But without the tools to faithfully document human activity—a challenge that by comparison seems so palpable—we had no way to investigate the inner workings of our own communities. Now with an explosion of information on every aspect of our everyday existence—from what we buy, to where we travel, to whom we know—we can measure what until quite recently was thought unmeasurable. In the Microeconomics and Social Systems Group at Yahoo! Labs, we are using this proliferation of data to explore how societies function. It’s a fascinating area of study that is just beginning to shed light on new layers of human behavior, making it a perfect fit for the Key Scientific Challenges Program.

In a recent study that’s garnered some attention, for example, we asked, “How eccentric are people?” Looking at consumer preferences across movies, music, and web browsing, we came to the surprising conclusion that ordinary people have pretty extraordinary tastes. In particular, we found that typical Netflix and Yahoo! Music users regularly watch movies and listen to songs that are not even available in the largest brick-and-mortar retailers. This result not only challenges stereotypes about people blindly following the herd, but also highlights the importance of offering consumers broad selection. That is, specialty products may dramatically boost user satisfaction by providing buyers the convenience of “one-stop shopping” for both their mainstream and niche interests.

In other work, we used web search queries to forecast the commercial success of movies, songs, and video games. Weeks, sometime even months, before a movie opens or a video game is released, one can find traces of pent up consumer demand in the search query logs. We found that these telltale signs of early interest are remarkably good predictors of future success. The catch? Although the search logs do reflect user intent, more mundane indicators, such as production budgets and reviewer ratings, perform equally well at forecasting sales. Thus, the benefit of web search as a prediction tool may have less to do with its superiority over other methods than with its generality, low cost, and real-time nature.

At a time when we are drowning in data, at Yahoo! Labs we’re asking a simple question: what can you do with it? The answer is limited only by our imaginations.

Dibble here…Jerry Yang, Scott Noteboom and I were joined by Governor Dave Heineman of Nebraska, Mayor Douglas Kindig of La Vista, Attorney General Jon Bruning and Nebraska Congressman Lee Terry, and hundreds of guests, as we celebrated the grand opening of Yahoo!’s new state-of-the-art data center in La Vista, Nebraska and our new sales and customer support center in Omaha. We are so grateful to the residents and local businesses in Nebraska with whom we could not have succeeded without their support.  Yahoo! serves billions of advertisements each day and services more than 600 million users from around the world each month and this data center is just one of many we’re building that will streamline our efficiency, while helping the planet. Yahoo! thanks Nebraska for being a part of the next phase of growth for the Internet.

David Dibble – EVP Service Engineering & Operations