Anyone who knows me knows that I love sneakers. Ok, you might even say I am sneaker obsessed. From the walk-in closet with 160+ pairs of shoes, to my blog SneakerBlogger, to the custom Nike’s in Yahoo! colors I created for CES earlier this year, I try to find any way I can to incorporate them into my personal and professional life. So when I saw that Yahoo! was going to be hosting a Freecycle-inspired “Free is Good Fair” for employees on campus today (a belated Earth Day swap meet) and that one of the items being donated would be Chief Yahoo David Filo’s signature Adidas sneakers, I started cleaning out my closet.

Much to my wife’s delight, among other things I contributed were five pairs of sneakers and athletic shoes and I was able to actually watch people pick them up and give them a new home. (Yes, people WILL wear other people’s shoes…) Hopefully they will get some great use and their new owners will think hard about what THEY could give up to turn their personal trash into someone else’s treasure.

I’m told Yahoos brought in more than 2,000 items from closets and basements throughout the Bay Area that might otherwise have been destined for landfills. The more interesting things I saw included a vintage map of Silicon Valley businesses from 2000, a red lacy bra (which seemed to disappear quickly), last-generation Tivos, Rockem Sockem Robots, vacuum cleaners, a complete set of Star Trek: Next Generation VHS tapes, bunny slippers, fleeces galore, Yahoo! schwag (Yahoo! Chicago stickers, anyone?), and gently used sporting equipment. Items that had not seen the light of day for years were suddenly adopted by new guardians, who promised to put them into immediate use. Although I think the snow skis might have to wait until next season…

We duplicated this fair in six California, New York, and Oregon offices. And whatever wasn’t claimed was carted away by local charities like the Salvation Army.

So if you see me around campus with size 10.5 Adidas shell-toes, know that they will be well cared for and infused with the spirit of giving.

Hmm… I wonder what size Jerry wears?…

Here are some photos and a video recap:

Lucas Mast
Senior PR Manager
Connected Life

There’s nothing like a pre-earnings quiet period to keep a corporate blogger on her toes. So I’ve scrounged around for some virtual hold music. And I found it in the form of a brilliant time lapse video that captures a day in the life at our headquarters, our local scenery, and the action around our Times Square billboard in NYC.

It was a little HD experiment created by Brad Williams, the production lead for Yahoo!’s Tech Ticker program. It’s his version of “Koyaanisqatsi” in three minutes.

Beats muzak.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

We’re very excited to announce that Flickr now supports video!

Yes, those videos you’ve been accumulating on your hard drive or cell phone finally have a great place to hang out, meet other videos, and be loved.

Adding the ability to share videos on Flickr is a natural extension of our mission to be the “eyes of the world” — letting our members share what they see with the people who matter most to them, be they family and friends, or the world. As we set about adding video to one of the world’s most loved photo sharing experiences (Flickr has over 25 million members worldwide who have collectively uploaded over 2 billion photos), we did a lot of homework. We spoke to our members, took surveys, played with very many video experiences on the web, and, of course, took lots of video. Through the process, we learned a few surprising things:

• Most videos being captured today are essentially “long photos” — short clips that are captured on digital still cameras or mobile phones rather than long format video taken by traditional video cameras
• People aren’t sharing these clips much. If they are, it’s either via playback on their camera, DVD, or sending a large email file.
• While certainly there is video being shared on the web, most of it is re-broadcast content, such as clips from TV shows. If it’s user recorded content, much of it is material that is trying to be like broadcast content.

The video equivalent for the personal, authentic moments that are the hallmark of photos found on Flickr is actually pretty tough to find.

Until now. Check out some of the great videos shared by members of our Beta program:

So here’s how it works. If you’re a pro member, you can go to Flickr and start uploading your videos now. Video on Flickr works the same way as photos. Features you know and love like easy uploading, tagging, sets, sharing, privacy settings, adding to groups, geo-tagging, interestingness, and stats all work for video just as they do for photos. We support videos that are up to 90 seconds long each and up to 150MB large. Your unlimited storage limits still apply — so go ahead, push that to the limit.

Why 90 seconds?
Most video that people capture is, in actuality, fairly short-format content captured on digital still cameras. Our research suggests that most of it is actually under 60 seconds, and 90 seconds should be a pretty comfortable limit. As with (most) other features on the site, we’d love to hear feedback.

Why pro only?
Pro members are the most active, dedicated members of the Flickr community and are the foundation to all we do at Flickr. Starting with them seemed like the right way to introduce such a significant new feature to the site.

So what are you waiting for? Free your videos — share them on Flickr.

Kakul Srivastava
General Manager, Flickr

We went from 8-tracks to iPods, snail mail to email, the VCR to the DVR. These are just a few examples of industries that have been completely changed by innovation. History clearly shows that inefficient marketplaces are ripe for transformation. And that’s what we’re focused on here at Yahoo!. We plan to forever change the way advertisers, publishers, agencies, and ad networks interact with one another in order to serve ads that are relevant and effective.

We’re popping the hood today on a new advertising management platform, AMP! from Yahoo! (you might have seen it referred to as Project Apex). It’s been under development for some time now by an army of engineers, product strategists and managers, and user-interface design experts — all intimately familiar with the online advertising industry. They understand the pain the industry currently feels in how things are done.

Here’s the core premise that’s fueled this new platform: Online advertising is growing increasingly sophisticated, yet it’s unnecessarily Byzantine to buy and sell. The online media landscape is incredibly fragmented. And, today, the process of finding your target audience, booking inventory, negotiating pricing, seeking approval, creating tearsheets, testing ads — it’s living in an 8-track world. Let’s just say people are doing a lot more faxing and phone calling than should be necessary in 2008. It’s terribly inefficient.

AMP! will not only automate all of these processes and take the cycle time down from weeks to minutes, it will enable a new, more open paradigm, taking participants from private walled gardens to a new world where they will be able to buy and sell across the entire Web – all in one interface, with a few clicks of a mouse. It’s like a stock market for ads — the more efficient the marketplace, the more value in it. The impact is hard to overstate. This is simply not possible today and we think that’s really hobbling the industry’s ability to focus on what matters most — developing great creative and getting it front of the right person.

We recently previewed AMP! for our partners in the Newspaper Consortium and there were “ah ha!” moments visible across the room, with execs throwing out comments like “blown away,” “revolutionary,” and they even put “sexy” and “ad serving” in the same sentence.

AMP! from Yahoo! is real. We will start rolling the platform out in phases beginning next quarter, and will open it up for additional publishers as well as advertisers, agencies, and ad networks throughout the rest of 2008 and into next year. And you can see what the newspaper execs were so excited about by checking out this short video:

Sue Decker
President

The polls have closed, the results are in, and Yahoo! News has been named the big winner on Super Tuesday. A recent custom report by comScore Media Metrix showed that Yahoo! was the most-viewed news site for elections results on February 5, beating out the likes of CNN.com, MSNBC.com and AOL News. (And no, there were no hanging chads on this ballot!)

The results shouldn’t come as a surprise. We’ve been busy getting ready for the 2008 presidential elections to meet the demand of our users and over the past few months have introduced several new enhancements. In addition to the up-to-the-minute Political Dashboard introduced in December (check out our earlier post), Yahoo! News had several other features the week leading up to Super Tuesday:

• Check the Political Pulse: On a regular basis, Yahoo! News and the Associated Press are releasing “Political Pulse” polls, which track the mood of the same 2300+ Americans over the course of this election year, and offer a snapshot of the mood of the nation. The polls examine a series of identical questions each month (on issues such as the economy and the War), in order to track how attitudes on key issues may be changing. We’re also tracking some timely issues, and in the week before Super Tuesday our poll told us what the word “change” really means to most Americans.
• GOP Interviews: Yahoo! also traveled to the Reagan Museum to conduct a series of Republican candidate interviews, conducted by reporter Mike Allen. The interviews covered a range of questions, from the war in Iraq to “Mac or PC?”

For a look into the Yahoo! newsroom and how we have pulled together the “people’s choice” of election news sites, check out this video:

Enjoy!

John Briggs
Assistant Managing Editor, Yahoo! News

Did you know that in any given week, technology stocks represent at least seven of the ten most-searched quotes on Yahoo! Finance? We did, and that’s why today we launched Tech Ticker — a new video initiative from Yahoo! Finance focused entirely on technology investing. Some consider the tech sector the fantasy sports of the investing world, and clearly our users are hungry for more in this area.

Reporting from both the Silicon Valley and the NASDAQ MarketSite broadcast studio in New York, we plan to provide the most in-depth technology investing coverage on the web. Expect Tech Ticker to be both quirky and opinionated. Our renowned editorial team couldn’t be stronger:

• Sarah Lacy, Correspondent, Silicon Valley: A 10-year Valley veteran, you may read her biweekly BusinessWeek.com column titled “Valley Girl.” She literally wrote the book on the business and culture of the Silicon Valley.
• Aaron Task, Correspondent, New York: He covered Wall Street for a decade at TheStreet.com, is a frequent guest on major business news programs and his daily podcast “The Real Story” was an award winner on iTunes.
• Henry Blodget, Contributor, New York: You know the history. Now meet Henry Blodget 2.0, author of the award-winning blog, Internet Outsider and now CEO of Silicon Alley Insider. Outspoken and battle-tested, Henry will never be at a loss for an opinion.
• Andy Kessler, Contributor, Silicon Valley: A former Morgan Stanley analyst, Andy turned $100 million into $1 billion as co-founder of a technology hedge fund. He began his career designing chips at Bell Labs and is now a best-selling author.

And me — I’m Diane Galligan, executive producer of Tech Ticker. I’m especially excited to join the Internet’s #1 finance website after nearly a decade of producing financial news with CNBC and CNN.

Expect 4-8 video segments a day, including breaking market analysis, CEO interviews, and even documentary style editorials. If you’re thinking this sounds a lot like FinanceVision, it’s not. We’re offering short video-on-demand clips that are focused on a single sector of the market, rather than live streaming coverage of the entire stock market. FinanceVision was actually ahead of its time. We hope to learn from their experience, and take advantage of the many ways the Web and Web video have since evolved.

The videos can be found on the Tech Ticker site, or in the headline feeds of the tech stocks we cover. And what about our coverage of Yahoo!? The answer is simple. We have not only the freedom, but the mandate, to call it as we see it.

You can go to http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker see for yourself. Let us know what you think is working, what’s not and what you want to see. In the meantime, check out the video below for an inside look at what Tech Ticker’s all about with Sarah Lacy.

Hope to hear from you — and enjoy!

Diane Galligan and the Tech Ticker editorial team

The last time we heard from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), they were letting us know what they thought about our use of a primate in our Yahoo! Tech launch event (we apologized). This time, they’ve crowned us with a 2008 Proggy Award for having the most vegetarian- and earth-friendly corporate cafeteria. We feel proudly redeemed.

A Proggy recognizes “animal-friendly achievement in 21st century culture and commerce…contributing to a more humane life for our entire society.” Whether they realize it or not, the thousands of Yahoos fed by Bon Appetit Management Company in our headquarters cafeteria (known as “URLs”) and beyond are provided with made-from-scratch food choices that minimize our impact on the environment. We are availed with dozens of vegetarian and vegan options, organics galore, ingredients from local farms, antibiotic-free meats, sustainable seafood, and biodegradable to-go containers. The kitchen staff even saves the vegetable oil from our fryers to create biodiesel fuel.

While an award for a corporate cafeteria might not seem worthy of great fanfare, it illustrates a big theme we Yahoos care about — finding innovative ways to help the planet. Many of the earth-friendly details are a result of input from Yahoo!’s Green Team, a volunteer army of employees who keep their eyes open for small changes that can make a big difference.

Here’s a quick video tour of URLs with Chef Bob Hart. He didn’t cook for the Grateful Dead, but he serves a mean gardein.

Kate Gerwe
Yahoo! Green Team
Senior Director, Marketing, Corporate Partnerships

As promised, here’s a video recap of Yahoo! Tech’s Last Gadget Standing showdown yesterday, which whittled down hundreds of the latest cool gadgets showcased at CES to just ten contenders. After some entertaining demos, the ultimate winner was the Eye-Fi, a wireless memory card that gives you a cable-free way to move photos from your camera to your computer or favorite photo-sharing site. Big thanks to the live audience that fed the applause-o-meter to narrow the field.

The recently launched YDN Theater, from the good folks at Yahoo! Developer Network, takes it to 11 today. They caught up with Maria Sansone, the inimitable host of The9, who walks us through the winning hacks from last month’s Hack Day Bangalore:

It’s revenge of the nerds at its finest.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

If there’s one thing Yahoo! employees strive for, it’s excellence in the area of innovation. We know this because we recently read the inspiring “Yahoo! We Value…” list, and it’s right there in purple and white: 1. Excellence; 2. Innovation. In fact, those two items beat Customer Fixation down to number 3, and that has the word “fixation” in it. So maybe we’d go so far as to say “obsessively striving for excellence in the area of innovation.”

Having gone to the trouble of writing the “Yahoo! We Value…” list, we’re sure upper management is heartened to see two of Yahoo!’s finest taking their ideas to heart. While some employees waste away their days refining dull search algorithms or trying to save the planet, we (John Allspaw and Dunstan Orchard) instead focused on something a little more real, a little more innovative, and a lot more excellent.

Behold the wonder that is Faceball:

More behind-the-scenes action here.

John Allspaw & Dunstan Orchard
Faceball Founders