Photo courtesy of saferinternet.org

The nature of the online and mobile environments is rapidly changing and so are the challenges for parents and children – from empowering kids to be safe and responsible online, to digital-reputation management to cyber-bullying.

On February 9^th, people and organizations around the world are taking a moment to recognize the importance of safety on the web. Safer Internet Day is organized by Insafe each year to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially among children and teens. This year, the focus is on “Think B4 U post,” with the goal of empowering kids to manage their digital reputation (e.g. how people are viewed based on what they post and share online) in a world where photos and videos can be broadly shared within minutes, and result in serious consequences.

At Yahoo!, we have been committed to fostering safer internet for many years, and today we are helping to amplify what people can do to create a safer online experience. As a long time leader in child safety, we have been working closely with national child safety advocates, law enforcement agencies, educational leaders, and parents to help coach youth about protecting their online personas. In addition we build child safety tools into our products, and encourage youth to take advantage of these tools.

For many teens around the world, mobile devices are the primary way teens stay in touch with friends and family and engage with the web. Given this role mobile devices play in youths’ lives, we recognize the need for mobile safety tips, and are helping to educate kids and parents with Yahoo!’s Mobile Safety Tips.

To celebrate Safer Internet Day, Yahoo! is sharing top 5 tips:

1. Think before you send. Stop, and think before you share a thought or forward a photo. Imagine your grandmother or principal on the receiving end. The best filter is the one between your ears — use it to your advantage.
2. Protect your personal information. When you send email, texts, photos or instant messages to people who are not trusted friends or family, don’t give out personal information they could use to find your physical location or exploit you. Guard your password like a hawk.
3. Control negativity. Think carefully about who you want to communicate with and who you should ignore. Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger have features that allow you to block people. If you receive abusive or harassing messages online, report the abuse where and when you see it.
4. Use Safe Search. Yahoo! offers a default Safe Search filter to help keep inappropriate content out of your search results. While no filter can guarantee 100% removal of all inappropriate content, using a filter like Safe Search will make a big difference in keeping unwanted material out of your search results.
5. Download applications from trusted sources only! If you download software from a third party, be sure to only download applications from developers you trust. And, read their Terms of Service and privacy policies to really understand what you’re giving them permission to do when you download their app.

Catherine Teitelbaum, Yahoo!’s Director of Child Safety and Product Policy

Last week marked the official kickoff of Yahoo!’s two-year sponsorship of the new Yahoo! Cycling Team.  And this past weekend, rider Dirk Copeland defeated 50+ other cyclists to win first place in the Cherry Pie Criterium.  What a fast start for the team!

The Yahoo! Cycling Team was formed by Ikeman Cycling, Inc. who’s mission is to promote young cycling talent in the U.S. and to grow the sport of cycling worldwide.  The team is comprised of a mix of young talent and seasoned cycling veterans.  Based in Northern California, the team plans to race the majority of its season on the West Coast as well as a portion of the National Racing Calendar.  Dependent upon its success in the U.S. circuit in 2010, the team plans to move on to Continental Status in 2011.

“We’re excited to launch this team in a community that is as enthusiastic about cycling as we are,” says Kevin Klein, Ikeman Cycling Owner and Yahoo! Cycling Team General Manager. “Both our young riders and experienced cyclists are eager to get our season under way and establish ourselves as a dominant elite team. “

For more information about the team and the 2010 racing schedule go to the Yahoo! Cycling Team Website (www.cyclingteam.yahoo.com) or follow the team on Facebook [facebook.com/YCyclingTeam] and Twitter [twitter.com/YCyclingTeam]

Data, Data Everywhere, but How to Keep it Safe:
Key Scientific Challenges, Entry #2: Privacy & Security

On January 27 we announced the kick-off of our 2010 Key Scientific Challenges Program. Earlier this week we launched what we hope will be 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 first post on green computing.

Today’s entry is another incredibly important issue and difficult challenge posed by the Web – privacy and security. We’ve recruited Ashwin Machanavajjhala from Yahoo! Labs to share his point of view on why privacy and security are Key Scientific Challenges.

As a popular destination on the Web, millions of users interact with Yahoo! every day. They search for information online, read the news, click on ads, upload, tag and share photos, and so on. Each of these billions of individual actions sheds some light on a particular user’s interests – what they like, what they want to know more about, buy or do in their spare time. They are all valuable cues that can be used to customize someone’s Web experience in a way that’s personally relevant to them.

Ultimately, a personally relevant experience is at the root of what we’re trying to deliver with all of Yahoo!’s products. The information that comes our way is a prime asset for making our users happy. But at the same time, with all that information comes a huge responsibility. We need to take extreme care to make sure people’s privacy is not breached. This responsibility to earn and keep our users’ trust is not just a matter of Yahoo! policy (although that is critical too), it’s also a technical challenge that requires scientific innovation to continuously improve and maintain.

When it comes to the trust of our users, we’ve learned lessons on how to approach both the policy and technical elements of privacy and security.  On the policy side, we are extremely proud of our Data Anonymization Policy, which has received wide support and affirms our commitment to help protect our users’ privacy. Yahoo!’s policy both dramatically reduces the time we hold personal data and increases the scope of log data covered under the policy. Under the policy, we anonymize user log data, including deletion of total IP address, after 90 days with limited exceptions to fight fraud, secure systems and meet legal obligations.  We’re also expanding our commitment to include data on page views, page clicks, ad views, and ad clicks as part of this policy.

On the technical side, we’ve invested in giving our users the ability to understand and shape how we interpret what’s personally relevant to them by launching our Ad Interest Manager, a central place where Yahoo! visitors can see a concise summary of their online activity and make easy, constructive choices about their exposure to interest-based advertising served by the Yahoo! Ad Network.

And our scientists at Yahoo! Labs have also been active in academic privacy research, examining new mathematical definitions of user privacy and developing novel technologies for sharing and utilizing user information to improve Web experiences in a privacy-preserving manner. These experiments and research have been published widely, opening up new avenues of investigation on issues that are critical to Yahoo!, like protecting search log data and dealing with so-called vanity queries, to new privacy frameworks that can be used in any field where making data available broadly is a key objective in overall innovation, as it is with the World Bank, Census Bureau and medical institutions publishing important public health studies, for example.

These efforts are just the beginning, though, which is why privacy and security is a Key Scientific Challenge area, and we can’t wait to see what the word’s aspiring minds have to say on the topic.

Ashwin Machanavajjhala
Research Scientist
Yahoo! Labs

Today, Yahoo! launched the Yahoo! Mobile Blog, which you can find at ymobileblog.com.  The blog will provide you with interesting information on what’s been happening in the industry, and behind the scenes at Yahoo! Mobile — from new products and features, to quick tips and tricks to market trends and predictions.

Below, you will find the first post from Irv Henderson, VP of global mobile products for Yahoo!.  In it, Irv discusses the purpose of the blog, background on Yahoo! Mobile and his views on what’s to come for 2010.

To add the Yahoo! Mobile Blog to your RSS reader, click here to subscribe:

On Wednesday we announced the kick off our 2010 Key Scientific Challenges Program. It is a thought-provoking competition that encourages top graduate students to help invent the future of the Internet by working with Yahoo! Labs to investigate and test their ideas in the real world.
 
The Key Scientific Challenges Program focuses on a variety of scientific issues that we believe are central to developing a better understanding of the Web and the foundational technologies that will accelerate innovation. Over the next couple of months, we’ll be offering a series of guest blog posts here on Yodel Anecdotal that offer a quick overview of these scientific challenge areas from a Yahoo! (or Yahoo!s) who have expertise in the field and can explain how their research can have an impact on making the Web more engaging, relevant and powerful.
 
Today’s our maiden voyage, and the first guest blog post comes from Scott Noteboom. Scott is one of the foremost experts on building data centers that makes it possible for Yahoo! to run some of the fastest, most popular Web sites in the world.  He’s also leading the charge to make Yahoo!’s data centers as efficient as possible, and we’ve asked him to talk about a new challenge area we just added to the Key Scientific Challenges Program this year, green computing.
 
Thanks,
The Key Scientific Challenges Team at Yahoo! Labs
 
Key Scientific Challenges, Entry #1: Green Computing
By Scott Noteboom
 
Increasing demand for the Web services and applications that have become such a central part of our lives (like email and Web video, just to name a few) is also causing a steady rise in the need for more and more computing power to make all of theses services work and work well.  When we talk about computing power, we’re often talking specifically about data centers, buildings that house thousands and thousands of servers working 24-hours-a-day to make sure that the Web sites you want are there on your screen and on your phone when you want them.
 
Of course, while the performance of servers is improving almost everyday, making all kinds of new innovations possible, they also require a lot of power. They need so much power that a 2007 joint report by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory revealed that energy consumption from data centers had doubled between 2000 and 2006 and was expected to double again by 2011. The report further calculated that there would be huge energy and money losses without increases in the efficiency of running and cooling these centers (because servers produce a lot of heat).
 
Recognizing both the problem and the opportunity that this presents, Yahoo! has embraced its role as a leading environmentally sustainable company by addressing efficiency in our data centers head on.  We announced in June 2009 that we’d be committing to a significant reduction in the carbon intensity of our data centers by 2014. And to accomplish this goal, we’ve developed several innovations, including a new high-efficiency data center design that reduces our cooling load and increases utilization in our data centers, increasing the productivity of our servers, and squeezing as much productivity as possible out of every last kilowatt-hour. These efforts have gotten us some recognition and hopefully will inspire more innovation because making the world’s data centers more efficient is also an important element to tackling global warming.
 
Everyone wants to see innovation on the Web and what it makes possible for us in our everyday lives continue to flourish, and that’s where innovation behind the scenes in data centers is so important. By making data centers more efficient, we can make sure that future innovations that make the Internet more and more powerful for all of us will also be environmentally sustainable.  
 
This is by no means a pipe dream, which is why we’re so excited to be part of the Key Scientific Challenges team recruiting some of the best young minds in the world to learn from our experiences and accelerate their own research and ideas. A study by The Climate Group entitled Smart 2020 predicts that, while greenhouse gas emissions from the Internet industry will rise to approximately 1.3 gigatons of CO2, the combined impact of smart grid, smart logistics, smart buildings and videoconferencing could reduce emissions by approximately 7.8 tons.
 
We’re very excited about the next big ideas that will continue to bring radical improvements in energy efficiency and truly green computing. If you’re interested in learning more about the Key Scientific Challenges Program visit the site, and if you’ve got an idea for research into green computing, get working on a proposal. Submissions are due March 5th.

As many of you are likely already aware, the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, kicked off this week.  WEF was created to serve as a catalyst for cooperation across business, government, the media, science, the arts, and civil society to address pressing challenges and future risks as one community.  Aligning with this mission, Yahoo! and other industry leaders today announced an initiative called GreenXchange (GX), a program designed to help address sustainability in the digital age.

As a founding member of the GreenXchange, Yahoo! is collaborating with Best Buy, Creative Commons, IDEO, Mountain Equipment Co-op, Nike and nGenera to create a web-based marketplace for sharing intellectual property which is intended to lead to new sustainability business models and innovation.  Businesses are in a unique position to use collaboration and open innovation as powerful tools for combating climate change.  The goal is to accelerate the learning curve for energy efficiency and sustainable business practices by making patented technologies for research and licensing available, in a manner that’s good for our individual businesses and the planet.

As an active participant, Yahoo! is planning to license patented technologies that we have developed to improve performance and increase efficiency in our data centers around the world.  Today, the members of the GreenXchange are hosting a CEO breakfast at WEF.  We are calling on other corporations to join the GlobalXchange commitment to fast track the development of innovative solutions to sustainability challenges.

The GreenXChange is part of Yahoo!’s 360 degree approach to advancing sustainability through internal commitments to drive change in cooperation with other institutions (including the Department of Energy) and work collaboratively with other influencers setting sustainability as a priority.

David Dibble, EVP of Service Engineering & Operations, Yahoo! Inc.

When disaster strikes, people want to help, but they often don’t have the resources at their fingertips.  At Yahoo!, we’ve implemented a number of ways people can stay up to date in the aftermath of the devastating Haiti earthquake and find ways to help with disaster relief efforts.

I am very fortunate to work in Yahoo! for Good, a team at Yahoo! whose focus is to empower people around the world to make a positive impact.  To support relief efforts in Haiti, Yahoo! is collaborating with non-profit organizations, leveraging our global network of services to raise awareness, and offering much-needed funding for the millions of people who have been affected by this natural disaster.

Here are the ways we are helping.

• The homepages of Yahoo.com, Yahoo! UK, Yahoo! Italy, Yahoo! Canada, and Yahoo! Mobile are connecting people to the latest news and ways to donate.
• Yahoo! News is providing ‘How to Help’ links in related stories and created a Topic page about the earthquake with donation resources.
• The Yahoo! Employee Foundation approved a $100,000 emergency grant to UNICEF and Partners in Health.
• US Yahoo!s have donated more than $80,000 to the cause in the last 48 hours, including corporate matches for those donations.

It doesn’t stop there.  We are scheduling banner ads across the Yahoo! network to support organizations like the American Red Cross and UNICEF who are providing relief efforts in Haiti.  We are also providing prominent placements on Yahoo! Sports and OMG to encourage people to donate. And there is more to come.

In the last 48 hours, I’ve been so inspired and humbled by fellow Yahoos who have stepped up to make all of this happen at lightning speed.  It’s times like these that remind me once again of the amazing power of the Yahoo! network to encourage people to take action. Join us in this important cause by making a donation to one of the charities listed here.

By Connie Chan, Yahoo! for Good

In December, Yahoo! launched our You In? program at kindness.yahoo.com to encourage people around the world to spread happiness by doing random acts of kindness.  Thanks to you, our big-hearted Yahoo! community who helped spread the word, over 315,000 people from 11 countries updated their Yahoo! status with good deeds, and more than 500 stories were posted to the You In? Flickr Group.

Check out some of our favorites –

Padmaja bought books for students in a rural government school in Bangalore, India

Kastle handed out reusable shopping bags and included a handwritten holiday card and $5 bill at a Farmer’s Market in Santa Monica, California

Edgar bought a set of books for a complete stranger in Brooklyn, New York

Inspired by amazing stories like these, Yahoo! also did some of our own random acts of kindness.

When we heard that Bill anonymously paid for a family’s overdue water bills , Yahoo! paid the heating bills for 12 families from a small town in Kentucky who were at risk of having their heat turned off in the winter.

Yahoos hand delivered  50 hot meals to farm labor families who didn’t have transportation to get to the food bank in Quincy, Washington. 

And on the busiest travel day of the year, Yahoo! went to the San Jose and San Francisco International Airports to pay for people’s baggage fees.

But the kindness didn’t stop there!  We also sent 50 kids from a Boys & Girls Club in Washington D.C. to the Nutcracker Ballet, took low income seniors in elderly care facilities on holiday shopping sprees in San Diego and Miami, gave DVD collections to children’s hospitals in Portland and Cincinnati, and more.

So our new year’s resolution is to keep this warm fuzzy holiday spirit alive by spreading ripples of kindness through our year-round Purple Acts of Kindness program.  You In?

Over the years, Yahoo! Labs has partnered closely with many universities and colleges. As a company, we want to invent the sciences needed for the next-generation Internet. Working with the faculty, researchers, and students of the world’s great universities is one of the best ways to meet that goal.

Looking back, 2009 was our most successful year to date. Through a variety of programs, we brought together a lot of smart folks and important ideas. As we head into 2010, we want to share our excitement about these programs and events.

Hack U:
Our University Hack Day competitions (Hack U) brought Yahoo!’s open technology, top developers, and hack spirit to campuses for technical talks and a 24-hour student programming competition. Students from 11 universities in the U.S., Canada, and India built more than 300 hacks. Winners from each campus participated in the New York Open Hack Day, ultimately winning 6 of the 11 categories.

Yahoo! Big Thinkers Series:
As part of our Big Thinkers distinguished speaker series, Yahoo! brought the brightest minds in the academic community to our campus for talks, and we’ve made those lectures available on the Web for all to see and enjoy. We had talks on
 

• Global climate change with Kenneth Arrow, Nobel Laureate and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Stanford University
• The psychology of the Web with Sandy Pentland, MIT
• Getting around the “you don’t know what you don’t know” syndrome with Ion Stoica, University of California, Berkeley
• How computational thinking can transform education with Jeannette Wing of the National Science Foundation
• Calculating the largest prime number ever found with Ron Graham, University of California, San Diego
• How the Internet and the science of computing are on the verge of driving a revolution in medical and biological science with Leroy Hood, Institute of Systems Biology

 
Next year’s Big Thinkers series should be just as captivating — we’ve got a great lineup for 2010.

Webscope:
Our Webscope™ program offers a reference library of 24 interesting and scientifically useful datasets we’ve made available for noncommercial use by academics and other scientists. More than 880 academic researchers have used the datasets, resulting in 28 technical papers, journal articles and theses so far. Very few companies have the resources and global scale to help academics and students interact with the types of real-world datasets it takes to spark innovation, but Yahoo! is one of them and it’s really paid off.

Key Scientific Challenges (KSC):
Our Key Scientific Challenges program partnered with 21 graduate students in 2009. We gave them scholarships, plus the opportunity to work closely with Yahoo!’s scientists on solving some of the biggest challenges the Web offers. The winners attended the KSC Graduate Student Summit, where they presented the fruits of their labor to fellow students and other Yahoo! researchers. It was the first of what will surely be many peer-reviewed conferences for these talented folks.

Cloud Computing Research:
Our M45 Cloud Computing Cluster is a 4,000-processor testbed being used in academia for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. Faculty members at Carnegie Mellon University have written 40 technical publications based on research performed on M45, and the cluster is now being used by three additional universities. Yahoo! is also part of both the Open Cirrus testbed and the Open Cloud Consortium.

Global Impact – Yahoo! Days in Haifa:
In November we held two very successful “Yahoo! Days” at major Israeli universities – Tel Aviv University and Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. Yahoo! scientists from around the world joined the event, which featured a keynote by Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Yahoo! Labs. Pictures from the Tel Aviv and Technion events are available on Flickr.

Netflix Prize-winner Yehuda Koren’s Campus Tour:
Yehuda Koren, a research scientist with Yahoo! Labs in Israel, was part of a team that spanned countries, time zones, and companies, collaborating over a three-year period to win the Netflix Prize, one of the most well-publicized and interesting machine learning contests ever conceived. It’s a story with surprises, twists and turns, game-playing, late nights, and computational brute force. There’s also deep science behind it all — science that will drive future innovation on the Web. Naturally, Yahoo! thought it was the kind of story that students and faculty at some of the world’s best universities would like to hear in person. Yehuda has visited seven universities since the award was announced in September 2009, including MIT, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Rutgers, Princeton, Penn, and GA Tech. And he’ll be back at in 2010.

Purple Footprints:
And, of course, we continued to sponsor our campus seminar series, leaving “purple footprints” at Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. All of those seminars have been recorded and are available online. Yahoos also presented more than 100 lectures, seminars, workshops and training sessions at campuses worldwide.

If you want to learn more about Yahoo! Academic Relations programs and how you can participate in 2010, please visit us.

Ron Brachman
Vice President
Yahoo! Labs

As part of Yahoo!’s “You in?” program to spread random acts of kindness, we headed out on Christmas Eve to make a positive impact on the Quincy, Washington community. We handed out 50 – (16 piece) boxes of chicken and jojo’s plus a box of fresh baked cookies to those standing in line at the local food bank. Then we loaded back up at the store with more chicken and cookies and went to the labor camps where the real need is. Most of these are located 5-10 miles out of town. We went house to house (trailer to trailer). Two ladies started crying…and one hugged my husband and me over and over. It was very touching.

Then today the guys went out with another van full of food and delivered it to some other areas we couldn’t get to on Christmas Eve. We also took bags of stuff we were told that most request at the food bank. Bread, cereal, peanut butter and beans. So we gave them a box of chicken, jojo’s and a bag with other necessities in it.

What we were so surprised to see is that many don’t have transportation to even get to the food bank in town. I think that is why they were so touched. We are going to go out and do it again tomorrow and target another area.

Also while we were waiting for chicken at Akins Deli we randomly walked around the busy store and eyed people shopping that looked like they could use a little help (monetary wise). We notified the sales clerks to charge their groceries at checkout to our account and hand them a kindness card that encourages them to “pay it forward” by doing something nice for someone else. We weren’t around to see but I heard there were 6 really happy and grateful families.

The surprising part to this whole story is that when I went up for communion on Christmas Eve at our church, our pastor said to me, “Lisa, I saw firsthand the way you and your company touched someone’s life today. Thank you for doing that. God Bless you.” I went back to my seat wondering what he was talking about. After church he told me that he was witness to one of the store charges and could see what a truly unexpected gift it was for a family that he could see desperately needed it and it touched him as well.

I wish my children could have seen the woman cry over being given chicken, jojo’s and cookies. It would have given them perspective as to how well they have it and how sometimes it’s not what or how much you give……it’s just the act of caring about those less fortunate and wanting to make a small difference in other people’s lives.

This was a truly moving experience, and I’m so thankful to be able to participate in this You In? campaign. I have NEVER been more proud to work at Yahoo!

I’m so touched to see that these random acts of kindness really are spreading around the world. Nearly 300,000 people have already added their kind acts to the map at kindness.yahoo.com. To add yours or find more inspiration, check out kindness.yahoo.com.

If you live in the Bay Area or have visited San Francisco during the holiday season, odds are that you have seen some of the cute dogs and cats in the windows of Macy’s in Union Square, all part of the SPCA’s holiday adoption drive. With hundreds of dogs and cats in need of a home living at the shelter at any given moment and a goal to find homes for more than 4000 animals each year, the SF SPCA has a herculean task that is undertaken by hundreds of staff and volunteers at their SF HQ, which includes Maddie’s Pet Adoption Center and the Leanne B. Roberts Animal Care Center.  You can meet some of our new friends here:

When we came by to drop off our gifts, we were greeted warmly by SF SPCA President Jan McHugh-Smith and amazing employees like Susannah Dunlap.  Jan and Susannah gave us an all-access tour of their amazing new facility that offers potential pet owners the chance to see the dogs and cats in condo-like settings.  All of the cats even have their own TV sets!

We were also able to see their state-of-the-art veterinary care facility, where animals from all over the Bay Area come to get checked out and get ready for adoption.  The shelter is a no-kill facility and is often a literal safe-haven for pets from other shelters that do not have space, including the apparent overabundance of chihuahuas.

While the SF SPCA website is a great place to see all of the animals available for adoption, you can always come down to see the pets in person.  And for those of you who are socially-networked, you can also follow them on Twitter and Facebook.  For a preview of some of the pets you can adopt, we’d like to introduce you to our new friend Curtis the Cat:

And as a bonus, our new friends at the SF SPCA have given us the opportunity to let our followers on Facebook and Twitter name a kitten that will be up for adoption soon–so follow us and help give Mr. Pickles a new name!

Please visit Yahoo’s You In? site to share your stories of kindness!

Happy Holidays!

Pamela Woon, Lucas Mast and Mariel Myers

Yahoo! Corporate Communications

Everyone is doing it – from New Orleans to Las Vegas, and even Hawaii is involved in the college bowl fever. It doesn’t matter if your team didn’t make the cut, you can still have fun by joining Yahoo! Sports College Bowl Pick’em. This is your last chance to earn college glory, and this is the only time it doesn’t matter if you’re a duck or a gator. You can have fun picking the winners, even if your team isn’t playing.
 
Don’t let the fact that you’ve never played stop you, the rules are easy:

1. Sign up at Yahoo! Sports College Bowl Pick’em   
2. Pick the teams you think will win – there is expert advice available or just go with your favorite mascot or team colors
3. Then watch the points stack up!

Sign up now because the players hit the field this weekend and that’s when the boys will be separated from the men! And a big college cheer to the Yahoo! Sports team that delivered the most exciting college fantasy game of the season.

It has been a stellar year at Yahoo! Labs, and before 2010 arrives, we want to share an overview of the great science that our colleagues have published in 2009. The Internet is changing as rapidly as ever – from what’s possible technologically to how people are interacting with technology and each other, and it’s part of Yahoo! Labs’ mission to help Yahoo! and the world understand that evolution. On that front, we made major progress during these past 12 months, and were thrilled that our work was recognized with seven Best Paper awards at top conferences in our industry, including:

• “Integration of News Content Into Web Results” by Fernando Diaz at Second ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM)
• The work Yehuda Koren described in his paper, “Collaborative Filtering with Temporal Dynamics,” was a crucial contribution to his team. It won the Netflix prize well as the Best Paper award at the 15^th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)
• “Sources of Evidence for Vertical Selection,” by Jaime Arguello (a Yahoo! intern from Carnegie Mellon University), Fernando Diaz (Yahoo! Labs), Jamie Callan (Carnegie Mellon University), and Jean-Francois Crespo (Yahoo! Labs) at the 32^nd Annual ACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR)
• “Generating Example Data for Dataflow Programs,” by Chris Olston, Shubham Chopra, and Utkarsh Srivastava at ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference (SIGMOD)
• “From ‘dango’ to ‘japanese cakes’: Query Reformulation Models and Patterns,” by Francesco Bonchi and Carlos Castillo at the 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence
• “On the Feasibility of Multi-Site Web Search Engines,” by Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Aris Gionis, Flavio Junqueira, Vassilis Plachouras, and Luca Telloli at the 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM)
• “Explore/Exploit Schemes for Web Content Optimization,” by Deepak Agarwal, Bee-Chung Chen and Pradheep Elango at IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM)

 
Yahoo! Labs also led the technical program at WSDM, ending up with a quarter of the total accepted papers at the event. And at the 18^th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) in April 2009, Yahoo! Labs secured the most accepted papers from a single organization. Two of those papers — “Visual Diversification of Image Search Results,” by Reinier H. van Leuken (Universiteit Utrecht), Lluis Garcia (Yahoo! Labs), Ximena Olivares (Unversitat Pompeu Fabra), and Roelof van Zwol (Yahoo! Labs); and “Social Search in ‘Small-World’ Experiments,” by Sharad Goel, Roby Muhamad (Columbia University), and Duncan Watts — were nominated for the conference’s Best Paper award.

In addition, at SIGMOD, Bee-Chung Chen and Ashwin Machanavajjhala also earned Best Dissertation runner-up awards for their work on “Cube-Space Data Mining” and “Defining and Enforcing Privacy in Data Sharing,” respectively. 

Finally, wrapping up the year at CIKM, Yahoo! Labs topped 2008’s accomplishments and, in addition to the Best Paper award, received awards for Best Student Paper and runner-up Student Paper, and earned a record of 30 accepted papers. The awards for Best Student Paper and runner-up Student Paper went to Michalis Potamias, Francesco Bonchi, Carlos Castillo, and Aris Gionis for “Fast Shortest Path Distance Estimation in Large Networks;” and Matthijs van Leeuwen, Francesco Bonchi, Arno Siebes, and Borkur Sigurbjornsson for “Compressing Tags to Find Interesting Media Groups.” 

Though the year isn’t quite over yet, we at Yahoo! Labs are proud of our colleagues’ accomplishments, and we’re gearing up for what lies ahead in 2010. 

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Labs

And once you have created your own winter wonderland, you can share it with friends and family by sending a link with Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! Messenger, or you can post it on Facebook or Twitter.

Happy Holidays from your friends at Yahoo!

Build your own snowman at: snowman.yahoo.com

This Fall, one of Tiburon’s favorite residents, the Purple Lady, lost her house in a fire.  Barbara Meislin, aka the Purple Lady, is a local author, singer and healer and she is known for her dedication to everything purple.   Given that we are kindred spirits when it comes to the color purple, Yahoo! employees wanted to do something to help. Several community members we spoke to said that the Purple Lady would only accept gifts that benefitted the community. This made it the perfect fit for our Purple Acts of Kindness program!

The Purple Lady recently wrote a book called “No One Can Ever Steal Your Rainbow”, a children’s book about love and hope that speaks to people of all ages.   Yahoo! bought 250 copies of the book, donated 200 copies to Raising a Reader, a nonprofit organization in Silicon Valley that engages low-income parents in reading to their children, and donated 50 copies to Somos Mayfair, a community-based organization that works with over 200 immigrant families in the San Jose area.

Thanks Purple Lady for inspiring us – you have created one amazing ripple of kindness.

Do you want to create a ripple of kindness this holiday season?  Check out our “You In?” campaign at kindness.yahoo.com to get inspired.

Photo by: Tim Porter

At Yahoo!, massive-scale data-crunching is our bread and butter. We are the leader in use and development of Apache Hadoop and other open-source cloud computing technology to process many petabytes of data, billions of Web images and objects, and hundreds of thousands of Web requests per second. With cloud computing and the careful analysis of data, we are able to deliver highly relevant content and improve the quality of online experiences across the Yahoo! network – from the homepage to Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Mail, and more.

Academic researchers exploring everything from astronomy to genomics have the same need to analyze massive amounts of data. Yahoo!’s cloud is intended to free up engineering resources to focus more on innovation by creating highly scalable applications. We hope that our technologies can be used in a similar way by research institutions, so that scientists can sift through massive amounts of data in a smart, scalable way and focus their energy on finding real breakthroughs.  The Yahoo!-donated cluster will be part of the OCC’s Open Science Data Cloud. It will be used by a variety of scientists, including world-renowned researchers such as Alex Szalay at Johns Hopkins University to study the birth of the universe and Kevin White at Chicago’s Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology to study the structure of the human genome.

This donation will enable OCC to scale their benchmarking and performance analysis efforts, significantly enhancing their capabilities to improve systems software for cloud computing.  The OCC plans to distribute the processing power between data centers at the University of Ilinois at Chicago and Johns Hopkins University.  The data centers are connected by a very high speed (10 Gigabit per second) network link, enabling researchers to test distributed virtualization technologies.

Our participation in the OCC is a continuation of the cloud computing research projects we began supporting a few years ago. Top research universities such as Carnegie Mellon, the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst use Hadoop on our M45 supercomputer for a broad range of computer science research, and are progressing with some ground breaking studies.  Similarly, we are a founding sponsor of the Open Cirrus™ Cloud Computing Testbed, along with HP and Intel, which is advancing cloud computing research on an international scale.

We’re excited to play an important role in this interesting intersection between technology and academic research, and we look forward to working with our counterparts as part of the Open Cloud Consortium.

- Shelton Shugar, senior vice president, cloud computing, Yahoo!.

Earlier this summer, we created a fun way to let you analyze your “social mojo.” And just in time for the holidays, the birds are back to share a seasonal analysis of your Twitter persona. Simply go to yahoo.holidaymojo.com, add in your Twitter handle (aka username) and through a (not) very scientific process you can determine exactly what kind of twitterer you are based on how you use Twitter (no private stuff!).

Depending on your social mojo persona, we’ll recommend a few apps you can instantly add to your new homepage to make it more personally relevant. So, if you’re a Twitter user, give it a whirl – you might be:

• Snowflake – Drifting from here to there, no one is better at following people than you!
• Regifter – You’re great at passing on the retweets.
• Toast Master – You have a lot to say and take advantage of your 140 characters to say it!
• Mistletoe Magnet – You like to bring people together with all those hashtags.
• Snowman – Based on how rarely you tweet, you’re clearly the strong, silent type.
• Nutcracker – You’re so good at uncovering the best URLs!
• Gingerbread Man – All those followers make it clear that you’re quite sweet.
• Noise Maker – You like to keep the conversation going with all those @replies.

Check it out (or check it twice) – follow us on Twitter — we’re a Nutcracker.

How big is your ripple of happiness?

It doesn’t take a lot of money or time to make someone’s day.  Smiling at a stranger can be contagious.  Paying the toll fee for the car behind you may inspire them to pay it forward.  Picking up a $207 grocery bill at Trader Joe’s can turn into $23,000 in donations for the local food bank.

These heartwarming stories inspired us to launch Yahoo!’s “You In?” campaign this holiday season because we believe that one small act of kindness can create a ripple of generosity.

Help Yahoo! create a ripple of happiness around the world with random acts of kindness.  Update your online status (on Yahoo!, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter) to share what you’re doing to spread holiday joy at kindness.yahoo.com. Then encourage others to join you by asking “You in?”.  Yahoo! will use our network to share your good deeds with our community. We’ll also be doing our own acts of kindness inspired by your status updates.  Whether your act of kindness is buying someone’s groceries or getting warm coats to people in need, your actions will encourage others around the world to join in.

It’s your world. And it is what you make it.

How big will your ripple of happiness be?

You in?

Ad Interest Manager is a central place where Yahoo! visitors can see a concise summary of their online activity and make easy, constructive choices about their exposure to interest-based advertising. Ad Interest Manager is also a continuation of our ongoing commitment to helping consumers get the information they want while protecting their privacy at the same time.

At Yahoo!, we believe that ads tailored to users’ interests make online experiences more compelling and user-focused. The new tool Yahoo! is launching today will show users what interests we think they have, and also let them edit and change those interests to reflect the most up–to-date information. Importantly, users who don’t want interest-based ads can turn them off completely. With the introduction of Ad Interest Manager, users can not only get a better understanding of how interest-based advertising works, but they can also communicate better with Yahoo! and our advertisers about what most interests them.

Yahoo! Ad Interest Manager is currently online in the U.S. and will be made available to European users in the coming weeks. Planned future enhancements to the Ad Interest Manager will also let users add categories of interest that Yahoo! may have missed.

Yahoo! was one of the first companies to implement a layered Privacy Center model more than eight years ago, which provides people with a central place to understand and control their options when it comes to the use of personal data. This is coupled with an industry-leading data-retention policy which strives to ensure that Yahoo! retains data only long enough to serve our business and create the highest quality user experiences while maintaining the ability to fight fraud, secure systems, and meet legal obligations.

To read more about Ad Interest Manager, please click here.

The nature of the online and mobile environments is rapidly changing and so are the challenges for teachers and parents – from digital-reputation management to addressing cyber-bullying.  Kids need to be in control of their online persona – that is the ways in which they represent themselves online, and how that persona can have an impact throughout their lives.  In this day and age, you are what you post!

Today marks Yahoo!’s third annual CyberCitizenship Summit in Sunnyvale, Calif. addressing the leading issues youth face today –  digital reputation management and cyberbullying.  Along with our co-hosts, Technology for Learning Partnership, we are bringing together more than 180 educational leaders from around California, child safety experts, and local law enforcement leaders to address how to guide students’ online persona.  With an increase in Internet and mobile gadgets coming into the home this holiday season, teachers and other participants will come away with real and practical information to help them understand the online environment in which their students live and toolkits to help students manage their digital reputations.

Over the years, Yahoo! has worked collaboratively with industry peers, child safety groups and law enforcement with the common goal to find new ways to protect children online.  At this year’s summit, we are thrilled to partner with some of the most notable national child safety experts to offer educational leaders guidance on digital literacy.
Presenters include:

Anne Collier, ConnectSafely
Marsali Hancock, iKeepSafe Internet Safety Coalition
Larry Magid, ConnectSafely
Diana Paradise, Technology for Learning Partnership
Catherine Teitelbaum, Yahoo! Safely
Glenn Warren, Orange County Office of Education

In advance of the summit, we worked closely with iKeepSafe.org, and sponsored the development Project PRO – a hands-on curriculum guide and a resource kit to help educators coach youth on protecting and managing their digital reputation, and strategies to keep youth safe from bullying.   Summit attendees will be guided through the program and implementation strategies and be provided with the kit for immediate use at their school site.
Hosting this summit is just one of the ways we work to help foster a safer experience for children. To learn more about digital reputation management and tips for preventing cyberbulling, visit safely.yahoo.com.
Catherine Davis Teitelbaum
Director of Policy for Child Safety

As the place where over 500 million people visit every month, Yahoo!’s goal is to bring together social experiences from across the web, and provide one place for people to access information and stay in touch with the people they care about most.

Yahoo!’s integration of Facebook Connect will provide you with richer experiences across the Yahoo! products you use every day, such as Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Sports.  In the future, you’ll be able to choose where you want to update your status message – from destinations across Yahoo! – or directly on Facebook.

We are doing this as part of our commitment to deliver more personally relevant Internet experiences, so watch for more details in the New Year!

Jim Stoneham, VP of Communities for Yahoo!

Economic traumas. Military entanglements. Crazy weather. And yet, even as we tried to find ways to survive day to day, we were also acutely aware that we were living through momentous times.

The Yahoo! Year in Review returns. Since 2001, we’ve been crunching lists based on search data. Naturally, we’ve expanded quite a bit since those early Internet days, and because a list of 10 is barely a drop in the sea of billions of searches, we’ve expanded beyond that to walk through the moments and events behind the trends.

This year, we have eight primary themes, and not surprisingly, two are finance-focused. “Financial Hangovers” and “Market Darlings” reflect the yin-yang of a rough year. Many of you hunkered down, staycationed, built up credit—and in more heart-wrenching scenarios reflected in searches, checked in with state unemployment sites, foreclosure details, and student loan alternatives. Not all businesses were bailing (or bailed out): Market Darlings touches on the big leap in fiscal viability of social networking sites (or rather, tiny little leaps in 140 characters or less) and e-readers. Whoever said people don’t read anymore needs to get thee to a wireless device.

You didn’t give up the political diet that you were on for the past two years. Aside from a few puzzling gubernatorial detours here and there, many of you focused on a political agenda that ranged from stimulus plans to wayward governors. The one big political category is “Obama in the House.” Barack Obama was the first politician to crack the Yahoo! Top 10 by taking the No. 3 spot in 2008, but he slipped off this year when he became the 44th President. Then again, people knew exactly where he was: on Pennsylvania Avenue, churning out executive orders and setting priorities. No matter if you voted for or protested against, the commander-in-chief commanded the headlines and searches.

We also covered overnight sensations (Susan Boyle) and infamous breakouts (Nadya “Octomom” Suleman) in “Sudden Fame,” newly coined terms in health (H1N1) and science (conficker worm) in “Mad Science,” shocking passings and sad good-byes in “Farewells,” and of course the Top 10 Searches.

Several notable shifts happened in the Top 10. The breaking news that Michael Jackson died became the top search of the year. As many of you know, the Web traffic on June 25, the day the news emerged of his demise, was massive, surpassing even Inauguration Day just months earlier. Online investigations into his death also turned into tributes to the King of Pop’s legacy, as people sought his music, videos, and even costumes to honor him on Halloween night.

While some are familiar faces (WWE, Britney Spears, NASCAR, Runescape), some terms are new: Vampire hysteria vaulted “The Twilight Saga” to the No. 2 slot, savvy rising star Megan Fox got herself in the top 5, and Kim Kardashian isn’t just the new Paris Hilton, but a symbol of reality TV prowess. As for Britney Spears, the princess of pop was hard at work this year on her “Circus” tour, and cut back on the antics that had commanded searches for the last four years of her No. 1 reign.

This year on the Year In Review site,  we also created a “Rewind” video. Check it out here:

YOUR YEAR IN REVIEW:

And as part of the 2009 Year in Review, Yahoo!s have an opportunity to tweet their own top moments of 2009. Tweet your top moments of 2009 here:

http://yearinreview.yahoo.com/2009/moments

By the way, some consider 2009 more than a historical turning point, but also the marker for the decade’s end. This year was more than a handful, but you can take a look at our past top searches by checking these links:

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

Vera Chan, Senior Buzz Editor for Yahoo!

So, what does it take to navigate a 77-foot-long, 430-pound Spiderman balloon through the streets of New York while millions of people are watching on live television?

Jodie, who is director of platform business strategy for Yahoo’s Right Media, is about to find out.

Although this will be Jodie’s 8th year participating in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, it will be her first as a captain of a big, new balloon. And she’ll be guiding the first balloon of the day, no less.

Jodie, who reports that you need good running shoes, muscles, a sense of humor and a bit of technical training to take on the volunteer job, gave us a behind-the-scenes peek at the preparations for the big event.

While the rest of us will have to tune in to NBC or CBS at 9 a.m. Thursday morning to cheer Jodie on, her New York Yahoo colleagues will have prime seats for the festivities.  For the first time in its 83-year history, the parade will pass by the Yahoo! building!

Good luck to Jodie–and Happy Thanksgiving from Yahoo!

It’s been less than two years since we launched this show, so you can imagine my astonishment when we surpassed over 280 million streams and became the most watched show in the history of the internet.  As a longtime comedian and TV host, I was used to going it alone onstage and was content to continue doing so as the one and only host of the one and only original program on Yahoo! TV, but a partner in crime would be so much cooler!   Enter my fearless counterpart, Nikki Boyer, and Daytime in No Time on Yahoo! TV, a show recapping – you guessed it – the best moments of daytime TV.  Really, what is a conversation around the company coffee pot without all the daytime TV details to gossip about too?!  Nikki and I quickly ruled the roost over here at Yahoo! TV.  We got matching mugs and took all our lunch breaks together (ok, actually, we tape at different times, but we would if we could), and before we knew it, we learned our twosome would become a foursome.

The tribe had spoken; Yahoo! TV decided that you the viewers should get a say in the best moments of the week in television. What a great concept, huh?!
My newest friends, and hosts of the recently launched interactive show What’s So Funny? on Yahoo! TV, Shira Lazar and Mike Bachmann, debate the absolute funniest clips on TV from the day prior in a he said, she said format.

She of CBSNEWS.com, Reelz Channel and The Tomorrow Show with Mo Rocca fame, amongst many other hosting gigs, and he of ABC Family’s hit “Make it or Break it,” guest starring gigs on Gilmore Girls and Ugly Betty and my personal favorite – a writer for PiNT.  Monday through Friday these seasoned vets engage in friendly banter regarding the merits of the clip each has chosen from the previous day, but viewers get to make the ultimate decision by casting in votes.  Over the weekend, Shira and Mike reveal the winning clip from each night and present the “Top 5 Funniest Clips of the Week,” as selected by Yahoo! viewers.

It’s a great show, and I must say, I’m so proud to see the family growing. So “suit up,” enjoy the ride and welcome to the team, Shira and Mike, and just remember, I like my coffee with two sugars and creamJ  You know you love me.

xoxo,
Papa Frank Nicotero

In this exclusive “Behind The Scenes” look, we see Mike and his team realizing an idea from start to finish, all the work that went into the project and how this effort ultimately made for a very intriguing result.

And here’s a few words from Mike Relm on the experience…

My life has been pretty digital lately so I decided to put a project together that let me step away from the computer and get arts and craftsy, at least for part of the building process. The idea behind this piece was to use the turntable in two ways that are on opposite sides of the technical spectrum. One being video scratching, which at the moment is the most advanced thing you can do with a turntable. The second thing is the zoetrope, which is the origin of motion picture. Anyone who has taken a film class will recognize the Muybridge images!

This was so much fun to make, definitely one of the best production experiences I’ve had. Helps to have a kick-ass crew, a few good ideas, and a beautiful location. We got to shoot at the Regency Center in San Francisco, which was built exactly 100 years ago, in a room that not too many people get to step foot in.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this project possible–and stay tuned for more cool things coming soon!

Barton Bishoff and Pam Woon

Yahoo! Digital Media Bureau

That is why we were thrilled that Emily Hancock, Yahoo! Senior Legal Director was recently able to accept an award from the Family Online Safety Institute for her work on behalf of Yahoo! to make the internet safer for everyone.

Left to right - Mike McKeehan, Verizon (FOSI Board Member), Emily Hancock, Yahoo! and María José Cantarino de Frías, Telefonica (FOSI Board Member).

The Family Online Safety Institute Award for Outstanding Achievement (“FOSI Award”) was awarded to individuals who have demonstrated an outstanding commitment to advancing the goal of a safer Internet. We could not be prouder to have Emily accept this award. Emily cares very passionately about helping to protect children and she takes a very proactive approach within Yahoo! helping to make changes to products, services, policies and tools whenever possible to achieve that end.  She has been instrumental in the ongoing development and improvement of Yahoo!’s technology for identifying, removing and reporting child pornography.

The award came as Yahoo sponsored the third annual Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) online safety conference, Building a Culture of Responsibility: From Online Safety to Digital Citizenship on November 4th and 5th in Washington, DC. Bringing together leaders from government, industry, education and nonprofits, the conference focused on determining how to best encourage responsible use on the Internet. The conference convened key players from the global Internet community to promote cyber citizenship and coordinate efforts to connect the next billion consumers safely and responsibly.

Yahoo!’s Director of Child Safety and Product Policy, Catherine Teitelbaum also played a major role in the conference, appearing on a panel aimed at “Getting Kids Hooked On Safety When They are Young.”  Catherine spoke of her extended tenure at Yahoo!, working to create a safer online environment for kids and teens, and how the work of keeping kids safe has evolved with time. Her dedication to this issue is just another example of how Yahoo! that serves so many different audiences can also make child safety a priority and successfully integrate child safety features into our broad product offerings.

Visit Yahoo! Safely to get the facts about online safety – http://safely.yahoo.com

The idea for RHoK was born at CrisisCamp June 12th-14th 2009 in Washington, DC where an industry panel with representatives from Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft recognized that certain matters, such as crisis response, superseded competitive concerns. During CrisisCamp, one big issue that was identified was the finite resources available, even within large corporations and government agencies. By building a development community focused on disaster response, hopefully we can all do our part to save lives. Over the past six months following CrisisCamp – in partnership with World Bank, NASA, and SecondMuse – the group has forged ahead to make this Hack Day a reality.

The first RHoK event started last Thursday with a mixer event. On Friday, the day was kicked off with a keynote from Craig Fugate, FEMA Administrator. Craig filled the crowd with excitement and motivation, while humoring us with stories like the telling of his “Waffle House” postulate. Following Craig’s keynote, the day continued with lightening talks, five minute rapid presentations on existing technologies and solutions, and continued in the afternoon with BarCamp style hour long breakout sessions.

During the night and following morning, hackers developed technology solutions to solve real-world problems. We had over a dozen hackers working late into the night and a handful who stayed overnight.  Saturday afternoon, 11 hacks were presented. They ranged from people finder portals, to arial maps related hacks, to disaster communication tools. The winners were:

FEMA Prize – Break Glass
1st Prize – I’m OK
Runner Up – Tweak the Tweet
Honorable Mentions – Disaster Mesh and Blue Team

You can find out more information on the winning hacks here and see photos from the event here

Overall the event was a great success and we hope to have additional events in 2010. Keep an eye out on the official RHoK website for news and more information. We want to extend a huge thanks to the other founding partners, Google, Microsoft, NASA, Worldbank, and SecondMuse. Without all of us working together, this event wouldn’t have happened. Internally, Yahoo! Developer Network and Yahoo! For Good were instrumental in our efforts to make this happen. Last but definitely not least, all participants at the event deserve the biggest thanks.  It’s YOU! who really makes the difference!

Jeremy Johnstone
Technical Yahoo!

It’s hard to believe that just over a month ago we kicked-off our search for the next generation of Yahoo! yodelers. This casting call heard ‘round the world brought celebrities and yodelers alike to Yodel Studio recording booths in New York City, London and Mumbai, not to mention all of you who joined in from home and submitted your best (and maybe first?) yodel at http://yodelstudio.yahoo.com.

After narrowing the choices down from more than 21,000 submissions to three finalists in the US, UK and India, and a week of public voting, we have our Platinum winners. Congratulations to:

•    Tiffany Jo Allen of Tucson, AZ
•    Katherine Skene of St. Andrews, UK
•    Ankitaa Bhattacharji of Mumbai, India

We meant it when we said it that Platinum winners would have the chance to be featured on one of the world’s largest stages: the Yahoo! homepage. Go to Yahoo.com, click on the Yahoo! exclamation point at the top left of the page and you’ll hear Tiffany Jo Allen’s yodel (Soon, you’ll here the other winners on the UK and India homepages too!). For the next week, you’ll hear Tiffany Jo’s talented voice on the Yahoo! homepage.

While only three yodels are official Platinum winners, many more blew us away with their passion and creativity. Be sure to check out the honorable mentions area of http://yodelstudio.yahoo.com to experience a wide range of yodeling genius – from R&B to country duets to death metal, no musical stone was left unturned.  Thanks for sharing in this part of Yahoo! history.

Brian Mullin
Senior Director, Buzz Marketing

Open is at the core of many Yahoo! initiatives and products. Over the past two years Yahoo! has been hard at work to change how we develop products and interact with our developer community. In addition to being avid supporters of Open Source, we participated and adopted community-based specifications such as OpenID and OAuth, and were a founding member of the OpenSocial and OpenID Foundations.  As you can see, we love Open.

But Open isn’t always easy.

Whenever we (or other companies) engage in a collaborative effort with a wider community, we are faced not only with technical challenges, but with the complex reality of intellectual property law. Patents, copyright, and trademarks are not what geek dreams are made of. This is why we have actively supported the creation of the Open Web Foundation, an organization dedicated to the creation of an open, free, and community-driven environment for the development of technical specifications:

The Open Web Foundation was founded to help developer communities collaborate and share technical innovation on the web, bringing to the world of formats and protocols the same successful grassroots approaches established by the open source community. Modeled after the Apache Software Foundation and Creative Commons, the Open Web Foundation seeks to facilitate the creation and implementation of specifications with legal agreements that make such work simple, safe, and sustainable.

For the past year, the Open Web Foundation Legal Committee has been hard at work on a new legal agreement for licensing of open specifications. While Open Source software enjoys a wide range of licenses for making software freely available, specifications and standards are usually licensed under a complex set of rules and conditions. These licenses are hard to read and spread over many pages full of terms even many lawyers don’t fully understand. There was also no suitable standalone agreement available for companies and communities to use when making their work available, forcing them into long and costly legal negotiation between the contributors.

Today, the Open Web Foundation is announcing the availability of the Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa), a reusable and straight-forward legal document, designed to be easily adopted by a wide range of specification communities and organizations.  Specifications made available under the Open Web Foundation Agreement may include everything from small ad-hoc formats sketched out among friends to large multi-corporation collaborations that ultimately grow into internationally recognized standards with the help of formal standards- setting organizations.

But what makes this agreement even more valuable today, is a commitment by a group of leading companies and individual contributors to apply it to a growing list of specifications. Today, Yahoo! is joining Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others in making available the following specifications under the OWFa:

* OAuth Core 1.0 Revision A
* OAuth WRAP 0.9
* Simple Web Tokens 0.9

We are also releasing the Media RSS (mRSS) specification under the Open Web Foundation Agreement. Media RSS is an RSS extension used to syndicate rich media content (instead of just text). The specification is used when providers of media content want to share that content with a third party, usually a search engine like Yahoo! Video Search. We are also in the process of transitioning the mRSS specification to the capable hands of the RSS Advisory Board for future development.

This is just the first step in what we hope will be a new path for open collaboration and innovation on the web. The best innovation happens when we let our talented engineers and product managers solve problems. This is one less thing for them to worry about.

Eran Hammer-Lahav

Director of Standards Development, Yahoo!
President, The Open Web Foundation

Facing a down economy, YEF set an aggressive fundraising target to service the wide variety of charities supported by employees and the employees stepped up–almost doubling participation form last year with 57% of Yahoos contributing.  In addition to the money raised directly from Yahoo! employees, YEF will be receiving a $1 million bonus from Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo that was pledged if 50% of employees participated in the program.  Congrats to YEF and to the employees for making 2009 a year to remember!

As an added bonus, we are including the amazing video that Yahoo! Exec Mitch Spolan created as a thank you to his team for their efforts.  See Mitch in his cinematic glory recreating Thriller below:

Mitch Spolan: Thrilled for YEF Success

Consider the video a preview of coming attractions, as Yahoo! execs step out of their comfort zones and make good on their promises to dye their hair purple, jump in a dunk tank, do the Thriller dance in full zombie make-up, sing, take a group to Vegas, run the Marketing Olympics, and host breakfast, lunches, and dinners – often in full costume.  And a special thanks to Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz for being the executive sponsor – and for hosting nine lucky Yahoos at her house for dinner.