Today, we’re giving the Yahoo! yodel back to the people with the launch of Yodel Studio, a global casting call for the world’s best yodels. Yodelers who take us up on this challenge will personalize and reinterpret our yodel, competing for a chance to be featured in Yahoo!’s new global advertising campaign and on one of the world’s largest stages: the Yahoo! homepage. Your yodel will also be heard through the donation Yahoo! will make to local and global charities of your choice for each yodel submitted (up to $130,000).

To kick this whole effort off in style, Yahoo! is hosting live Yodel Studio events today in New York’s Times Square, London’s Covent Garden and tomorrow at Mumbai’s High Street Phoenix Mall. Professional recording studios have been built in each location with celebrities on hand to coach yodelers. Jewel, Pete Wentz, LeAnn Rimes, and Randy Jackson will join us in New York with super producer Rob Cavallo; Pixie Lott and the X Factor’s Sinitta will be in London; and Bollywood singer Shankar Mahadevan and musical artists VJ Nikhil Chinappa and Shaa’ir + Func will mentor in Mumbai.

And if you need some yodel inspiration – might I suggest channeling your inner Jewel?

So get yodeling soon – the deadline to submit your yodel online is November 8! Read more here.

Brian Mullin
Senior Director, Buzz Marketing

In honor of our new Yahoo! Homepage, which was designed to be customized to reflect your true personality, we’ve launched a new tool that helps you analyze your social mojo. Just enter your Twitter username and our highly scientific pipe thingy goes to work to determine exactly what kind of Twitter persona you possess. You might be a:

• Headliner – You’re the star of the Twitterverse, have tons of followers, and have retweets the likes of Ashton Kutcher and Perez Hilton
• Crowd Pleaser – You use lots of hashtags and are in on all the hot conversations
• Cheerleader – Retweeting is how you roll
• B.F.F. – Your volume of @replies makes you everybody’s best bud
• Party Animal – With so many followers, you’re the life of the party
• Private Eye – Like any good investigator, you’re following a boatload of people
• Concierge – You live for links and sending people to the best stuff
• Word Whiz – You’re a natural wordsmith and make the most of your 140 characters
• Lone Wolf – You’re more of a low-profile type (some might even accuse you of lurking)
• Name Dropper – You use lots of @names when you tweet
• Matchmaker – You pass along lots of URLs to make sure everyone’s connected
• Wall Flower – You don’t tweet much but you’re still in on the party
• Novelist – You have a lot to say and tweet with a lot of characters to prove it
• Shadow – You follow lots of people like a good shadow would
• Scenester – If there’s a hashtag conversation happening, you’re there
• Tweethead – Your high number of retweets shows you like to spread the good stuff

And once you get your assessment, we suggest a number of related websites that you can add to your very own Yahoo! Homepage to help feed your mojo.

Give it a try — http://yahoo.knowyourmojo.com… and then tweet about it. (And be sure to follow us on Twitter — we’re a Concierge.)

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

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

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

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

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

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

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

“CONNECTED: The Power of Six Degrees” is a new BBC documentary that unfolds the science behind the popular trivia game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” whose notion that anyone on the planet can be connected in just six steps of association was supposed to be an urban myth.

The film follows two young scientists, Harvard’s Laszlo Barabasi and Yahoo! Research’s very own Duncan Watts, as they work to uncover the pervasive law that nature uses to organize itself. By studying vast natural and man-made networks — from the connections between Hollywood actors to the nervous system of a worm, the U.S. electric power grid and the WWW — they discover that diverse systems share a common blueprint. It takes us from the hunt for Saddam Hussein to the front-lines of cancer research and shows that the Six Degrees principle doesn’t just relate to people but also to viruses, web pages, neurons, species, molecules, and even fashion.

Watts, a former Australian Navy officer with a passion for extreme rock climbing, was a professor at Columbia University at just 29. He launched the explosion in the new science of networks while studying crickets and the mechanism that allows them to chirp in unison. He’s the author of “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age.” Yodel Anecdotal will post a full interview with Watts soon.

“CONNECTED: The Power of Six Degrees” premieres tomorrow night on the Science Channel. Check your local cable listings for times.

Here’s the trailer:

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

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

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

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

See you on your desktop.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor