I don’t typically look at frogs as being all that intelligent or pithy but after a few years of replacing all my light bulbs with those swirly ones and dragging my recycling bins to the curb each Tuesday night (rain or shine) now I understand and appreciate what Kermit was talking about all those years; it ain’t easy being green.

It’s not that I’m lazy or don’t care. I tell my son a hundred times a day to turn his bedroom light off when he’s not in his room, my security lights are on a timer so I don’t forget to turn them off, I’ve learned how to brush my teeth with a few drops of water, I use organic cleaners, I eat organic food, etc.

But I’ve found that there just aren’t that many useful and truly ‘green’ consumer products on the market.

I’d love to own a small hybrid car but I don’t think my wife, two kids, baby, blind black lab and a I would fit very well, even though I am on a diet. I recently found some interesting looking coasters made from recycled CD’s, but just because I think it’s cool to have a Def Leppard coaster on my coffee table doesn’t really help anything, does it?

Yahoo! Green’s Make it Green campaign (launched last month) could tangibly help change all of this by inviting regular people from around the world to submit ideas that will improve our lives and ‘green up’ our planet.

You don’t have to be a scientist to enter and you don’t have to have a patented product either. That’s because Yahoo! has teamed up with the company I work for, Edison Nation. We have tons of expertise and experience reviewing products, handling intellectual property, and partnering with manufacturers and retailers to put products onto store shelves.

If your idea is selected, you will earn $2,500, a share of sales for up to twenty years and possibly be featured on PBS’ Emmy award winning invention show Everyday Edisons.

So if you think you have a great green idea, don’t delay — Make it Green ends June 30th!

Kermit and the planet thank you.

Michael Cable
Director, Edison Nation

Abebe Gellaw, the 2008-09 Yahoo! International Fellow at Stanford this year, is an example of how one person with a great idea can make a difference.

Abebe is an Ethiopian journalist, but the regime in his home country is too repressive to allow true journalism, so he is in exile. He had been in London for years before coming to the U.S. as the Yahoo! International Journalism Fellow at Stanford.

The Yahoo! fellowship was specifically established for people like Abebe, journalists from countries where there are strong challenges to a free press. Yahoo! and the Knight Fellowships agreed that supporting journalists who were directly or indirectly under attack should be at the top of the to-do list, and so we created the Yahoo! Fellowship in 2006, with a generous gift from Yahoo!.

Abebe is the third Yahoo! Fellow, following Imtiaz Ali, from Pakistan, and Violet Gonda, of Zimbabwe. Like Abebe, Violet was in exile, too. Abebe’s great idea is Addis Voice, a London-based website devoted to independent news about Ethiopia. It has become a trusted source of news and commentary for the Ethiopian diaspora. Here’s an interview with Abebe:

Abebe’s fellowship is ending, and we are ready to welcome Nadia Trinidad of the Philippines, one of the deadliest countries for journalists in the world. Nadia is a senior correspondent for ABS-CBN Brooadcasting Company in Manila. She will study the psychological and sociological aspects of corruption in the media. She will arrive in August.

Journalists are under attack around the world, and organizations like the Committee To Protect Journalists make sure that those attacks are brought to light. It makes me feel proud that the Knight Fellowships and Yahoo! have teamed up to provide a fellowship at Stanford every year for someone who is bearing the brunt of those attacks.

Jim Bettinger
Director, John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists
Stanford University

Filmed and edited by Bart Bishoff, Yahoo! Broadcast Bureau

Editor’s Note: Earlier this month, 10 underserved high school girls from Los Angeles attended a VIP screening of the documentary “A Powerful Noise” as part of our Purple Acts of Kindness program, which aims to surprise and delight our local communities with random acts of generosity. These freshly empowered girls then had the chance to become filmmakers themselves. Here’s a recap through the eyes of one of the mentors who accompanied them:

Limousines arrived at Gertz-Ressler High School to pick up 10 teens. They were heading out for an evening of film and female empowerment, along with mentors from the Step Up Women’s Network. The girls couldn’t have been more excited and were certainly the envy of their peers! The girls thought the limousine would be the biggest surprise of the night – little did they know what was to come.

After a scrumptious dinner, we presented the girls with a Yahoo! backpack, and they couldn’t believe what was inside. Licetz, the girl I was paired with for the evening, was dancing in her seat when she saw the Flip video camera that was hers to keep and would empower her to make her own powerful voice be heard.

The evening culminated with a VIP screening of “A Powerful Noise,” a documentary presented by CARE about women changing the world. The girls were completely inspired by the strong role models in the film and felt they could also make a difference in their communities. There was a special buzz in the air the entire evening, as the Step Up girls knew they would also have the chance to make a video, capturing their reaction to “A Powerful Noise.”

The two featured videos below were created by Step Up girls who won an all-expense paid trip from Yahoo! to attend the CARE conference in Washington D.C. in May. This is sure to be a life-changing experience for them.

I’ve found it rewarding to volunteer for Step Up’s program for high school girls. It gives these teens an opportunity to be mentored by many professional women throughout their high school years as they prepare for the next step — college. As the first person in my family to receive a college degree, I know how important it is to these girls and their families that they go to college.

These girls don’t often have the opportunity to feel special and privileged, and I was so impressed with Yahoo! for giving them this wonderful, first-class experience.

Edie Lynn Ortenberg
President and CEO of The Hollis House
Volunteer for Step Up Women’s Network

Editor’s Note: Last fall, we rolled out Purple Pedals (aka the Ybike), a project that mashed up purple bicycles with GPS devices, cameras, solar panels, and Flickr to create a social media experiment. We sent 14 of these bikes to influential bloggers/photographers/cyclists around the world. Here’s the story of how our Copenhagen bike was received on a recent visit to Africa:

My Experience on the Ybike
When I hit the dusty roads of Tanzania, “karibu” and “wow” were some of the first things I heard. “Karibu” is Swahili for “welcome” and shows everyone’s openness and goodwill at the sight of me with my purple Yahoo! bike. I could tell by the expressions on people’s faces that a “muzungo” (“white man”) on a purple cruiser was not an everyday sight — most white people arrive in four-wheel drives.

There are plenty of bicycles in Tanzania. The people who ride them — the majority of Tanzanians — cannot afford cars or motorcycles. The fancy Yahoo! bicycle with solar panels, camera and the shiny purple colour showed people that the bicycle is not just as a means of transportation for the poor.

I’m cofounder of Baisikeli (Swahili for “bicycle”), a project that makes high-quality bicycles accessible to the poorest people of Africa. These bikes have many purposes, including helping farmers increase their income by more than 100%, just by enabling them to move twice the amount of crops in half the time. We also build bicycle ambulances, which are donated to rural health care centres to enable them to provide vital access to health care in neighbour villages.

My Running Guides
The Baisikeli workshop is based in Arusha, 80 kilometres from Mt Kilimanjaro. When I first arrived from Denmark, I went out for a bike ride to get a feel for the vibes of the city. Within the first few minutes, two young boys were running next to the bike shouting “around – around!,” explaining that they were going to give me a guided tour of the neighbourhood. To be honest, I’ve had better guided tours. But taking into consideration that “around” was their only English word, the energy they put into the tour was amazing.

The Attention
A Yahoo! bike ride in Tanzania was a new experience every time. Obviously, you get a lot of attention when riding a fancy purple bicycle in Tanzania. People would often ride up alongside me and start asking questions in Swahili and show enthusiasm for both the bicycle and me. Children on the side of the road would call for siblings, who would come running out of houses, screaming euphorically at seeing the muzungo on the purple bicycle. I couldn’t help but laugh. It was great every time — seeing the small children amused by me passing by.

A boy laughing at muzungo passing by on a purple bicycle:

Uses for Bikes in Africa
Bicycles are important to Tanzanian infrastructure. They are vital in the mobility of both the population and goods. People are employed with transporting huge amounts of things like charcoal, milk or bread, traveling dozens of kilometres to the city to sell them.

Sometimes people turn their bicycles into mobile shops, so they can ride around and sell their goods. Here’s a bicycle sneaker shop:

The idea of using bicycles for varied means of transport is the foundation of Baisikeli. We design bikes based on what we observe about how they are used in society. If people can make a living transporting 100kg tomatoes, they can make an even better living transporting 200kg. As a result, our mantra is: “Bikes for a better life.”

Here are some more examples of people riding bicycles with a heavy load: a shop, two baskets balance the weight, selling ice cream, and goatskins.

Bikes for Better Health
Bicycles also mean the difference between life and death for inhabitants of rural villages — everyone from pregnant mothers to children with malaria. Twenty-five percent of children never reach the age of five. Bikes can change that. I visited a village called Intavira, 60km from the nearest city and without a proper road leading to it, to donate a bicycle ambulance. This village of 2,000 inhabitants was the largest of 20 in the area and the only source of proper health care. Sick relatives are often pulled in a wagon by cow. Now with the Baisikeli ambulance, the surrounding villages will have easier access to the clinic –- and we hope this will reduce the rate of deaths in the area.

Here’s a slideshow from my visit.

Henrik Smedegaard Mortensen
Co-Founder
Baisikli – Bikes for a better life

I have them, Jimmie Rollins had some, even MJ had a few — behind every great player is a coach. A good coach transforms pure talent and desire into championships. And as the Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Football ’08 cover athlete, my responsibilities include helping fantasy players improve their teams and win championships. A fantasy life coach, if you will.

As a fantasy life coach, there are some tips I can offer you to help your game, including the most important one –- draft me, Braylon Edwards, wide receiver for the Cleveland Browns, first. Did you know I hold the team record for receiving yards and caught 16 touchdowns last season, second best in the NFL? Do you know how many points that is? That’s big time… enough to make you look silly if you don’t draft me this year.

Second, gather your family, friends and co-workers around the computer and kick-off the fantasy season at http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/. The new draft is so easy your mom can use it. Yes, invite your mom to play in your league, and like any good coach I must remind you not to talk smack to your mother.

Third, sign up for fantasy football mobile features. Do you think coaches just sit around all day? No, they are on the move and they can’t afford to let the team struggle because they’re moving and shaking. It’s not acceptable for your fantasy team to be left behind because you didn’t know your receiver was injured. As of September 2nd, sign up for Yahoo! mobile at http://m.yahoo.com/fantasy and manage your team while you’re on the go.

I hope these pearls of wisdom transform your ’08 fantasy team into a championship. Check out Yahoo! Sports this season for more of my coaching tips.

Braylon Edwards
Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Football ’08 Cover Athlete

I respect lots of journalists. But I’m in awe of Violet Gonda, who was the 2007-08 Yahoo! International Fellow at Stanford last year. Why? Because she defies an oppressive regime in Zimbabwe that wants to shut her up. She walks the walk of speaking truth to power.

The Yahoo! International Journalism Fellowship at Stanford was established for people like Violet, journalists from countries where there are strong challenges to a free press. Yahoo! and the Knight Fellowships agreed that we needed to support journalists who were directly or indirectly under attack, and so we created the fellowship in 2006, with a generous gift from Yahoo!. (The Knight Fellowships itself has been around since 1966. A young Jerry Yang first met with the Knight Fellows in the spring of 1995.)

The first Yahoo! Fellow was Imtiaz Ali, from Pakistan, where journalism is a deadly occupation. But there could hardly be country that fits our definition better than Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe’s regime has systematically and brutally cracked down on anyone who disagreed with it — opposition politicians, the press, human rights activists and others. Violet Gonda has been banned from the country (actually, the justice minister said the country would welcome her back — but only in prison) so she works in exile, at a small radio station, SW Radio Africa, in London. This station broadcasts uncensored news about Zimbabwe back into the country by any means possible, including text messaging. (Want to get a taste of her work? Listen to these two interviews, one with a Mugabe spokesman and the other with Desmond Tutu.) We were proud to have her for the year at Stanford, where she studied the development of news media in emerging democracies. Now she is back in London. If there’s a God in heaven, someday she will someday be able to return to her homeland.

And as she leaves, we are ready to welcome Abebe Gellaw, of Ethiopia, who will be the 2008-09 Yahoo! International Fellow. Like Violet, Abebe is in exile. He left after the Ethiopian government started rounding up and arresting journalists in November 2005. He is editor-in chief of Addis Voice, a London-based website devoted independent news about Ethiopia. He will arrive in August for his year.

Journalists are under attack around the world, and organizations like the Committee To Protect Journalists make sure that those attacks are brought to light. It makes me feel proud that the Knight Fellowships and Yahoo! have teamed up to provide a fellowship at Stanford every year for someone who is bearing the brunt of those attacks.

Jim Bettinger
Director, John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists
Stanford University

Getty Images has always been interested in discovering, championing and marketing great imagery. The availability of economical digital cameras and the dramatic evolution of distribution technologies over the last five years have changed the landscape of our photography industry in exciting ways. It has had a hugely democratizing effect and now image makers all over the globe are able to share and develop their imagery within global communities such as Flickr.

We recognise that the many designers, art buyers and art directors that make up our client base visit sites like Flickr to find daily inspiration for their projects. As a result of a new partnership between Getty Images and Flickr, they will now not only be able to view the imagery, but easily license it, too.

As the unrivalled experts in the licensing of intellectual property — imagery, footage, multimedia and music — Getty Images will be able to work with Flickr to easily make the commercial licensing of what is, in effect, the world’s image library a reality.

Apart from the value of the accomplished and experienced photographers that contribute to Flickr, the addition of this content also brings a new flavour of photography to Getty Images and its customers — there is another world of photography that will afford an authentic view into the daily lives of people around the world. The places they live, the food they eat, the people they love and the milestones in their lives.

Sometimes the most amazing imagery is more about moments in time and place than it is about technical expertise. This partnership gives our clients access to thousands of these moments.

We congratulate the Flickr community for its fresh collection of high-quality images, and we look forward to working closely with the community.

Andy Saunders
Vice President of Creative Imagery
Getty Images

Today is the Summer Solstice, which means Summer’s offically here - well in the Northern Hemisphere at least. This is also the longest day of the year. Wondering what to do with those extra hours of daylight? Pull up a lounge chair, break out the tequila and check out what we’ve been up to this week.

Yahoo! Mail goes vintage: Frustrated by not being able to to get the email address you want? We’ve heard you and we’re doing something about it with the introduction of two new email domains: ymail.com and rocketmail.com. If “rocketmail” sounds familiar it’s because it’s vintage Internet. RocketMail was one of the first free webmail services in the ’90s, was acquired by Yahoo! in 1997 and formed the basis of the first version of Yahoo! Mail. So, whether your style is brand spanking new (ymail.com), hip vintage (rocketmail.com) or comfortable classic (yahoo.com), head on over to http://new.mail.yahoo.com/addresses and get the email address you’ve always wanted.

Media Player gets foxy: Check out the latest wily addition to the Yahoo! Media Player. Through a rather clever integration with FoxyTunes you can now control all of the music inside your browser as well as outside of it. The latest version of FoxyTunes enhances any page that has music on it by automatically adding the Yahoo! Media Player to that page. This allows you to play any track on that page or even the whole page as one big playlist. The best thing is that once you start playing a web page with the new player you can instantly control it with FoxyTunes, even while surfing in other tabs or browser windows - just make sure to leave the page that’s currently playing somewhere in the background. And, if you close that page, your FoxyTunes will automatically switch back to your regular media player, be it iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, etc. Now that’s foxy!

Kids and technology - a parents’ guide: Wondering where to find the best information on keeping kids safe on the web? Well, look no further. Yahoo! Kids launched a new Parents channel this week bringing together some of the best resources in the business. Larry Magid, longtime technology journalist, Internet safety advocate and co-director of ConnectSafely.org, will be blogging alongside Ann Collier who’s been providing some of the best kid-tech news to parents on NetFamilyNews. Together they co-authored “MySpace Unravelled: A Parents’ Guide to Teen Social Networking.” So head on over to learn how to help your kids navigate the online world safely.

Internet Explorer - more del.icio.us: Last month we unleashed an early beta release of an Internet Explorer version of our del.icio.us bookmarks extension. And this week you can now officially begin to enjoy social bookmarking on Microsoft Windows XP and Vista operating systems. While the features are similar to its Firefox 3 extension counterpart, this little number also has more unique additions including faster searching within larger accounts of bookmarks and signals for new network activity and links for you. Learn more and download it now here.

Smithsonian goes to the Commons: The Commons photo collection on Flickr welcomes its fourth member in the shape of the Smithsonian Institute. As you’d expect the collection is rich in history – from photos by the Institute’s First Photographer, Thomas Smillie, to portraits of Artists, Scientists and Inventors (yes even Albert Einstein makes an appearance) and People and The Post. The contemporary collections include American Celebrations and a documentary from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. And don’t forget to check out collections from the other three members: The Library of Congress, Australia’s Powerhouse Museum and The Brooklyn Museum.

Every day, it seems, kids are using technology more for fun, for school, and for keeping in touch with friends. Keeping up with everything they do with technology is a real challenge for parents.

Kids don’t email often anymore. They text-message and send instant messages faster than you can figure out what they’re saying, and sometimes faster than they know what they’re saying. The new iPhone will be available in July; just what does that mean for the kids who use iPhones? There are plenty of controls parents can put in place to help guide their kids to use the web safely, but it’s not always the simplest information to find. And even when we put controls in place, kids grow into teens quickly and move beyond simple controls. They need to learn how to navigate the online world safely, and parents need to know how to help them find their way.

There are some great resources on the web for parents to learn all of this, of course. It’s just often hard to know where to look. Yahoo! Kids launches its new Parents channel this week with some of the best resources and top minds who have been looking out for kids on the web under one roof: Yahoo! Kids Parents.

You’ll find Larry Magid, a longtime technology journalist and Internet safety advocate blogging about safety issues, including what parents need to know about the new, less-expensive iPhone that will surely make its way into more kids’ hands. Larry contributes to CBS News, The New York Times, The San Jose Mercury News and several other major news outlets.

He also is the co-director of ConnectSafely.org, an interactive web site for teens, parents, and educators with Anne Collier, who also is blogging on Yahoo! Kids Parents. Anne and Larry are the co-authors of “MySpace Unraveled: A Parent’s Guide to Teen Social Networking.” Anne has been providing some of the best kid-tech news to parents in an accessible, measured way on NetFamilyNews, and she’s now bringing her well-informed, clear-eyed perspective to Yahoo! Kids.

As a Yahoo! Tech blogger for the past few years, I followed Anne and Larry’s take on kids and technology closely. I also checked in often on Common Sense Media, a wonderful resource for parents to vet movies, video games – all media available for kids to consume. Now, you can find all of these and more expert voices and resources on Yahoo! Kids Parents to make sense of the latest technology advances and what they mean for kids of all ages. I’ll also be blogging on Yahoo! Kids Parents, in addition to blogging for my daily Yahoo! gig, editor of Shine Work+Money.

Finally, a place on the web to find reliable information from several trusted sources about kids, technology, and online safety.

Dory Devlin

Yahoo! Kids Parents Tech Blogger

Photo from galina135