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