The VMAs have become a cultural touchstone in the music world, dating back to 1984, when it became clear that video didn’t kill the radio star. Neither has the Internet, and Yahoo!’s collaboration with MTV further enhances the experience of celebrating favorite artists and cheering them on as they vie for their VMAs.

Are Yahoo! Searches Already Predicting the Winners?

It looks like music fans are gearing up for the VMAs because searches on Yahoo! for “VMAs 2010” are up an incredible 1743% this month. While the VMA winners will not be announced until the Sunday evening awards show, we can’t help but wonder if all these searches could be early predictors to the winners. Yahoo! has unearthed the top searched Video Music Award nominees during this year’s nomination period, and if searching is an early predictor, a sampling of the winners would be:

VIDEO OF THE YEAR: Lady Gaga, Bad Romance

BEST FEMALE VIDEO: Ke$ha, Tik Tok
BEST MALE VIDEO: Usher featuring Will.I.Am, OMG
BEST HIP HOP VIDEO: B.o.B. featuring Hayley Williams, Airplanes
BEST POP VIDEO: Ke$ha, Tik Tok

BEST ROCK VIDEO: Paramore, Ignorance

Even if our predictions are not spot-on, we’re as eager to find out the winners as you are—and we’ll meet you Behind the Lens! (Don’t forget us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/yahoo_music)

Starting this week, we will be bringing this vision to life in the Yahoo! products you use every day.  We are starting to integrate Facebook in a big way, a result of the agreement we first signed with Facebook last December. People who use Yahoo! and Facebook can now link their accounts to view and share updates with friends across both networks.  This means you can see your Facebook News Feed from your Yahoo! homepage, Yahoo! Mail, and other favorite Yahoo! sites and services.  When you create and share content on our properties – including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Answers, and many of our entertainment sites, such as omg!, Yahoo! TV, and Yahoo! Music – you can share that content on Facebook.

Beyond Facebook, your activities on Yahoo! are another important way of bringing social experiences together. Globally, Yahoo! now has more 80 sites producing socially infused content, including three million photos and videos uploaded daily to Flickr, 1.1 million answers provided daily on Yahoo! Answers, and thousands of comments posted daily on articles across Yahoo! sites. These social actions – what we call Yahoo! Updates – can be found in many places across Yahoo!, within products you use and on Yahoo! pages you visit every day.

Our vision is to provide a central hub for people’s online lives, and we understand that requires a Web you can trust.  That’s why this week Yahoo! is making privacy settings even easier to use with a central dashboard.  Rolling out this week as a re-fresh of Yahoo! Profiles, Yahoo! Pulse is a dashboard that makes it simple to set and manage your activities and privacy on Yahoo!.

Expect more to come and until then, share, update your status, and tell us what you think.

Jim Stoneham, Vice President of Communities

Cody Simms, Senior Director, Yahoo! Social Platforms and Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN)

Following in the footsteps of popular US Yahoo! entertainment portal OMG, which launched in June 2007, The Hype has generated much excitement amongst the team here in Australia.

The Hype draws in content from Yahoo!7 Movies, Yahoo!7 Music, Yahoo!7 TV, and our PLUS7 catch-up TV service, plus leveraging the great editorial from our magazine partners and featuring daily unique content from our on-the-pulse editorial team.  An exciting and exclusive new feature we are offering is The Hype Daily Gossip Show, which gives a three minute video wrap of the latest celebrity and entertainment news and gossip each week day by 9 am. There is also a weekly newsletter which delivers the hottest galleries, news, gossip and video straight to the inbox of subscribers.

Without wanting to blow our own trumpet too much (but why not!), Yahoo!7 has already established a huge following with entertainment–hungry Australians. We received four times the traffic of our nearest competitor after the Logies (the Australian TV Awards), and with the launch of The Hype are excited to be the country’s number one online entertainment destination.

Kath Hamilton, Director of Audience, Yahoo!7

Tag, you’re history: Important moments in history made their debut on Flickr through a pilot project with the Library of Congress called The Commons. They’ve added more than 3,000 photos from two of their popular collections — American Memory: Color photographs from the Great Depression and The George Grantham Bain Collection, images from the daily news scene nearly 100 years ago. Your job is to tag them and leave comments to add even more depth to these important archives. More here.

Fearless files: You’ve had that moment of hesitation when being asked to “accept file” when IMing a friend. (Hey, anybody can get a virus.) Fear no more. By teaming up with Symantec, Yahoo! Messenger can now automatically scan files with Norton AntiVirus (if you have Norton AntiVirus 2007/2008 and Norton Internet Security 2007/2008 installed on your computer). More over here.

Of flab and football: January can only mean two things: diet resolutions and football mania. That’s why you need to head to My Yahoo! to add the Diet Tracker module and Football Page. The Diet Tracker doubles as your personal trainer and guilty conscience, letting your track your daily weigh-ins against a target date. The Football Page is just that — a pigskin-filled tab with nothing but news, stats, photos, blogs and more. Pass the (low fat) chips.

Music blog remix: Yahoo!’s Media Innovation Group just released an experimental (“possibly dodgy”) desktop application that lets you mix together blog posts and MP3s from your favorite music blogs. Save your favorite posts on various music blogs, build your personal remix, save the results for future reference, make it into a playlist, podcast, or feed, or just share what you’ve mixed together with pals. It’s a proof of concept for now, but a cool concept nonetheless… more here from the developer himself.

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