Whether you’re gearing up to watch today’s Opening Ceremony, getting married, waiting for a prophecy to materialize, or taking photos for Flickr 888, the 8th day of August in 2008 is a most auspicious day. If you’re feeling lucky, too, check out how we prospered this week:

• Shortcut to Beijing: It’s Olympic fever time. Want to keep up with Michael Phelps’ medal collection? Or find out who’s been disqualified for doping? Or keep tabs on whether Ronaldinho can bring victory to Brazil? Yahoo! Search just launched a shortcut module that gives you all the relevant news in one little tidy box above your search results. If you want a medal count update, just type “Olympics medal count” (and add “Macedonia” to that if you just want medals in that country). Enter “water polo Olympics” if you just want a recap of results and upcoming events for that sport. Type in “Blanka Vlasic Olympics” to keep up on the world champion high jumper and her news, schedule, and results. Gold medal for Yahoo! Search for making it that easy. More here.
• My Olympics: And speaking of the summer games, the My Yahoo! team just released an Olympic Games module that gives you an at-a-glance summary of the latest and greatest. You’ll get news headlines, photos, videos, and medal counts for the top countries, all in one place on your My Yahoo! page. For you busy multitaskers, there’s no better way to catch the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat. More here.
• Medals to go: Yup. It’s another Olympics feature! This one lets you keep tabs on the run. Not to be outdone, the Mobile team has created two ways for you to stay up to date on game action. If you have Yahoo! Go 3.0, just add the “2008 Beijing Games” widget to your carousel. Otherwise, just fire up your phone’s web browser and head over to http://m.yahoo.com/2008games. You’ll get news, analysis, photos, and can even customize your site to focus just on your favorite sports (judo, fencing, kayaking, what have you). More here.
• Photo fix: The next time you upload a batch of photos to Flickr, you might notice a new “Save and Edit” option. Click that and you’ll enter the free and easy world of photo editing with Picnik. Your whole batch will appear in a tray (aka the Picnik Photo Basket) so you can tweak en masse — rotate, crop, resize, fix colors or exposure, sharpen, kill red-eye. It’s like rolling in the thick green grass on a warm summer’s day, minus the ants. Edit away! More here.
• See what you wanna see: Imagine visiting a blog that builds you a personal list of headlines that are most up your alley. That’s what the MyBlogLog team just made possible, through a new WordPress plug-in (we’ll get on that next week!). Blog owners who install the Just For You plug-in can deliver custom headlines to visitors who are MyBlogLog members. It looks into the blog’s archives and serves up posts that matching tags or categories listed in the user’s profile. If the reader isn’t a MyBlogLog user, Just for You just presents a list of headlines based on collective tags of recent MyBlogLog visitors. More here.

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Twenty-seven years ago, “Video Killed the Radio Star” premiered on a cable network geared toward playing nothing but 24/7 music videos. Remember when the screen would go black as MTV employees popped a new tape into the VCR? (Remember when MTV actually played music videos?) After you pay tribute to that original batch of VJs, check out what we riffed up this week:

• Speedier, easier, tastier: Fans of social bookmarking, rejoice! Delicious just got snackier. It’s now sporting an entirely new infrastructure, making it faster and more reliable. It’s got a revamped search engine that lets you search in all kinds of new ways, including within your social network. And it has a spiffy new interface, making it easier for newbies yet familiar enough for veterans. And for good measure, the site now lives at delicious.com so you don’t have to remember where that wacky punctuation goes (although, of course, del.icio.us still works just fine). More here.
• 24 hours of Flickr: August 8th isn’t just opening day at the Beijing Olympics. It’s the start to Flickr 888 — a day-long global photo project that invites photographers around the world to snap a moment in time and share it with the group. The goal is to capture a day in the life around the world. You can only submit one photo, so make it your best shot. Stumped? Check out photos from last year’s 24 hours of Flickr. More here.
• Back to school brainiac: Brain turned to mush over the summer? Head over to our new Back to School site and do some cerebral calisthenics. An interactive module of the brain helps you understand all four lobes and offers games to help you sharpen them. You’ll also find exercises for overall brain fitness and top-10 lists of back-to-school fashions, dorm essentials, elementary school stuff, and computer gear. And you’ll get info on how to hit the books while being green and a listing of the most popular back-to-school searches. Parents and kids welcome.
• Going on a Mail Safari: If you’ve been longing to use the All-New Yahoo! Mail with your Safari browser, pine no more. Full compatibility is here. Better yet, it’s OS agnostic, so it works with both the latest Mac and Windows versions of Safari. And that’s especially handy if you switch-hit between Mac and PC at home and work. Let’s hear it for harmony. More here.

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Forget throwing salt over your shoulder and avoiding black cats. Today is Blame Someone Else Day. Late for a meeting? Forgot to charge your cell phone? Overdue mortgage payment? Just not your problem. After you’ve passed the buck to an unsuspecting scapegoat, read up on what we were culpable for this week:

• Video revisions: Head on over to Yahoo! Video and you’ll see we’ve spruced up a few features. By popular demand, you’ll now find a bevy of sharing options under each video so you can shoot it off to the world via Digg, Facebook, MySpace, del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. We also made it easier to check out stats, which now includes how often a video has been favorited. And, perhaps coolest of all, you can now play back videos without leaving the search results page. Makes looking for just the right baby hamster video a cinch. More here.
• Didn’t you see my blog?: If your friends get sore when you don’t keep up with their latest blogging brilliance, we’re here to help. Upgrade to Yahoo! Messenger for Windows (9.0, Beta) and your friends’ most recent blog post will show up as their status message, courtesy of the MyBlogLog wizards. You’ll also be able to keep track of their MyBlogLog activity, like when they add contacts, join communities, or add tags. As the MyBlogLog team eloquently put it, they’re helping transform your IM it into a “socially aware RSS Reader.” More here.
• Final for Firefox 3: A while back, we tested the waters with a Firefox 3 extension beta for Del.icio.us bookmarks. And now it’s official. After hundreds of thousands of downloads and copious user feedback, it’s live and kicking (and better and more stable, thankyouverymuch). It’s a great way to search and manage your bookmarks and keep tabs on your Del.icio.us network. More features are coming down the pike. Still using Firefox 2? It works just fine there, too. More here.

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This day in history marks groundbreaking milestones that cemented America’s stature as a consumerist force to be reckoned with. Charles Hires invented root beer 142 years ago (how now, brown cow) and SpaghettiO’s (Uh-oh!) made their debut 99 years later. What’s more, it’s National Sea Monkey Day — so give a treat and a hug to those peculiar just-add-water creatures. After you give it up for marvels we can’t live without, read up on what we invented this week:

• Traffic is a good thing: That’s right, there are more traffic pileups than ever on Yahoo! Maps to help make you the wiliest driver on the road. They’ve added a panoply of new markets from Bakersfield, Calif., to Rochester, Maine, and improved markets like New York, which previously only gave you incident data. And why should freeways have all the fun, when you can find out about traffic jams on major thoroughfares. No more getting stuck on Manhattan’s Canal Street or San Francisco’s Van Ness Avenue. Add in our drag-and-drop routing and your clutch will be buying you pizza. More here.
• Exploring bookmarks: Swiftly on the heels of the popular del.icio.us Firefox 3 beta extension comes an early beta release of an Internet Explorer version. Now IE users can revel in plugin features like nearly instantaneous searching with huge accounts (yeah, you, with more than 10,000 bookmarks), full sidebar and toolbar integration with bookmark synch and typedown search, and a handy indicator of new network activity and links. Download it here or discuss it here.
• Mybloglog gets friendlier: Kevin Bacon, eat your heart out. Mybloglog has just launched Friender, a quick way to grow your network of friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends… The next time you go to manage your friends and contacts, you’ll notice a “Friender” tab. It’s essentially a rank-ordered list of friends (and others they know) that you’re connected to elsewhere. Chances are, if someone knows five of your friends, you probably know them, too. You quickly fly through the list and grow your network. And the best part is it all happens in real-time. Shazam! More here.
• Monkey on the loose: It’s official. The doors to Yahoo! Search no longer have locks. SearchMonkey is open for business, inviting developers (from pros to tinkerers) to start building customized Yahoo! Search results that are even more useful and relevant. If structured data makes you quiver (think CitySearch, StumbleUpon, eBay, Epicurious, Yelp, Netflix), you’ll waste no time mashing it up to add links, reviews, contact information, reservations, etc. to your site’s search listing. And if that’s not enough motivation for you, how does winning up to 10,000 clams sound? We’re looking for search heroes in the categories of Best Enhanced Result, Best Infobar, Most Innovative Use of Structured Data, Best Data Service, and Grand Prize (best over all categories). More on the SearchMonkey Challenge here.

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You silently grieve every time you open your drawer — all those lonely socks whose mates went missing on their last trip to the laundry room. Well, today is Lost Sock Memorial Day. A time to mourn, eulogize… and then face the music and admit those tootsie warmers ain’t never coming back. After you’re done purging, here’s what we got out of our system this week:

• Safe from harm: Like the real world, the Web can have some crummy neighborhoods. That’s why we launched SearchScan, a new safety feature built into Yahoo! Search, courtesy of the security experts at McAfee. No more unwittingly clicking on dangerous links that might download spyware, malware, or other nefarious wares. You’ll get a warning label next to questionable web sites, including those that might have dubious email practices that include spammy missives in your inbox. We just don’t want you going to the wrong side of the street. More here.
• Your every move: Those cats at MyBlogLog are making it easier to keep tabs on what your community of contacts is up to. They’ve just added Yahoo! Answers, Google Reader, and the cool new video startup Seesmic to the nearly 50 popular services you can track in your “New With Me” lifestream. Make a move? MyBlogLog will post that event for all to see. More here. They also just cooked up an Add Services Shortcut (with a most unfortunate acronym) that assumes that you use the same screenname at multiple sites. Their script monkeys scan the services for your ID and let you add them with a single click.
• Seeing is believing: You’re a visual person. You like pretty pictures. Then Glue Pages Beta is for you. Over across the Big Pond, the Yahoo! India Search team just launched a new concept for search that sticks text, images, and video content together into a single results page. Available for select terms across categories like health, sports, entertainment, travel, technology, and finance, it gives you various takes on a given topic. For example, “Barak Obama” brings back results on Wikipedia, Yahoo! News, Memeorandum.com, videos, images, blogs, and RSS feeds for the most active political news sources. More here.
• Searchin’ Safari: This isn’t so much product news, as just good news… for Mac users. We just acquired Inquisitor, which created a Safari browser plug-in that auto-completes search queries and pops up results along with ideas to help refine. It’s not unlike our own Search Assist feature. Download it here and keep your eyes peeled for future innovations.

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Would you believe it was only 55 years ago today that we first understood how genes were passed from generation to generation? Can you say double helix? After pausing to honor the granddaddies of molecular biology, check out what was in our deoxyribose nucleic acid this week.

• Would you like to touch our SearchMonkey?: If you’re a developer or site owner clamoring for a chance to monkey with enhanced Yahoo! search results, sign up for a developer preview of SearchMonkey or mark your calendar for our May 15th developer launch party. It’s our first step toward a totally new open Yahoo! strategy. Buh bye, links and abstracts. Hello, rich results with data like images, deep links, ratings, reviews, etc.!
• Circle of refinement: Yahoo! Local just made narrowing search results vastly easier with that rockstar of geometry: the circle. Looking for a greasy spoon for breakfast, but want one close to the ocean? Click “expand map” on your search query results and move that circle around to whatever ‘hood you’re looking for and make the radius bigger or smaller. As you move the circle, the business results automatically update. Brings new meaning to search radius. More here.
• Share your Flickr love: See something on Flickr and just can’t contain yourself? In this world of instant gratification, it’s now easier than ever to share photos, videos, sets, and groups with Flickr’s simple new “share this” button. Everpresent on the upper right side, it beckons you to email, link to, blog about, or get the HTML code to embed pictures and videos. What’s more, it will auto-complete screen names of your contacts as you type. All the more easy to spread the love. More here.
• Ain’t nothin’ better than free: You’re about to toss your old bottle cap collection when you realize there just might be a 10-year-old aching for a Nehi Red to complete his. That’s when you go check out our “Free is Good” microsite, launched in honor of Earth Day. It’s based on the old “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” adage and it’s there to help you find reuse groups in your neck of the woods. In addition to the warm feeling you’ll get inside from getting cool stuff and keeping other stuff out of landfills, you’ll have a shot at scoring eco-friendly prizes like a Smart car, a trek to a national park, a trip to an eco-resort, a home energy audit, local organic food or public transit for a year, or even free toilet paper (hey, who doesn’t need that?). Get thee green!
• Gimme your digits: You’ll never have to ask that again with the new MyBlogLog feature that lets you instantly add your MyBlogLog contacts and other members to your address book. They’ve rolled out one-click access to vCards (for Outlook, Thunderbird, Address Book on Macs, etc.) and hCards (for you more sophisticated microformats fan). Your info will reflect whatever you specified in your privacy settings. There’s nothing quite like portable data. More here.

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Today marks a 102-year anniversary that fortunately very few people remember… when a 7.9 tremblor rattled streets, buildings, and teeth in San Francisco. After comfortably denying it could ever happen again, check out our earth-shaking updates:

• Your city is big time now: Ever been frustrated that your city doesn’t rank when it comes to online city guides? Seeth no more. Whether you live in Kailua, Kinnelon, Killingworth or Kennebunkport (or any large metropolis around the world, for that matter), you’ll find your city in the new Yahoo! Our City. It dynamically scrapes what’s available on the Net — Flickr photos, news, events, weather, videos, blogs, maps — and melds them together in a single comprehensive snapshot. The fruit of a Yahoo! India Hack Day winner, it’s a city guide of the people, by the people, and for the people. For every citizen around the world. More here and on their blog.
• MyBlogLog Tweets:The team at MyBlogLog is embracing the 140-character Web. They’ve launched their own Twitter account to help keep you up to speed on goings on, as well as make it easy for you to lob over comments and quick questions. So go follow MyBlogLog and don’t skip a beat. More here.
• Even hackers have taste: If you’ve spent time at the Yahoo! Developer Network in the past, you might have noticed its radical face lift. Not only does it have a clean new 21st-century look (we didn’t want to rush anything), it now has “improved navigation and information architecture built to meet the needs of the lazy and impatient developers” among you (their words, not mine). You’ll also find more timely content, with four content tabs about the latest and greatest at all times. There’s also an Upcoming events stream for rubbing elbows with Tech Yahoos and lots of YDN Theater goodness. We even used our own popular YUI library components to rebuild the site. It’s all about eating dog food around here.

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It’s been 45 years since The Rock was designated to hold bad guys the likes of Al Capone and “Machine Gun” Kelly. Gangsta cred or not, there’s no escaping this week’s updates:

• Mobile March Madness: Now you can keep tabs on all the latest college hoops action wherever and whenever from your mobile phone with three new tools. You can get up-to-the minute news, scores, schedules and images on the dedicated mobile NCAA page, the new Men’s College Hoops mobile widget (you’ll need Yahoo! Go 3.0), and specially-configured Yahoo! oneSearch results, with specialized men’s college basketball content from Yahoo! Sports and Rivals.com. No need to be tied to your computer screen to keep score. More here.
• Team spirit: We’ve got more Audibles to cheer your NCAA team on Yahoo! Messenger. Whether it’s to jeer at your friends’ alma mater or boo a bad play, we’ve got Audibles (like a referee calling an offensive foul) and new avatar gear (find jerseys from more than 25 schools) to show your team pride. Make sure you’re using Yahoo! Messenger 8.1 or 9.0 beta to get your spirit on.
• Staying on topic: You may have heard about the “New with Me” profile page on MyBlogLog that pulls together all your activity across the Internet and shows people what you’re up to (like a feed of all your updates and your friends’ updates). We’ve just added a new Tags page that combs through your “New with Me” page into relevant pages called Topics. What does this mean? Not only can you see an aggregation of your friends’ Internet whereabouts in one place, now you can find what your MyBlogLog community is saying, doing, thinking about any topic you find interesting quick and easy. BTW: Find out what the Easter chatter is here.

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Ride the Fire Eagle, grab some afternoon delight…

March is a great month to get your geek on. Tech conferences flourish: O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference, now in its seventh year, heralds springtime in San Diego. South by Southwest (SXSW), Austin’s annual music, multimedia, and film extravaganza tests the stamina, sociability, and interaction skills of thousands web developers and designers from all over the world, with more than a week of panels, presentations, and parties.

Last Wednesday at ETech, Tom Coates from Yahoo!’s Brickhouse invited participants to “ride the Fire Eagle.” His keynote announced the developer’s beta launch of Fire Eagle, “a secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy.” Fire Eagle invitation cards flew out of the booth and into the hands of hundreds of developers attending the event.

O’Reilly Media also hosted Graphing Social Patterns (GSP), a new conference held in conjunction with ETech, focused on the business and technology of social platforms. Yahoo! Developer Network participated in ETech and GSP as a gold sponsor. Following Charlene Li’s Monday morning keynote on the Future of Social Networks (you can view her presentation deck here), MyBlogLog product guy Ian Kennedy announced the opening of MyBlogLog’s APIs.

MyBlogLog is a Yahoo! service that powers the “Recent Readers” badge, which you’ll find on our sidebar and all across the blogosphere. MyBlogLog is a tool that lets people learn about their community of readers, and gather and display pointers to all the online social services they use. By opening its APIs, MyBlogLog gives developers tools to create interesting new social mashups and news ways to visualize online communities and social activity data.

Speaking of social activity streams: dozens of Yahoos participated as speakers, panelists, booth staffers, and attendees at ETech, GSP, and South by Southwest. Take a peek at some highlights of our ETech presence, captured by Ricky Montalvo for the Yahoo! Developer Network theater:

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Developer Network

Photo from James Duncan Davidson

Eat my shorts and do have a cow in honor of Matt Groening’s 54th birthday. After you’ve done your best “doh,” take a look through our futurama updates.

• Popcorn not included: We’ve added one more reason for you to cozy up with your sweetie. Add the My Netflix module to your My Yahoo! page and get instant access into your Netflix account without leaving your page. You can see what the “Top Rentals” are or what’s new and hot for a special evening. Or get a status update on what movies are on their way to your home. Read more here.
• New and improved: Yahoo! Video look a little different to you? Not to worry, you’re not going crazy. We’ve made some changes to make the site the one-stop shop for all video on Yahoo!, whether it’s news, sports, movies or music. You now get a wider and cinematastic (16:9 player view in fact) viewing experience, bigger files so you can upload higher quality files (up to 150 megabytes), and also curate your own video experience beyond embedding your own individual videos to your blog or site. There’s more, read about it here.
• Putting the My in MyBlogLog: Just think, how cool it would be to personalize your site with your MyBlogLog community. With the new MyBlogLog plugin you can now instantly display members from your MyBlogLog community on your site. The plugin lets you display a widget of your most active MyBlogLog members, helps you to manage a members’ list page, and view a detailed members profile page. Just think of all the social bookmarking opportunities! One caveat, the plugins only work if you’ve already got a Yahoo! API key, but not to fret if you don’t. You can apply for the beta at developer.yahoo.com/mybloglog . Check out what else the team’s brewing here.

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