Whether you’re celebrating Nowruz, Ostara, Shunbun no hi, or the vernal equinox, today is the first day of spring, people! Rebirth, revival, renewal, the end of a long cold winter, and a time to see if you can actually balance an egg on its point. Here’s what we fêted this week:

• omg! celebrity mamas!: The ever-popular gossip site, omg!, is giving you one more way to obsess about the lives of the rich, famous, and far-too-photographed. This week, realizing that you can’t seem to get enough of Katie/Suri, Gwen/Kingston, Angelina/(pick one) on omg!’s Goddess blog, the team has launched “Spotlight to Nightlight,” a biweekly video program that peers into the lives of celebrity mothers. Each three- to five-minute episode features host Ali Landry (former Miss USA and famed “Doritos Girl”) chatting up a different celebrity mom, discussing parenting tips or the latest mama making headlines. Ever wonder how much a starlet’s nanny makes? Get addicted here.
• IE8 4 Y!: Microsoft’s brand new Internet Explorer 8 browser launched this week. Minutes later, we made a Yahoo!-optimized version available. What’s in it for you? Easy access to Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Mail, our toolbar, and our homepage. You’ll get instant visual results for weather, stock quotes, and movie reviews/showtimes when you use the browser’s search box (i.e., a three-day weather forecast shows up right inside a search pulldown menu). And, no matter what site you’re on, you can always access a preview window to check your Yahoo! Mail. More on the Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Mail blogs. Download IE 8 optimized for Yahoo! here. (Not available for Macs. Duh.)
• Find photos with fast filters: Ever searched for just the right photo but gotten lost in a sea of stuff you don’t want? Yahoo! Image Search has just added a few new filters to hasten your mission. You can now narrow your scope by selecting black & white vs. color, restricting results to images that are either from Flickr or not, or even specifying the dimensions of the shot you’re after. And they promise more cool stuff to come. More here.
• Sometimes it’s the little things: The Flickr team rolled out two small tweaks that mean so much. If you’ve often found yourself irked by the “loading…” message you got when trying to narrow down your list of contacts, behold the people picker! It’s now lightning-fast when trying to find someone in your Contact List, share an image, or send Flickr mail. But wait, there’s more. For Flickr Pro members, the Stats page now shows real-time data for the day (no more waiting til midnight) and lets you drill down for daily details on up to 28 of the last days. More here and here.

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The great American love affair with award shows may be ending. That’s the conclusion you might draw after looking at recent television ratings for shows like the Emmys, SAG Awards, and Golden Globe awards. But what’s really at play is that, like with other forms of media, the Internet is starting to steal the show.

Rather than sitting through hours of pomp and circumstance, more American entertainment lovers seem to be heading online to get their fix. Most likely it’s because they can catch the evening’s highlights — teary speeches, Adrien Brody’s fiery kiss, Roberto Benigni’s giddiness, Letterman’s Uma-Oprah tension, the Gold Amex dress — on demand for their water cooler discussions.

Let’s check out the numbers. The 2008 Emmy Awards averaged 12.2 million viewers, down 6% and the lowest ratings ever for an Emmy telecast. Yet the day after the awards, 4.6 million people flocked to Yahoo! TV and generated 103 million page views (nearly doubled year over year). This year’s SAG Awards drew the smallest audience since TBS and TNT began airing them together in 2006 –- with 5.3 million viewers, down 12% from 2007. The next day, 4.1 million people flooded Yahoo! Movies for its best and worst dressed gallery and checked out 83 million pages. And although the 3-hour Golden Globes won a coveted Sunday night time slot, this year’s star-studded telecast drew the lowest ratings in 13 years –- 14.6 million viewers, down from 20 million the year before. The next day, 7.2 million people descended on omg!, taking in an average of about 40 page views per person, driven mainly by an insatiable appetite for photos.

So all is not lost — we’re still just as obsessed with celebrities and their red carpet fashion foibles. Possibly more so than ever. But we’re just turning to a different screen to view it — during and after the show. So don’t cancel your Oscars party on Sunday. Just make sure you have a laptop next to the popcorn.

Sibyl Goldman
GM, Yahoo! Entertainment

Thirty-nine years ago today, the Cardinals and Bruins set aside all rivalry when computer scientists at Stanford and UCLA created the first permanent link between their two shiny new ARPAnet routers — paving the way for modern networked computing and eventually the means for all of your tweets, pokes, LOLcats, and smileys. Here’s what we hooked you up with this week:

• T-Mobile triumph: If you’re a T-Mobile subscriber in the U.S., you’ll be spending a whole lot less time trying to find things with your mobile phone. That’s because Yahoo! oneSearch is now the default mobile search for T-Mobile’s new web2go service, serving up search results designed specifically for your cell phone. After all, it’s an awfully small screen and wading through a sea of links is downright irritating. More here.
• Sticky search: Faithful Product Pulse readers will remember when we unveiled Glue Pages in India, an experimental concept for search that sticks text, images, and video content together into a single results page. It’s now a U.S. import, available as a slightly different experience as Yahoo! Glue beta. It assembles content from across the Web into a veritable microsite about your query. Topics are limited for now (we’ll expand over time), but go check out how it handles popular people, places and things like cupcakes, Sarah Palin, Twilight, and Citigroup. More here.
• Feel-good news: Recession, deflation, layoffs, bank meltdowns. C’mon, isn’t there some good news out there? Why, yes, there is. And the good people at Sears want to make sure you see it. Head to Good News Now, a new video channel on Yahoo! News that sees the world through rose-colored glasses — spotlighting strictly uplifting stories in the news. You’ll find profiles of heroes, medical triumphs, baby Obamas, charitable neighbors, natural disaster survivors, and more. The channel will run through New Year’s. Maybe headlines will improve by January?
• Britney, Britney, Britney: Whether you’re a tabloid subscriber or just read copies at the dentist’s office, you’re all too familiar with the world’s fascination with Britney Spears. Well, the volume increases on Monday, when Yahoo! TV will premiere the exclusive trailer of MTV’s upcoming documentary, “Britney: For the Record.” Then we’ll spend the rest of the week gearing you up for Britney’s 27th birthday and the release of her new album “Circus” on December 2, with special coverage across Yahoo!. On Monday, check out “Britney’s 27 Wildest Moments” on Yahoo! Music; Friday, omg will share “Britney’s 25 Most Memorable Looks;” and next Sunday, Shine will take a look at Brit’s relationships. Mark your calendar!
• Big time in no time: And a final note… I’d like to congratulate the team behind Primetime in No Time, the show that gives you a rapid-fire recap of the TV you missed the night before. They’ve just served their 100 millionth stream since launching in March, becoming one of the most successful original programs in the history of the Internet. Hosted by comedian Frank Nicotero, the show is clearly addictive. w00t! More here.

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There’s no denying that celebrity news draws a crowd. And we’re particularly proud of the size of our omg! crowd after only a year. Handily beating TMZ many months, omg! has risen to the top of the Comscore heap in record time with our addictive take on celebrity news. From red carpets to hotties and baby bumps galore, omg! has covered Hollywood at its best and most embarrassing moments.

And what a year it’s been… two million user comments, 2,000 photo stories, and the launch of “Goddess,” our new celebrity mom blog. And Hollywood did not disappoint — we had an endless stream of material to work with. Britney bottomed out, rebounded and went on vacation with Mel Gibson. Halle, Angelina, Tori, Jessica, Jamie Lynn, J Lo, Nicole and Christina broke out the bugaboos for new babies. Meanwhile, Paris and LiLo spent some QT in the county jail, Amy Winehouse wandered the streets of London, and Heidi and Spencer broke up, got back together, and went to every party around town.

Phew! Here’s to another year of celebrity break-ups and shake-ups, fashion faux pas, tiny dogs, big sunglasses, time in the clink, and even bigger handbags!

Sibyl Goldman
GM, Yahoo! Entertainment