Sony Pictures plunders the Kids homepage with a full page overlay for its new animated summer movie treasure.

Arrrrrgggg you ready for summer movie season? We hope so because Sony has set sail to a silver screen near you with a galleon for all ages entitled “The Pirates! Band of Misfits.”

With such voice talent as Hugh Grant, Salma Hayek, Imelda Staunton, Jeremy Piven, David Tennant, and Brendan Gleeson, “Pirates!” is the latest piece of clay-mation from Aardman, the British studio famous for its quirky and very entertaining stop-motion clay-mation films such as the Wallace and Gromit series, “Chicken Run,” “Flushed Away” and “Arthur Christmas.”

To herald its arrival, the Yahoo! Kids homepage recently featured a full page overlay, more appropriately known, at least in this case, as a takeover.

When you land on the page, you’re also landing in a seaside village courtesy of a very rich background framing and underlying the live page content. This background was served as a Wallpaper unit, a static image to replace the default background with Sony’s content.

Just when you think all is peaceful, the Pirate Captain (voiced in the film by Hugh Grant) swings past your monitor in the nick of time to dodge a cannonball. Through the charred hole we see a smiling Polly and a concerned Mr. Bobo.

From there, the rest of the live page content fills in, as does the 300 x 250 graphical unit on the right. Pirate Captain, Charles Darwin, and Cutlass Liz brandish the title and a link to tickets and showtimes.

The swinging Pirate Captain effect was achieved with a Flash Overlay and transparent video with alpha channel to let the page content as well as the coastal village background shine through. To make the user experience fun without going overboard (pun intended), the automated swinging Captain is frequency-capped at one per day per user.

The cannonball explosion effect was rendered via a separate Flash file timed to fire after the Captain has swung by. Mr. Bobo and Polly represent two more Flash units. Even after the action settles into the 300 x 250 unit, you’ll notice a Flash-animated fish swimming around and poking its head above the water.

The 300 x 250 unit features an ActionScripted replay button that offers the user another opportunity to make the Captain swing again.

The Pirates take full advantage of the entire digital Kids canvas to render an experience as quirky and fun as the movie itself without—yes I’m using that pun again—going overboard.

Click here to embarrrrrrgggk on a pirate voyage.

–Thomas T. Lady

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a new series entitled “Ad Tech of the Week.” For more information visit the Yahoo! Advertising Blog or follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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.

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