Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Personally, it's always fun to see Yahoo! mentioned in places that I don't expect. As I was reading a press release about Weezer's record-setting new music video, I noticed that the premiere was actually being exclusively presented by Yahoo! Music -- in fact, we have an entire video premieres hub devoted to showing hot-off-the-press music videos from a number of high profile artists. All you videophiles out there should be sure to keep an eye on the schedule of Upcoming Premieres to make sure you don't miss out on the latest and greatest.

The big news for today is that we've launched an exciting update to Yahoo! Calendar that finally pulls it into the 21st century, adding AJAX-y goodness, support for open calendar standards, and a slick zoom interface for viewing monthly vs. daily events. So I hear, at least -- I forgot to sign up for the internal beta and now I'm stuck on the waiting list. *blush* But you can follow along with me as Herbert the Calendar Guru soothingly puts the new calendar through its paces.

Larger version available here

Flickr does a great job of surfacing beautiful photos on their Explore page, which is certainly no easy task given the millions of photos they have to sort through. You might think that there's a complicated algorithm based on how many views, comments, favorites or whatever that each photo gets. And maybe you'd be right. But maybe the answer is...fuzzier.

Like, a-panda-vomiting-a-rainbow-of-interesting-photos fuzzy.

Of Pandas and Rainbows, by The Searcher

I don't know much more about it than what I've read online, but it's certainly interesting, you've got to admit. I'll let you know if I hear any more details about, say, why there's a panda throwing up on Flickr.

One step up from enhanced results in Yahoo! Search is...well, enhanced results pages. Similar to the Breast Cancer Awareness theme that was introduced last week on breast cancer related searches, queries related to the upcoming US presidential elections -- like Obama or McCain -- will return back an election-themed results page with a "Vote" icon pointing back to our elections hub, as well as whatever informational module applies. It's a fun way to draw attention to important events and hopefully will remind a few people to get out there and vote.

It's Friday and I'm not even in the state*, so I'll keep this short. If you've ever had trouble concentrating on a piece of text in a vast sea of white space, try closing the blinds, using some awesome YUI magic. Chris Heilmann goes into meticulously gory detail in the linked post, which is a very cool read. Sadly, it doesn't work on all sites...like this one...but it's still pretty neat when it does.

* Well, I'm in a state. Just not my usual one.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and as such, it's probably a good idea for you to raise your awareness a bit. Search for information about it, if for no other reason than to see a pink results page. Add the Search for a Cause Searchmonkey application to contribute to a cure just by shopping online -- in fact, we'll be donating up to $25,000 to the cause if you just add the application. And read more about all the ways that we're trying to help out here.

We increasingly affirm around here that Yahoo! needs to be a global company -- our next 500 million users won't be coming from the US, for instance. Doubly true in this current financial climate. :P If you do ever wonder how global Yahoo! already is, though, you can check out our international hub at http://world.yahoo.com. It's not really much more than a fancy collection of links to our various home pages, but I'd never realized that a page for that existed and it is kind of fun to check out how Yahoo! looks to the rest of those countries out there (conclusion: different!). Who even knew that we had coverage in Turkey? Thanks to Ms. Tse on devel-random for the heads up.