Yahoo to offer Privacy Option in Advertising

It's a known fact that cookies on your computer can tell the 'bog brother' on the the internet a lot about you. Sometimes more that you want people to know.

In an effort to promote good faith, Yahoo has announced that they will let its Web visitors decline ads targeted to their browsing habits. This decision is made as Congress steps up scrutiny of customized advertising and consumer privacy. The House Energy and Commerce Committee has held a hearing questioning online advertising practices.



The option will likely be available by the end of August.

Visitors who decline would still see generic ads .The policy change does not affect Yahoo's other targeted ads, such as those tied to search terms or location.

The Yahoo trend does not stop the collection and retention of data that had been used to generate targeting profiles. Yahoo said it still needs the information for other reasons, including fraud detection and law-enforcement requests.


Time Warner's AOL began extending the option to its own sites late last year, incorporating technology it acquired with the purchase of the behavioral-targeting firm Tacoda. Microsoft Corp. also allows opt out on its own sites.

Google's privacy policy offers opt out to third-party sites only. Google say it conducts little, if any, behavioral targeting. Instead, Google has focused on contextual targeting, in which ads are influenced by one's search terms or the text of a Web article.

Yahoo Search Monkey

There is a new way to search and it's called Search Monkey. Yahoo introduced us to this new phenomena last May and has been adding to it since then.

Using SearchMonkey, developers and site owners can use structured data to make Yahoo! Search results more useful and visually appealing, and drive more relevant traffic to their sites.

How does it work?

The SearchMonkey developer tool helps you find and construct data services that you can use to build apps. Once you've built your app, you can use it yourself and share it with others.

Yahoo Tells Us How to Getting Started

1. Visit the Developer overview or Site Owner overview to learn more about participating in SearchMonkey
2. Browse the SearchMonkey Guide to learn what it takes to build a SearchMonkey app
3. Start building your data service or app using the SearchMonkey developer tool

Yahoo Search Gallery

Yahoo! Search Gallery showcases all of the useful SearchMonkey applications that have been built by developers, site owners and Yahoo!. Yelp, Yahoo! Local and LinkedIn Enhanced Results will automatically appear in the search results, eliminating the need for users to go into the Search Gallery to add them.

Yahoo! Search Gallery allows users and developers to visit the Search Gallery by clicking the "Customize" dropdown from the search results page. Developers and site owners can sharing applications by adding links to their app's page on their sites.

Once inside the Gallery, users can view and add apps built on the SearchMonkey platform by developers, site owners and Yahoo!.

The Gallery is still in beta, but there are already a number of really useful apps included. Yahoo expects the number and variety of apps to grow significantly with time. In the meantime, here is an example created by the developer community:

One third party developer, Marco Vitanza, designed this Infobar, which annotates blogspot.com search results with links to the 10 most recent posts from the corresponding blog.

Check out more apps at the gallery. Visit Search Monkey

Yahoo Widgets

Probably the one place that Yahoo shines over anyone else, including Google, is their desktop widgets. I have enjoyed the Yahoo widgets on my desktop for a long time and have never had a problem with them

The Yahoo widget allows you to :

Save time with live updates right on your desktop

• Your favorite info comes to you
• No need to surf around for what you use most

Convenient at-a-glance view keeps your Widgets in line

• Get all of your personalized updates in one place
• Neatly organize your Widgets along any edge of your desktop

Choose from more than 4,000 Widgets. Make it all yours

• The most Widgets available anywhere online… more than 4,000 and growing fast!
• Weather, games, web cams, radio, scoreboards, calendars, mood rings… if you can imagine it, there's a Widget for it!

Speedier than ever

• Dramatic performance improvements make your Widgets even faster
• Uses less computer memory for Widgets, which leaves mo

I have installed a tic-tac-toe board widget that I have assigned different webcams to.

Multicam

Enter and display four or nine webcams of your choice in one Widget. Go into the preferences to enter new image locations.

Clicking an image will enlarge it to fill out the Widget and clicking again with go back to the four or nine camera view. With Webcams all over the world, you can view Central Park, the traffic in D.C. and more, all at the same time. To find webcams, simply type "webcam+location of your choice" in your search engine. TV news channels usually have the best ones if you are interested in cities.

Yahoo E-Mail

Yahoo Inc. is offering free e-mail accounts under two new designations in an effort to attract Web surfers unhappy with their current addresses.

Yahoo will begin registering new addresses under the domains of "ymail" and "rocketmail" at http://mail.yahoo.com.

It will be the first time that Yahoo has offered e-mail accounts under umbrellas other than its own company name since it became a correspondence conduit in 1997.

Yahoo purchased the parent company of Rocketmail a while ago and Rocketmail users at the time of the acquisition were allowed to keep their existing accounts, but Yahoo hadn't accepted any new addresses under that name until now.

Yahoo decided to allow the new e-mail designations after being driven by the difficulty that people are having as they try to find an appealing e-mail handle under the Yahoo domain.


Yahoo is hoping the additional options created with the ymail and rocketmail will help boost its e-mail growth.

With 266 million worldwide users in April, Yahoo is the e-mail market leader, according to the latest data from research firm comScore Inc. Microsoft Corp., which unsuccessfully tried to buy Yahoo for $47.5 billion, is a close second at 264 million users.

About 101 million people used the Internet search leader's Gmail in Apri. E-mail accounts at both Yahoo and Microsoft have been growing at a slower pace than Google Inc.'s Gmail, which has added more than 30 million users in the past year.

E-mail under the ymail and rocketmail designations will offer all the same features as the Yahoo domain, including an unlimited amount of storage capacity.

When it entered the e-mail market, Yahoo provided just 3 megabytes of free storage per account. But Google changed the competitive landscape in 2004 when it introduced gmail with 1 gigabyte of free storage under its Gmail service. Gmail now offers more than 6 gigabytes of free storage.