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Yang: Being Yahoo CEO is a 'lonely job'

HALF MOON BAY, Calif.--Being chief executive of Yahoo is "a lonely job," says Jerry Yang, who co-founded the company in 1994 and was promoted to the top job in June in a management shakeup.

"It is a lonely job in the sense that you have to make some of the tough calls," he said in a "fireside chat" session at a conference here. "It feels like I've been in training for the past 13 years." The conference was put on by the Right Media Exchange, the advertising marketplace of Right … Read more

Politicos OK limits for U.S. firms in Net-censoring countries

Update 12:53 p.m. PDT: Congress has moved a step closer to enacting a new law regulating key aspects of how U.S. tech companies operate in countries whose governments censor or otherwise manipulate the Internet.

As expected, the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs backed a slightly amended version of the Global Online Freedom Act by a voice vote on Tuesday morning. The bill's preliminary nod is a prelude to the same House committee's plans to grill Yahoo executives early next month about a widely publicized case involving the imprisonment of a Chinese journalist.

The … Read more

Politicos to revisit crackdown on U.S. firms in 'Internet-restricting' countries

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly named the House bill. It is the Global Online Freedom Act.

Updated Tuesday at 9:04 a.m. PDT: Try as it might, Congress failed last year to pass new rules for U.S. companies--backed by fines of up to $2 million--that do business in "Internet-restricting" locales like China.

But the politicians apparently aren't giving up on the idea just yet.

The House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs has scheduled a Tuesday vote on the Global Online Freedom Act. Past iterations have enjoyed support from human rights activists … Read more

Yahoo marketing chief to leave

The person in charge of marketing for Yahoo is the latest executive to leave the company, which is in transition.

Chief Marketing Officer Cammie Dunaway is leaving the company at the end of this month, according to a Yahoo statement.

"Since joining Yahoo in 2003, Cammie has built an award-winning direct-marketing team, improved the company's customer insights and found creative ways to improve our brand," the statement said. "Cammie has strengthened the marketing function and built a strong bench of creative talent. We wish her all the best in her future endeavors and thank her for … Read more

Flickr to use Picnik for online photo editing

Update: I added a few more details from Picnik.

Flickr plans to expand from photo sharing to photo editing through a deal with start-up Picnik, a major change in the nature of the Yahoo site.

"We are working on a relationship with Picnik, which will be available in the coming months," a Flickr representative said Friday, declining to share further details.

Picnik said in a statement that Flickr users would get access to all the Picnik editing features within the Flickr site. "Picnik will become a seamless and tightly integrated photo editing solution for Flickr uses," … Read more

Yahoo to expand in Microsoft turf

Yahoo is leasing office space and hiring in the Seattle area, not far from Microsoft actually, as part of a plan to create a technology hub in the area.

The company has leased three floors, about 115,000 square feet, in an office building in Bellevue, Wash., and will likely fill it with 450 to 600 workers, David Sobeski, senior vice president of platforms and architecture at Yahoo, said in an interview on Friday.

In addition to hiring an unknown number of people, Yahoo will consolidate workers who are in scattered offices in the area. They include salespeople and engineers … Read more

Flickr to upgrade photo printing

SAN FRANCISCO--Flickr was originally designed for sharing photos, but Yahoo is trying to make life easier for those who want to print pictures and not just see them on a screen.

The Yahoo site is working on an upgrade to Flickr's Organize interface, which lets people select batches of photos, to make it easier to print multiple photos, said Kakul Srivastava, Flirk's director of product management. Today, each photo must be selected individually off its own Web page, which rapidly gets tiresome.

"It should be happening in the next week or so," she said in an … Read more

Congratulations Jerry Yang: What's next?

An earlier version of this blog inaccurately described Zimbra and Rivals.com. Zimbra is an e-mail company and Rivals.com is a college and high school sports site.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang may have managed to stop the bleeding at Yahoo.

Yahoo's third-quarter results beat analyst estimates, and Yahoo executives seemed upbeat about the company's future in a conference call Tuesday afternoon.

Shares of Yahoo rose more than 10 percent in after-hours trade after the company reported that revenue rose 12 percent year over year to $1.77 billion, while net profit was slightly lower than a year … Read more

Yahoo summoned to Washington over Chinese arrests

The chairman of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee is summoning Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang to Washington to talk about "how the Internet company gave false information to Congress about its role in a human rights case in China that sent a journalist to jail for a decade," according to a release from the committee chairman's office.

Chairman Tom Lantos has asked Yang and Yahoo General Counsel Michael Callahan to appear at a hearing on November 6.

"Our committee has established that Yahoo provided false information to Congress in early 2006," Lantos said … Read more

Customizable search for your Web site visitors

These days, there are several ways to get a customized or internal search engine free of charge. Google's Custom Search Engine (CSE) and Yahoo's Search Builder lead the way, and their products are fairly easy to implement. After the Big Two, there are several services trying to make their mark, but one that that stands out is the Swicki from Eurekster.

A Swicki is a combination search portal and widget that can be customized on any topic or topics either within a Web site, group of Web sites, or the Web at large. The end product is a … Read more