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by Vera H C Chan From Olympic highs to financial lows, fall took on a whole new meaning this harried September. Among the many events that befell Search, hurricanes hit fragile coasts, politics went into overdrive, and bailouts tried to stop a sinking market. Glumly mull over what the world was searching for in September. Path of Resistance Like the grotesque nursery rhyme of the old lady who swallowed a fly, it seemed inconceivable how formerly redoubtable Wall Street firms had to be swallowed up by fellow firms or the government itself. As names like Lehman Brothers, AIG, and Goldman Sachs rippled into everyday consciousness, it was Washington Mutual s teetering collapse that truly captured people s online attention and brought uncertainty into the pocketbook. People keep close tabs on a proposed massive bailout and the man behind the plan 14,762 , and introduced the dread phrase u.s. financial crisis into the Search vernacular. Path of Glory Mother nature and father finance disrupted the presidential campaigns, so people really had to rely on the Web to keep track on the candidates, the debate, and most importantly whether Republican vice presidential pick Sarah Palin was indeed Tina Fey s alter ego. The countdown to the Nov. 4 elections dropped into mere double digit days, pressuring searches to investigate rumors, media appearances, family members, religious affiliations, voting records, personal history, and porcine make up tips. Path of Destruction Hurricane Ike followed closely behind Tropical Storm Hannah, but he gave fair warning of his category 4 visit. People monitored the impending disaster and its projected path top 500 searches , but still its sheer, kinetic intensity resulted in a death toll of 67 and a devastated Texas coastline. A hopeful but critical eye turned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency 23,989 and searches popped up for food stamps and other aid. Many organizations, private citizens, former presidents and undocumented laborers came to clean up what was left behind. Small miracles did surface, from a single Gilchrist house withstanding the impact to a mystery ship unearthed, and a lionness seeking sanctuary. September 2008 Fastest Movers in Search Search Terms with the Biggest Percentage Changes Hurricane Ike infinity spike. See above. Hurricane Ike Projected Path infinity spike. See above. Sarah Palin Tina Fey See above Don LaFontaine 80,143. The deep throated trailer guy spoke his last. Shackle 64,991 . The lionness sought refuge from Ike in a church. Jerry Reed 45,657 . The country singer died Aug. 31 Eva Longoria Parker 36,182 . Pregnancy rumors surround the actress, but it could be just lots of M Ms FEMA.com 23,989 . See above New iPod Nano 21,843 . Its slim figure debuted at Apple s developer conference. Atom Smasher 20,949 . Flouting doomsday predictions, the world s largest debuted to Search fanfare, then promptly got glitches. September 2008 Top 10 Personalities People Commanding the Most Searches Overall Sarah Palin 138 Britney Spears 24 Obama 32 Jessica Alba 38 Lindsay Lohan 15 Kim Kardashian 7 Miley Cyrus 36 John McCain 91 Paris Hilton 9 Lil Wayne 7

by Mike Krumboltz It s something straight out of The Simpsons. A man bets his buddy that he can eat an amazingly hot bowl of chili. He does. But then, a little while later, the man dies of heart failure. Was the atomic chili to blame?That s the question authorities are wrestling with in Edlington, Doncaster. Andrew Lee, who was only 33 years old, was believed to have been in perfect health before eating the chili. In fact, the fork lift operator had just passed a medical test at work. The sad and bizarre nature of the story has stirred up interest in the Buzz. An article from the Telegraph is gaining interest. Another piece from Fox News explains that Mr. Lee used red chilies grown on his father s allotment. Toxicology tests are currently being run to see if there were other factors that contributed to Mr. Lee s passing. Expect a lot more interest once those tests come back.

by Claudine Zap Today, our top five picks in Buzz. Yves Rossy 4,175 .A Swiss adventurer made it across the English Channel with nothing but a jetpack on his back to fuel his flight. Kathleen Parker Palin 551 . The conservative columnist is making waves and Buzz with a call for Sarah Palin to put country first, and step down from the Republican ticket. Cadbury 1,225 . The British candy company announced a recall of some of its made in China chocolate found to contain the tainted milk product that has sickened thousands of children in China. Portuguese Shipwreck 945 . Archeologists are racing to save a king s ransom. Gold coins, bronze cannons, swords, and sabers have all been salvaged from a 16th century Portuguese trade vessel found by chance by Namibian diamond miners. Moon sighting 588 . Muslims observing the month long fast Ramadan searched for the new moon as a sign that the holy month had ended.

Nicole Sullivan and Stoyan Stefanov are dedicated to making the web a faster place. As integral parts of the Exceptional Performance Team they already shared a lot of crucial information of how to make your web sites faster. One thing they ve been pondering a lot about lately is image optimization for file size. Image editing tools come with all kind of great ways to optimize images for visual quality and file size, but when you look at the image in a text or hex editor you ll find that there is a lot of extra information in the file, for example the name of the editing suite, dates when the picture was created and lots more. There are a lot of tools that remove this information safely and get the most out of the images without having an effect on their visual quality. The catch is that there are a lot of tools for a lot of image formats, all of them on the command line. So Nicole and Stefan took their research findings, fired up their code editors and built a web app that does all the optimization for you: Smushit.com allows you to upload some files or give it URL. The tool then takes the images, optimizes them and tells you how many bytes you can save. You then get a zip of all the images for download and can replace them on your site. Here s a video of Stoyan and Nicole presenting Smushit.com at The Ajax Experience in Boston sorry about the audio : Chris Heilmann Yahoo Developer Network

This is the first in a series of articles reporting on Flash on the Beach, one of Europe s premier Flash conferences. I m going to pick out my personal highlights. This morning, having arrived bright and early in a cold but sunny Brighton, I eagerly made my way to the Brighton Dome to register for this year s Flash on the Beach conference. This is the third year in a row that I have made the journey down to the South Coast for the conference, and once again the line up of speakers over the three days is stellar. After grabbing a cup of YDN sponsored tea yes, we re doing our bit for all the caffeine addicted Flash developers out there I headed into the main auditorium for the start of the day. Adobe Keynote John Davey, conference organiser supremo, dropped a bombshell in his introduction to the keynote session: Flash on the Beach will be coming to Miami in April 09. If you ve always wanted to get to Flash on the Beach but didn t want to brave the chill of the UK in October, then maybe Miami is more your style. I am assured that tanned, toned bodies and manicured poodles are welcome but strictly optional. The keynote, delivered by Richard Galvan and a few other Adobe folks, showed off some of the features that are shipping with the Flash CS4 release. It s been a while since I ve played around in the Flash authoring tool, but judging by the spontaneous applause from the audience it sounds like the new animation system is going to please the designers amongst you. We also got a tantalising glimpse of the new features in the Drawing API, including what looked like live video being projected onto an animated distortion mesh. I don t know what practical applications that might have, but it sure looked pretty. Richard promised that there ll be more information on this and other new features in some of the other Adobe sessions at FotB, so I ll keep you updated. Mark Anders: Flex 4 and Thermo After some more tea or should that be moar tea I switched venues to see Mark Anders talk about the new designer developer workflow in Flex 4 and a tool known only by its codename: Thermo . Having been on the wrong end of a few misinterpreted designs and on both sides of the designer developer fence I was interested in seeing how Adobe plan on tackling this thorny issue. The upcoming Flex 4 has a radically refactored component architecture and a handful of new MXML elements to represent vector graphics, the latter of which exist as a subset of MXML knows as FXG. If you ve had any experience with the excellent degrafa library, you ll feel right at home with FXG. With these two additions, and the introduction of Thermo think Flex Builder but with the scary ActionScript stuff being replaced with new designer tools , Adobe seems to have completely separated the look and feel of a Flex application from its underlying logic. Developers can round trip their designs using the new FXG format, and then integrate into their code either at compile time or runtime. To demonstrate this improved workflow, Mark showed off a weather application that consumed Yahoo s Weather API. The application had several, radically different skins that changed not only how the application looked but also how the user interacted with it. He went from a debug view where all the information was visible, to an accordion style view with animated open close states, and finally to a mobile view which looked very much like iPhone s Weather application, complete with flick scrolling. The skins were all created with Thermo without a single line of ActionScipt code in sight. Impressive stuff indeed. However, as excited as I am by all this, I can t help but wonder why Adobe created FXG and retrofitted all their creative tools to read and write the new format, when SVG is already here and supported by all those tools and more. If I bump into Mark or any of the Adobe people over the next few days, I ll be sure to ask. Eric Natzke: The Art of Play The last session of the day was back in the main auditorium, which was just as well as it was absolutely packed. Graphic Designer come Flash hero Eric Natzke showed off some of his latest artwork, and talked about the process of generating that artwork with Flash. I think I can safely say that everyone in the room was inspired by Eric and his amazing graphical style, not least because there was a mad scramble at the end of his sessions to get one of the free postcards he was giving away. I didn t get a postcard, but I m seriously tempted to order a few of his canvases for my living room. End of Day One Sadly I can t attend James Paterson s inspired session or the party this evening as I m currently on the train back to London, but rest assured I ll be back again tomorrow for more Flash related fun. Steve Webster Front End Engineer, Yahoo! Europe

The Opera Web Standards Curriculum in association with YDN has just been updated with another batch of great tutorials on website development. The new sections cover Accessibility with an article from yours truly on accessibility basics and another by Yahoo! s Ben Hawkes Lewis on accessibility testing. The section on CSS is also available with an introduction to CSS from YDN s Christian Heilmann. Other industry stalwarts, such as Tommy Olsson, follow on the CSS section with more detailed articles on specific topics. I m glad I ve been able to contribute to this great introduction to web development. If you are looking to learn the basics it s highly recommended. Tom Hughes Croucher Yahoo! Developer Network

by Mike Krumboltz There s an old saying: If it ain t broke, don t fix it. But in the competitive world of video games, such clich s don t apply. Game companies that stay the course become road kill. Nintendo must know this. The company has elected to rethink its hugely popular DS by adding some surprising new features.According to multiple sources, including Digital Trends, the Big N is redesigning the portable game machine with music playback and a camera. This is pretty huge, and, if you ask us, an unspoken acknowledgement that Nintendo suspects Apple s iPhone is capable of stealing a huge chuck of its customers. Search certainly supports the theory. iPhone s App Store is growing bigger every day. Search wise, everything from app store reviews to app store games to best free iphone apps is gaining steam. No question about it people are aware of the iPhone s potential as a gaming device. Now it s up to Nintendo to do the same thing convince consumers that its newest effort will do a lot more than just play games.

by Claudine Zap What s generating Buzz in Search today? We look at some of the top movers that caught our attention. MI6 6,535 . The real life version of James Bond s spy agency is looking for the next 007 on of all the not top secret places Facebook. Amazing Race 13 2,987 . The new season of the competitive reality show with a race around the world teams up duos with a shared past. The Lone Ranger 2,337 . Rumor has it that Disney s take on the classic TV show will star George Clooney and Johnny Depp. Be still, our beating hearts! Tina Fey SNL 1,207 . The 30 Rock star reprised her role satirizing Republican V.P. candidate Sarah Palin on SNL. New Kids on the Block Tour 173 . The original boy band from the 1980s has reunited with a new sound, a new look, and a fall concert schedule. The only thing that might be old is the fans.

In case you were looking for a little light reading on a Monday, our own architect Peter Mika has just published an article in the latest print issue of Nodalities. Peter s article, titled Anatomy of a SearchMonkey, dives into the architecture and thinking behind the SearchMonkey project, and how SearchMonkey applies to semantic data on the Web. The entire magazine is available as a free PDF download 5 MB , so take a look and let us know what you think! Evan GoerYahoo! SearchMonkey Team

by Claudine Zap It was a weekend of sad good byes, comic relief and even a breakthrough. Here, our scoop of what buzzed this weekend to help jump start your week. Good bye, ol blue eyesPaul Newman, who died after a long battle with cancer at the age of 83, was remembered for more than his presence on the silver screen and his piercing gaze. News of his death caused a sentimental 22,000 surge in searches for information on the movie star. Beyond his screen career, Newman s legacy includes racecar driving, a 50 year marriage to actress Joanne Woodward, and a product line of healthy and organic foods, Newman s Own, which contributes 100 of its profits to charity. The company, which started as a lark when Newman began bottling salad dressing in his basement, has resulted in 250 million in donations, according to People.com. Hello, snack attackIn China, the tainted milk scare appears to be spreading beyond its borders. According to the Washington Post, products that contain the bad milk have seeped into snack offerings around the world, from cake in Hong Kong to sausage products in Japan. The FDA even issued a consumer warning to avoid the made in China products White Rabbit Chocolates and Mr. Brown Coffee. So far, 54,000 children in China have been sickened and more than a dozen countries have issued warnings or product recalls. Delay upon re entryLance Armstrong, the veteran winner of multiple Tour de France races, may be held back from a planned comeback in Australia. The cancer survivor could be stymied by strict anti doping laws, according to USA Today, which noted that racers coming out of retirement need to be registered with the anti doping program for six months before being allowed to race. Officials have not yet approved the timing of Armstrong s competition. Armstrong s goal is to compete and win his eighth Tour de France race, and put to rest the suspicions of doping that followed his seven Tour de France wins. Tina Fey s Palin replayAs if we didn t get enough presidential politics during the week, Saturday Night Live served up another dose of vice presidential satire this weekend that caused all kinds of Buzz. Tina Fey reprised her role as Sarah Palin, the part that gave the SNL season opener its highest ratings since 2001, according to TV Guide. Fey, who looks eerily similar to the Alaska governor, used the opening segment to mock Palin s recent interview with Katie Couric played by Amy Poehler . Digs included yet another Alaska Russia joke, an inscrutable explanation to the economic crisis, and a request to phone a friend in response to a question she couldn t answer. You can view the skit here. Also buzzing this weekend This weekend marked the opening of the California Academy of Science in San Francisco. Featuring an aquarium, a planetarium, a rainforest, and an undulating sod roof, the eye popping modernist architecture of Renzo Piano is barely overshadowed by the diverse range of exhibits housed in the museum. And it s the largest green certified building in the U.S. Chinese astronauts made history when they landed safely on Sunday after accomplishing the country s first ever space walk. The landmark event was considered a major step forward in China s quest to become a space power.