by Mike Krumboltz For working stiffs across the country, Mondays are usually the roughest, most depressing day of the week. This Monday is an exception, because â?" hallelujah! â?" it's Presidents' Day . Not everybody is lucky enough to get the day off, but a lot of folks are interested in the origins of the holiday. Web lookups on both " presidents' day origin " and " who started presidents' day " are surging,

New Huffington Post YAP app shows the value of Yahoo! OpenID When it comes to online news innovation, you've got to love the "HuffPost," as the influential news and commentary site's followers like to call it. The HuffPost (a.k.a., The Huffington Post ) just introduced a new app that lets users read top HuffPo articles without having to leave their Yahoo! homepage . With this groovy little widget, it now takes just one click to scan the most popular HuffPo stories,

by Claudine Zap Some would argue that every day is a party in New Orleans. But the Mardi Gras season stands alone as the carnival-street party-revelry that goes pretty much unrivaled â?" until Ash Wednesday , that is. The celebration got an early start this year when the New Orleans Saints pulled off their first Super Bowl win. Ever. But something tells us that NOLA can still find the energy and enthusiasm for the party of parties. Here,

The proposed Microsoft-Yahoo search partnership may soon be approved by one set of regulators, at least. A new report indicates that the European Commission will give it a green light one week from today. We should note that this isn't a sure thing; according to Reuters , an unnamed person who's "familiar with the situation" just said, "I expect clearance without any concessions next Friday." Still, that statement indicates a fair level of confidence,

A trending topic on Twitter today is Robin Hood Tax - with plenty of support for RobinHoodTax.org.uk's excellent video featuring Bill Nighy: The idea behind this is that "A tiny tax on bankers that would give billions to tackle poverty and climate change, here and abroad" . So far, this very well-thought out social media campaign has generated: 1,889 Twitter followers A never ending stream of Robin Hood Tax (currently a trending topic) and #RHT tweets 31,

SearchSpeak 2010 video spolights Yahoo! search initiatives Earlier this week we blogged about SearchSpeak 2010 , an event that took place at our Sunnyvale campus. At SearchSpeak, some of the smartest and savviest Big Cheeses at Yahoo! took folks through the search and search marketing innovations we've introduced over the past six months, and some of the innovations we're working on for the future.

Caroline Mastoras, our Travel category Development Manager in the UK, has been hard at work helping Thomas Cook create a vibrant and engaging solution for holiday goers to use when choosing where to go on vacation. Built in Silverlight , you use your mouse to spin the virtual map and choose a destination to see video promos, detailed information and check availability and pricing from Thomas Cooks extensive worldwide portfolio of holiday inventory.

It is interesting to note that, according to Google, there are monthly 12,100 searches for the phrase "Website Translation" and only 1,000 for "International SEO". Of course, there are other phrases of importance such as "multilingual SEO" but that's even small and actually there are a great many more varieties of website translation phrase than international SEO. By my reckoning,

Local business search is becoming more of an area of great focus by search providers as time goes on. Google, especially, has been working overtime on providing new features that can help users find local businesses of interest. AOL's MapQuest has been working on improving its own business search functionality, which we talked to the company a little about. What kind of traffic do you get from MapQuest? Comment here .

We want as many people as possible to be able to access Facebook all the time, regardless of where they live or what device they carry. Today, we hit another milestone toward that goal, with more than 100 million people actively using Facebook from their mobile devices every month. This usage happens on almost every carrier in the world and comes less than six months after we announced 65 million people on Facebook Mobile . Through this growth,