“UNICEF’s in-country communications teams are working with the schools using OLPC laptops, and also with children using other recording devices, computers, and mobile phones to preserve and share stories online,” explained Stephen Cho on the Official Google Blog.  “An enthusiastic team of Google volunteers, including me, developed the laptop application, the interview guides based on the work of StoryCorps, and the website.”

Also, as you’ll see upon listening to them, the stories stream through the YouTube player.

Fair warning: these stories aren’t guaranteed to be universally interesting, and due to language barriers (storytellers speak in their native tongues), it’s unlikely that many people will even be able to understand every story.  Still, Our Stories should create a remarkable historical record of what’s going on in the world around us at this point in time.

Something like 75 audio recordings are already available through the Our Stories site, and according to a FAQ section, many more may be added in the near future.

First we need to point out that Yahoo has its Widget Engine all ready for Vista. The application formerly known as Konfabulator runs just fine on Microsoft’s latest operating system, with some 3,700 widgets available for download.

On the charitable side, Yahoo teamed with Unicef for a ten-day celebrity-studded awareness building campaign. Through Yahoo Answers, celebrities from film, TV, music and sports will ask questions of Yahoo’s users to build awareness of children’s issues throughout the world.

Actors Lucy Liu, Lawrence Fishburne, Alyssa Milano, Danny Glover, and Tea Leoni, musicians Clay Aiken and India Arie, NBA star Elton Brand, and celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson have been listed as celebrity participants for the program, which runs from today through February 9th.

The opening question, “What can we do to get more Americans committed to supporting programs that help children?”, comes from singer and Unicef Ambassador Clay Aiken. Nearly 2,000 answers have been posted in response already; they range from thoughtful to useless, with answers in the latter category being voted down by users in favor of exposing the better ones in the thread.

Quite a few responses made early on touched on a similar idea: increase awareness of Unicef and its mission. There are a number of worthy causes people can support. If they only know Unicef from the Trick Or Treat coin collecting done each Halloween, that means there is room for people to learn more.

The Yahoo Answers campaign should be a good start toward educating more people, since Yahoo draws so much online traffic, and its Answers service has become a popular stop for users ever since its debut in December 2005.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.