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They have long supported charitable works by their employees and users, with the latest effort combining star power and Yahoo Answers to bolster the Up Close 2007 campaign to benefit Unicef.

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.