Yahoo! video nominated for award

QUINCY - About 250 goats grazing and playing near Yahoo's Quincy

data center are the subject of a two-minute industry video titled

"Purple and Green."

The video was made by Soap Lake filmmaker Kathy Kiefer and

recently nominated for a People's Telly Award.

QUINCY - About 250 goats grazing and playing near Yahoo's Quincy data center are the subject of a two-minute industry video titled "Purple and Green."

The video was made by Soap Lake filmmaker Kathy Kiefer and recently nominated for a People's Telly Award.

The honor recognizes "the very best local, regional, and cable television commercials and programs, as well as the finest video and film productions, and work created for the Web," according to the Telly Awards Web site.

The video is online now, at http://www.youtube.com/tellyawards?x=jbhWwaVdFH0, where viewers can vote on their favorite nominee to win the award.

Kiefer said she was contacted by Lisa Karstetter, at Yahoo!, to videotape footage of goats arriving at the data center.

"I had no idea what to expect," Kiefer said. "I sort of put this together, to reflect my own sort of 'wow, this is how this works.'"

The film was shot in one day last summer to show others in the server farm business what Yahoo! was doing to control weeds in a environmentally-friendly manner, she said.

"Amongst the technology companies, server farms are a big deal," Kiefer commented. "They're in a race to produce the greenest server farm."

One highlight of the video is at the end, when a young goat bleats.

He was one day old and born in Quincy, she said.

Andrew St. Pierre, of Soap Lake, worked as videographer for the project.

"It was such a fun little project to do and the idea behind it. It was supposed to be an energy-efficient green project. They were trying to find the friendliest way to remove all those weeds from their drainage ditch."

St. Pierre also learned more about the unpredictably of animals.

As he was trying to shoot close-ups of the goats, a baby goat started nibbling on his microphone cable. As soon as St. Pierre pulled the cable out of the goat's mouth, the animal went straight to St. Pierre's shirt.

Lisa Karstetter, Yahoo's community relations strategist, said the video was first shown internally to 14,000 employees to illustrate different alternatives for other data centers and company properties.

"Kathy got it going viral," she commented.

The goats grazed around Yahoo's stormwater retention pond, trimming the overgrown kosha weed.

"We were having a hard time trimming weeds in that area," Karstetter said.

Craig Madsen, owner of the Edwall-based Healing Hooves, the business that supplied the goats, said Yahoo! may bring the animals back this year.