Elatable : Bradley Horowitz

2011-10-31T22:07:00.001-07:00

About BradleyThis is a test... ignore...

Test

2009-09-17T14:00:00.001-07:00

And the winner is...

2009-06-03T22:26:00.000-07:00

And the winner of the Android G2 phone is... Leonard Lin!

First apologies for not posting this sooner. I did "pick" a winner at Monday at 9pm, just took me 48 hours to tell you who it was.

Secondly, thank you to everyone who submitted ideas. I got about 20 serious submissions, and a few jokey ones, through comments on the blog post, tweets, and emails. I thought many were great. I hope you all do go forth and develop them.

The reason I picked Leonard's idea:

Bet on the team. Leonard is a rockstar developer, fantastic track record... Every project he touches thrives.
I think the app he described is extremely interesting. Reminded me of Dash Navigation, a company I've found fascinating for a long time. The concept of crowd-sourcing data about the commute (both historical and real-time) leads to many, many interesting derivative apps. (For instance with Dash, real-time rerouting around traffic jams, determining speed traps, etc.)
I like the focus on public transport. Good for the economy and environment.
Leonard's idea, as you see below, was well thought out.

Darius Roberts was definitely my runner up. Darius, I hope perhaps you can collaborate with Leonard (and I'll intro you guys.) I think that "rideshare yenta" is an awesome, complementary idea. I ought to be able to register an intent to get from San Francisco to Palo Alto, and the app connects me with the right commuter (I can express preferences about whether I'm willing to drive, split gas money, etc.)
Leonard, I'll be in touch regarding getting you the goods. Thanks, and I can't wait until you build something.

Finally, just to be explicit... This "contest" wasn't endorsed or sponsored by Google. I just wanted to give the phone to a good home. Thanks!

Leonard's idea:

So, here's the basic idea about creating a *great* Transit app (one that has features that no one else has really bothered with yet).

I'd start w/ SF for v1 b/c I have all the transit data (511.org gives full dumps) and because BART and NextMuni give full realtime data, so you can basically get to the minute predictions, but the idea would be to create something that could load any GTFS data, or ping against GMaps' routing but add some additional features.

I don't have a name/domain name yet, so if you have any bright ideas on that...

Backend:
* REST API for data
* Proxy for realtime data

Routing:
* Caching or full local DB of stops, routes, tiles
* Collecting data on favorite routes, stops, destinations
* Reverse chronological history of searched (maybe even taken) routes
* Easy reversals or routes, destinations

Route Choosing:
* visually lay out alternative routes
* pull in realtime data
* show more info on arrivals time, transfers

Reminders/Alarms/Affordances:
* Reminders for last return trip if you're out on the town
* Alarms for longer commuter trips (geoloc/time elapsed, absolute time)
* "First time" / "lost" affordances - what are the previous stops, where are you now, etc.

Nearby View:
* See nearby stops, specifically when they're coming.
This is especially useful if you know that multiple routes can take you to the same place... (I can take the 26, 14/49, or BART to get back home)

I whipped up a couple super simple wires (about 5min each, but hopefully they give somewhat of an idea)

Integration w/ Glympse would be interesting (I was glad that someone's been working on that since that is something I'd been complaining about for the past year :)

Anyway, if that's successful, the next thing that would be of interest to tackle (v2) is NYC - b/c of the Subway/undergroundness of it all and lack of any "real time" data, the NYC version would be focused on developing crowdsourcing capabilities - ie, when you head into and out of a Subway station, perhaps the ability to mark in/out times and aggregating and processing that data. I haven't fully thought through the algorithms, but I bet just by when people are leaving at previous stops you can find out if you're looking at a 5m or 25m wait...

Once this sort of algorithm is perfected, if it'll work in NYC, it'll work (better!) for any city that has aboveground transit (buses) w/ schedules but no exact times...

Giving away an Android G2 "Google I/O Edition" phone

2009-05-29T23:13:00.001-07:00

IMG_2634
Originally uploaded by mansillaDEV

I accidently happened upon an Android G2 Google I/O edition phone (with 30-day SIM card, etc.) (The giveaway was detailed on TechCrunch.)

I'll give this away to the developer who convinces me that she or he will do something cool with it! Leave me a comment or send me a tweet, and I'll pick a winner on Monday night 9pm PST.

Printing a PDF from a gnarly hotel kiosk computer

2009-04-20T13:43:00.000-07:00

I'm in Europe on the tail end of a wonderful trip (Amsterdam/Zurich.)

Tonight I asked the guy at the hotel desk (great hotel by the way) if they had a printer I could use to print my boarding pass. "There's the printer", he said motioning to his right. "But unfortunately it won't print PDFs sir." I looked at the machine... Some kiosk version of Windows XP - wouldn't allow downloads (let alone installs.) Serious bummer. I have an early flight and a tight connection, it would have been helpful.

Then I remembered "Gview", Gmail's righteous PDF viewer. Went back to the laptop in my room, mailed myself the boarding pass PDF and sparked up Gmail's viewer. Half way there. Then right-mouse'd, saved, and emailed the image file in .png format for Page 2 (the actual boarding pass) to myself again. Went downstairs, logged into Gmail, read that mail, clicked "View" and VOILA! The image file opened up in the browser perfectly... Clicked print... and it worked.

Thank you Gview team!

Paul Resnick lecture in Palo Alto

2009-03-31T09:54:00.000-07:00

This morning I went to a very interesting lecture on reputation systems by Paul Resnick, Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information (where I'm an advisor. And like me Paul went to umich for undergrad, MIT for grad school.) Paul's work provides some rigorous mathematical foundations for how collective intelligence systems can be manipulated, and techniques for bounding and mitigating abuse. Important stuff that I'm certainly paying attention to... Note there were a lot of questions about marijuana legalization on the whitehouse.gov Town Hall last Thursday. ;-)

Sonos player

2009-03-29T20:11:00.000-07:00

Irene's got a Sonos system in her house... I discovered a new feature this weekend, and it's pretty darn cool.

I love listening to This American Life, but rarely can free myself up at exactly 12pm on Saturday, when it airs on KQED. So I started fishing on their website to find out how I could catch it earlier (by say, listening to the East Coast airing on WNYC) or catch it later (listening to the Hawaii airing on KIPO). But it was really tedious and hard to figure out when it was airing where...

Sonos to the rescue... There's a feature that allows me to search for shows by name, see if they're playing now, see when the show is playing next (across the zilliosn of stations around the nation that stream), and see what past episodes are available via podcast. Pretty cool!

Some old Spahn Ranch material

2008-10-05T12:23:00.000-07:00

From the original 4-track demo tape... Courtesy of Rick Giampietro...

Countdown
Trial
Lo & Behold
Wonder & Perish
Echoes
Dissipation

Countdown has the original ee cummings lyrics.

Songs with tribal / marching band drums…

2008-08-21T19:33:00.000-07:00

Love those jungle drums. Irresistible, primal, they got you.

Winners in respective categories:

Best Non-Gimmicky Use
Radiohead, There There

Best Gimmicky Use
Toni Basil, Mickey
Runner up: Gwen Stefani, Hollaback Girl

Best Incorporation of Marching Band
Fleetwood Mac, Tusk

Best Actual Marching Band
Pride of Arizona, Radiohead Medley

What are some others?

“Loopt debacle…”

2008-07-16T03:33:00.000-07:00

I was pretty shocked and surprised at the news that Loopt had a fairly egregious violation of user trust.

When the FireEagle team built their product, privacy was not only their foremost concern... it was in fact pretty much the main "feature" of the product.

Loopt has done the right thing and put their hand up and said "our bad!"

Goodbye, Bobji…

2008-05-21T02:59:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago I learned that Bob Sterner, my dear friend of 24 years died from a suspected drug overdose. (Autopsy report still pending.)

Bobji

I first met Bob when I was nineteen. Odell and I were just old enough to start checking out the local Detroit music scene (which at the time was quite vital: Necros, Negative Approach, etc.) One evening we happened into a show by the band Grief Factory.

We were totally unprepared for what we saw next. Grief Factory was a minimalist three piece... An incredibly talented jazz drummer, tribal repetitive bass licks, and... Bob. They burned incense, lit candles, said prayers... it was not so much a concert as a ceremony. All of this could have been incredibly pretentious... but it wasn't. It was real, and somewhat frightening.

Bob was part shaman, part madrigal... He moved like no one I've seen before or since. He sang like no one I've heard before or since. Poetry flowed from him effortlessly. He was plugged into something deep and ancient, that I don't think he even understood or knew how to manage. He was so raw as to be almost unhinged... as if he were tripping or even mentally ill... But because he was willing to flirt with these scary, dangerous parts of himself... genius erupted.

After Grief Factory broke up, Odell, Bob and I formed Spahn Ranch. We were totally unskilled as musicians, and were seriously worried about that first practice session with Bob. He was still a larger than life character for us, and we were certain he was going to call our bluff... and we had literally nothing. Neither Odell nor I knew how to play an instrument. We hadn't even decided who'd play what. We had no equipment. But at that first session, Odell grabbed some souvenir ornamental drums from the walls of his family's Afro-pride decorated suburban home... And we rustled up a pawn shop guitar in time for Bob's appearance... And I remember that first time, playing outside... near the shed on the Double O ranch... magic happened, and we all knew it. Over the years Sarah Babb, Rob Rude, Billy Rivkin, and others floated in and out of the band... And eventually Hobey Echlin became our fourth permanent member.

Bobji and me

Eventually we achieved some measure of success by modest local standards. We put out an album on California's (in fact Oakland's!) Insight Records, and pretty much commandeered the privilege of opening for national acts that came through Detroit in the 80's: Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Jesus and Mary Chain, Swans, My Bloody Valentine, Nina Hagen, etc. We had an avid fan base... But apart from the small modicum of local success we enjoyed, playing together always remained a ritual. Even if it were the four of us in a basement, it still gave me an opportunity to watch Bob in action. Whatever noises or melodies I could tease out of my guitar were just raw material that would hopefully inspire him and provoke him into action.

After a couple years, we broke up. My recollection is that this happened when Bob moved to the Cape to study nursing. I soon followed him to Massachusetts to grad school at MIT. Odell and Hobey pressed on and formed Majesty Crush. Majesty Crush were freaking amazing, and I still love them. Go buy this CD.

When we was young and sleepy

Anyway, my friendship with Bob shifted away from music (or at least from "the band") to a deeper connection. Bob and I shared a spiritual connection, that eventually led him to India where he served as the staff nurse in a small rural Ashram. He intended to stay for a short while, but ended up spending years there.

While in India, Bob nearly became Indian. He picked up fragments of Hindi... It was his seva (service) to take care of a number of elderly ashramites (folks in their 80's or 90's) that had been instrumental in the very formation of our path. These guys were "walking antiques" [(tm) Bob Dylan]. These guys loved Bob and he became not only their caretaker and mascot... but one of them. He joined their posse (and they very much ran as a posse.)

At the clinic folks would come by with the usual litany of minor ailments (scratches, rashes, bug bites, dehydration, etc.) and Bob would treat them with love and respect... but also a deliver a dose of connection, good will, love, smiles, gossip, poetry, art and advice. He became an institution, and literally hundreds of people grew to know him and love him through that role.

Bob absolutely adored Indian culture. When I came to visit, we'd make trips into Bombay where he'd show me back alleys, little chai shops, how to travel on the trains with the working class, etc. He adored everything about India, but especially the people...

Over the years, we watched each other go through relationships... We watched each other change jobs... Change tastes... change habits... But our friendship and love was constant, and truly never wavered.

We were very, very different... but we totally appreciated each other. The world will never be the same for me with out Bobji on it. I lost a brother. But I am committed to honoring his memory in the way I know he'd want me to... by "loving bigger"... a beautiful phrase his sister Jeannie invoked at the memorial on Friday.

Okay, now a public service announcement...
PLEASE DON'T DO DRUGS THAT CAN KILL YOU!
< mount soapbox >
I am particularly devastated by Bob's departure because it was so senseless. I have gone through the usual bouts of self-flagellation around "How could I not have known?!" and "I failed him..." Truth was, I had no idea that Bob was back on drugs. I knew he'd had a problem over the years, but all signs pointed to a total recovery... Everything seemed to be going so well for him. We had made plans to see each other on Friday night... and instead I was at his memorial that day.

So please do not OD on drugs.
</ mount soapbox >

Attached are some memories from Bob's friends who gathered together in Trenton MI to celebrate his life...

Goodbye, Bobji...

Amy Goodman at Google tomorrow…

2008-04-14T18:46:00.000-07:00

I just came to know (via a campus poster) that Amy Goodman is speaking at Google tomorrow via the Authors @ Google series. Noam Chomsky coming later in the month.

The group sponsoring this series is doing a fantastic job of bringing compelling, provocative speakers. What a perk!

And the talks are archived on YouTube for the world to enjoy.

This in addition to an unbelievable stream of internal technical talks that transpire on a daily basis. I'm way impressed.

Call me…

2008-03-24T16:24:00.000-07:00

I'm playing around with Grand Central, and am really impressed with the power of this service. (Not to mention impressed with the team... What a talented bunch of folks!)

I've added a "Call me" tab to this blog... I'd love to hear from you. Give me a shout...

Thanks.

Video of Martin Friedmann

2008-03-03T06:52:00.000-08:00

In an effort to remove physical clutter around my house between gigs, I bought a cool device: the Pinnacle Video Transfer unit. The device is cheap ($129), accessible (bought mine at Best Buy) and works exactly as advertised.

One of the things I ripped was my old VHS copy of the memorial that Ali put together for Martin's memorial. When I eulogized him, I said - "To those who knew him, no explanation is necessary... To those who didn't, no explanation is possible..."

Well even if you didn't now him, this video gives a taste:

More about Martin here... He'd have loved Google.

On Leaving Yahoo…

2008-02-14T08:33:00.000-08:00

Leaving Yahoo.

Yes, it's true. I've left Yahoo.

It was somewhat overwhelming sifting through the barrage of reactions over the last 48 hours: "Thanks for all you've done", "How could you?!", "Congrats!", etc. It's fascinating to watch people react. I've been taking it all in.

I want to use this post to explain some of the circumstances around my departure.

I came to Yahoo out of a startup that I helped found, and it was my first "real job." I literally expected to stay there one year. I thought it would be a good life experience to see first-hand how a successful, multi-billion dollar corporation operated. But I never expected to build a career there... to retire from Yahoo... or frankly to stay for a multi-year stint.

But this "park there for a year and learn" strategy was out the window in a day. There was such an excitement at Yahoo, and I was taken aback by the level of passion and talent there. This was no place to "park". And not aspiring to climb the corporate ladder there made it easy for me to be cavalier, call shit on stuff I thought was broken, and generally do what I thought was right.

What was most delightful is that I never got the expected "pushback" from management. Instead they were the wind at my back, pouring gas on the fire, inviting me and challenging me to do more and more provocative things. So in this manner, nearly four years flew by. I had a dream job that I had the luxury of creating for myself. It was a perfect fit between my inclinations and abilities, and Yahoo's needs at the time.

The name of the group I created at Yahoo is the Advanced Development Division, or ADD for short. I wanted to be VP of ADD. I was able to retrofit a reasonable acronym back onto the letters and got away with it. I'd generally say, "I head up the ADD group at Yahoo... We work on lots of things, for a little while..." That was generally good for a chuckle... but it's true, that's how the group was designed. (By the way, I don't know a lot about the actual syndrome ADD, and I don't mean to make light of it. Apologies if I am being crass or inappropriate... not my intention.) The point of this paragraph is simply that as VP of ADD, four years is a very long time for me to focus on anything! I am amazed and grateful that Yahoo continued to create circumstances for me that held my full interest and engagement... and hopefully allowed me to make the place a little bit better.

The question should not be "Why are you leaving?", but rather the rhetorical "Isn't it amazing and wonderful that Yahoo created circumstances that allowed you to stay for so long?!"

Starting to thank people is a very slippery slope. Apologies to everyone that I'm surely going to omit, and if you ping me I'll edit the post to try to atone for egregious errors. These are some of the folks that I feel compelled to call out and thank for making my experience at Yahoo so wonderful:

My heartfelt thanks to Eckart Walther, Jeff Weiner, Qi Lu, Raymie Stata, Prabhakar Raghavan, Kiersten Hollars, Dan Rosensweig, Chad Dickerson, Cindy, Kaigene Jau, Ethan Fasset, Joe Hyrkin, Ellen Salisbury, Marc Davis, Joshua Shachter, Wendy Pfeiffer, Doug Crockford, Tim Mayer, Joff Redfern, Meg Garlinghouse, Randy Farmer, Susan Mernit, Marco Boerries, Paul Levine, Jen Dulski, Lorna Borenstein, Scott Gatz, Gary Clayton, Caterina Fake, Salim Ismail, Ian Rogers, Larry Tesler, Joy Mountford, Irene Au, Zod, Phu, Venkat, Terry Semel, Brad Garlinghouse, Toby Coppel, Stewart Butterfield, Libby Sartain, Andrew Braccia, Mor Naaman, Tim Cadogan, Sam Pullara, Tom Coates, Jeremy Zawodny, Mike Marquez, Jeff Karnes, Pasha Sadri & the Pipes team, MyBlogLog team, Andy Baio & Upcoming, Arlo Rose, Sue Decker, Ash Patel, Jerry & Filo.

This is the tip of the iceberg. Yahoo is filled with brilliant, dedicated folks that have inspired me and been incredibly generous to me. Thank you.

FAQ:

Were you laid off?
Ha, I wish. Yahoo provided very humane (even generous) packages and accommodations for those folks. See next question...

Why now?
The timing is a bit unfortunate. I wish I were leaving with Yahoo on top of the world... it'd still be the right thing for me personally. So while the timing may look "suspicious", please don't project your own assumptions onto my decisions. I thought that since so many people were leaving on Tuesday, it'd be a good day for me to slip out unnoticed too.

What about your teams? What happens to Brickhouse?
The teams are in great shape. Salim is also gone, and I arranged to fold the Advanced Product and Brickhouse teams under the leadership of Chad Dickerson. They recently launched Yahoo Live! to much fanfare, and have several more fantastic products in the pipeline. Chad is the man. I have every confidence that the team will thrive under his tenure.

Part of why I feel able to leave is that the teams are rocking, and much of the change I aspired to bring to Yahoo is now baked into the culture. Yahoo has no single-point-of-failure, and I've thought a lot about succession planning. Yahoo and the initiatives I started (or care about) are gonna be just fine without me.

So you've lost faith in Yahoo's strategy, leadership, etc.?
Not in the least. I have been incredibly impressed by (and reasonably close to) the improvements and changes that Sue and Jerry have instituted in the past 6 months. While the search for a "silver bullet" came up short (hey, it was worth looking), I believe the management is doing all the right work to align the team to execute on the new strategy. And the strategy itself? I think it's spot-on, and has already made a huge impact on how the company identifies itself. When I joined 4 years ago, Yahoo was all about what transpired on "*.yahoo.com". That part of Yahoo now self-identifies as our "O&O" (owned and operated) division... In the context of Yahoo's larger ambitions, it's extremely helpful to be a principal in the publishing space (and not just a principal, but amongst the web's largest)... but Yahoo has transformed itself into a company that participates and embraces the open internet ecosystem at large. Yahoo "gets it."

So you don't want to work for Steve Ballmer, eh?
I have no more insight into the current MSFT / YHOO discussions than any avid reader of the NYT, WSJ, etc. Given my trajectory, I honestly haven't invested a lot of time or energy wondering which scenarios would play out best for Yahoo. I have faith that Yahoo's board and management will optimize for the best possible outcome.

What will you be doing at Google?
We'll save that for another post. What's unfolded for me over the last few months while thinking about my next steps has been amazing and surprising... I'm excited about the my next step, and thrilled I'll be working with a stellar team that I'm sure will teach me a lot.

Thank you Yahoo!

live is live

2008-02-07T10:56:00.000-08:00

live is live

DLD Conference

2008-01-20T19:40:00.000-08:00

Richard Dawkins & Craig Venter

Originally uploaded by bradley23

I'm at the DLD Conference in Munich.

This is my first time at DLD (though I've been to Munich many times for other conferences and personal visits. It's a city that I love.)

The conference agenda is pretty thrilling. Apparently a lot of folks stop through DLD on their way to Davos, so the quality of speakers is outstanding. About the only challenge is that the conference is oversold by about 2x. The facility is busting at the seams, and simply navigating around into the sessions is practically impossible.

I'm on an "Exploding Media" panel tomorrow, with Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, Marissa Mayer and Peter Hirschberg. Looking forward to it...

Gatz hands the baton to Dickerson…

2007-12-17T14:06:00.000-08:00

Scott and Chad crosspost and tell the tale: Scott's story & Chad's story. I'm honored to work with these guys. Two of the classiest individuals I've had the pleasure to know. Scott, you'll be missed... and thanks for everything from the bottom of my heart.

Yahoo Plugin for WordPress

2007-12-12T16:44:00.000-08:00

As reported by Battelle, we just launched the Yahoo Plugin for WordPress. This blog, elatable.com, runs on WordPress.

The plugin is very cool. You simply author the post as you normally would. You click a 'lil button that says "Review this Post"... and all kinds of valuable goodness auto-populates the post.

For instance if I name a place, say Ann Arbor, MI, that'll be auto-detected and linked to...

If I mention a company, say Hewlett-Packard, then that too will generate goodness (I've opted for the badge at left...)

You can read more about it (and get it for yourself) here....

Open Data is Good for Democracy

2007-12-12T10:24:00.000-08:00

I recently attended a fantastic, inspiring event... The Open Government Working Group hosted by OReilly Media in Sebastopol... I blogged about it on the Next* blog...

Me v. Ze Frank (not so much…)

2007-12-02T13:48:00.000-08:00

Gordon Luk has a really interesting post that I'll use as a launching pad to clarify a point I often make in public lectures... In the interest of saving you a click, see below.
This reminded me of Umair's article "Why Yahoo Didn't Build MySpace..." which basically suggests that the pyramid of participation I reference is a Yahoo "strategy." Nothing could be further from the truth. Destroying that pyramid is our strategy. The pyramid is more of a forensic, backward-looking empirical observation. The very next slide in the deck is also shown below.

Lesson: Of course, I take full responsibility for these misunderstandings. Gordon and Umair are brilliant guys. So as I'm dishing out soundbites, maybe I need to slow down and make sure that I'm clearer...

Gordon says:

Do you ever have posts sitting around in wordpress for months at a time, delayed for one reason or another? This is one of them, and after re-reading it, I think I’ll go ahead and post it, but remember that it’s kind of a warp back in time to October 2006.

Yahoo! Open Hack Day was a massive, massive success, and i’m glad to have been a part of it. Now that i’ve had a few days to rest and reflect upon my experiences, I want to discuss an observation of Bradley Horowitz’s that has stuck in my mind.

Bradley’s one of the foremost advocates for social search development here at Yahoo. He’s one of the brightest minds around, and always makes my head spin a little bit when I talk with him. You can check out his Keynote presentation here (warning, this was 4GB to download!). Around the end of minute five, Bradley says some really interesting stuff. First, he showed the famous grainy video clip of a monkey trained to perform martial arts kicks in the context of what the worst-case scenario behind user-filtered content could produce. Then he went on to show some beautiful photographs from Flickr’s Interestingness, as a way to demonstrate the better side of what can be efficiently extracted from collaborative participation. His point that these photos bubbled to the top because of implicit user activity is key; as he mentions, the aggregate human cost of photo moderation borne by the user community on Flickr dwarfs anything possible by simply paying employees to review and rate them.

Ze Frank, seen in this video speaking at TED, a design conference, seems to also think hard about the new culture of participation on the Internet. Ze often invites his viewership to participate with him on various flights of fancy, including making silly faces, creating short video clips, playing with flash toys and drawing tools, etc. During his TED presentation, and also at various times on The Show, Ze talked about the hold that various groups have on the perception of art, and how many people are able to participate and create in a new culture without being ostracized by an established hierarchy. He seems to hold that the “ugliness” which seems to permeate MySpace is, in fact, a manifestation of participation outside of the boundaries of hierarchical editorial control. Thus, his position seems to be that the silliness and ugliness of the huge amount of web “design” on myspace depends heavily on perspective. At the minimum, he seemed to believe that participation culture removes barriers to experimentation that could lead to an overthrow of traditional design aesthetics.

These perspectives seem to be at odds. On one side, Bradley appears to be advocating the harvesting of social participation to come to results that select traditionally valuable content. In other words, using New Media platforms to efficiently perform the job of the Old Media publishing empires (Kung Fu Monkeys should be buried!). On the other side is Ze, who seems to be advocating not only a disruption of Old Media distribution through mass publication, but also seems to be leading a charge to disrupt traditional aesthetic values (Kung Fu Monkeys are beautiful, and should be encouraged!).

I think it’s an interesting contrast, and I worry that i’m mischaracterizing the arguments of each.

My personal viewpoint is a bit more nuanced. I believe that one day, web platforms will also be able to efficiently cluster their users based upon interests or tastes, similar to how Flickr can cluster tags to disambiguate meaning. These clusters will probably be designed not around user surveys or self-reported demographics, but instead will most likely be extracted through efficient methods of recording implicit participation information over the long term. There may well be a cluster (which I would belong to!) of folks that do enjoy Kung Fu monkeys, and there is almost definitely a cluster that find it degrading and offensive. The difference here between traditional preference filtering and clustered audiences is similar - one requires a great deal of potentially inaccurate user feedback about their preferences, whereas the latter acts more on implicit activity, and is thus more likely to produce the desired effects.

Not only would such a model be able to try and target clusters of preferences among users, but it would also allow for users to participate in cultures in which they feel welcome from the beginning.

I responded:

My argument is not so much that Kung Fu monkeys = bad, or that they should be “buried.” But in a world where “anyone can say anything to everyone at once”, our most precious commodity becomes attention. I remember sitting at the Harvard Cyberposium Conference a few years ago when someone said… “It’s getting to the point where every moment of our life can now be digital recorded and preserved for posterity…. [pregnant pause…] Unfortunately, one doesn’t get a second life with which to review the first one.”

Coming up with the right tools to help me get to what matters to me becomes essential. But I don’t want to get prescriptive - what matters to the fans of Kung Fu monkeys is… Kung Fu monkeys! And we should be providing tools that help that community as much as any other…

Another way of putting it… I’m disinclined to subscribe the a Flickr feed for the tag “baby”. Just not interested in seeing random babies, thank you very much. But my brother’s baby? My neice? Cutest baby ever! I want to see every picture of her that exists!

Death to the monoculture and long live the long tail! Long live low-brow humor, stupid pet tricks and mentos and diet coke! And Ze Frank…

My point is that tools like Flickr interestingness allow us to leverage aggregate attention for the benefit of each user. I love interestingness, and use it as a sort criterion for just about every search I do on Flickr… But Flickr also uses a social graph with varying coefficients (me, family, friends, contacts, public) to provide another dimension that helps direct my attention to the right babies. ;-)

I think my thesis is simply that in democratizing the creation of content, we’ve created a high-class problem… There’s too much “on”… 500 channels, maybe. 500M channels? Never. The flip side of this wonderful revolution in publishing, destroying the hierarchical pyramid of participation, is that we (our industry) have a burden to provide people the means of actually getting to the content they want to see… (Perhaps sometimes, even before they know they want to see it.) This ought to keep us busy for a lifetime or so…

I think you captured my view pretty much in your closing paragraph. I’d guess Ze Frank agrees with us mostly too.

Relaunch of next.yahoo.com…

2007-12-02T08:01:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago our team relaunched next.yahoo.com.

Simply, it's a place where we can show you some cool stuff happening at Yahoo. I shared more on the yodel blog.

William White and team just launched this very cool embeddable music player there. Timely too... Now instead of just linking to MP3s like I did in a previous post, listening to my old band is now just click away (or even less than a click if I'd selected autoplay...)

Go subscribe to next to keep apprised of what we're up to over here...

The Fall: Tempo House from Perverted by Language

2007-11-25T15:31:00.000-08:00

Visiting family back in Detroit, and staying with dear friend Bobji*. We spent the night trading music... I hooked him up with Sufjan Stevens, My Bloody Valentine, Ry Cooder, Fujiya & Miyagi, etc. He hooked me up with Spiritualized, LCD Soundsystem, old Tones on Tail, etc. So much fun.

As the hours got wee, we discovered this gem recently added to YouTube. The Fall's Perverted by Language album is in my all-time top 10. I have numerous live / bootleg versions of most of the songs on the disc. What is so cool about this video is that it is the very performance recorded on PbL. I didn't even know a video for this existed. I've listened to the audio so many times, every squeak and squawk, click and clack is burned in my brain. Watching Mark E. Smith and gang actually perform it... so cool!

I've been having a great trip home, including time today at the newly opened Detroit Institute of Arts. Awesome, more later on that I hope...

*Bobji was the singer for Spahn Ranch (I was the guitar player, Odell was the drummer and Hobey the bass player.) We were the Detroit based Spahn Ranch, not the industrial band of the same name (that had much wider acclaim and is what turns up if you use a search engine.) Anyway, someone on the net recently digitized our first (and only) album. Here's a few songs from it: countdown & echos of the day. And here's the cover!

They also made a MySpace page for us.

New Pipes release, iPhone support

2007-10-23T06:05:00.000-07:00

As reported on the Pipes Blog, Jonathan and the Pipes team just pushed a new release with features both useful and cool. I'm especially thrilled about the iPhone support (having just gotten an iTouch, thanks Mr. Hornik!)

In keeping with the endless stream of jokes that name "pipes" inspires, Jonathan created what may turn out to be one of the most important and useful Pipe of all... The Restroom Locator... A tip of the hat to George Costanza, connaisseur of public restrooms... ;-)

Mansur’s passing

2007-10-21T11:46:00.000-07:00

Rashi's father Mansur, the silver Weimaraner

Today Rashi's father Mansur left this world. It was a profound event, and I'm still collecting all of my feelings about it. He was a special dog, a special being. He traveled the world and touched so many people. I'm so glad that Rashi got to have Mansur close by for the first two years of her life. She always went ballistic when he was around, kissing him to death. He was very patient, very tolerant of her...

Mansur, yours was a life well lived. We will miss you, and I'm glad a piece of you lives in our Rashi.

Brightcove v. Maven

2007-10-14T23:37:00.000-07:00

The Boston Globe has an interesting article about Brightcove and Maven, or more specifically Jeremy Allaire v. Hilmi Ozguc. I know both of them a little bit, and have been following their respective companies for a while.

Both of them are really Virage 2.0, or at least the part of our business that we used to call VI (Virage Interactive) that Dave Girouard and Joe Hyrkin built in 1999. It's cool seeing these companies get traction. If they can really get momentum around the video ad network then methinks the journalist underestimates the potential exit magnitude.

Breaking: Stewart playing with Sonnet, taking fewer meetings

2007-10-02T03:44:00.000-07:00

Stewart responds to the Valleywag post:

Aaaaaaaactually, I'm going on paternity leave, not leaving Yahoo! (I took some of my leave in July and found that I rushed back a little early.) I am actually going to be changing more diapers and coaxing more burps for a while (thanks for getting that right - I do love her!) but have no plans to give up the paycheck just yet -- and I even have an uncomfortable number of meetings planned for when I'm supposed to be out on leave :)

Major improvements to Yahoo Search

2007-10-02T03:36:00.000-07:00

Want to congratulate Jeff, Vish, Tim, Eckart, Luke and Tom and the cast of hundreds who launched the improvements to Yahoo Search last night. I've seen some folks in the blogosphere underestimate the nuance and ultimately impact of this innovation. Making a change this radical is a bona fide "big deal", and there is a lot of subtlety involved. I've been using it for a bit, and am duly impressed. Kudos to the gang.

Valleywag fishes, Brickhouse thriving!

2007-09-25T03:18:00.000-07:00

I read this post with some measure of amusement. We'll be unveiling 3 or 4 major initiatives before the end of the year, which really represent the first complete turn-of-the-crank for the Brickhouse / Advanced Products model. Brickhouse is thriving. You'll be hearing more about these soon, and though I'm quite tempted to crow about them now... I'll resist.

Regarding the departures, Pipes "graduated" from Brickhouse (and hence left my group) several quarters ago. (And Ed had actually moved on from Pipes months ago.) From concept to hand-off Pasha spent more than a year on the project - frankly longer than we generally plan for... Our model is literally based on the premise that the DNA required to innovate as a "founder" on a small team is fundamentally different than the DNA required to operate on ongoing concern within a big company. (Hence Brickhouse.) Hence this kind of turnover is not only expected, but anticipated and baked into the model. We definitely ask our "founders" to help with tech transfer and transition, which both Pasha and Ed did in a totally responsible fashion. I know they both want to see Pipes succeed.

Frankly, my group is almost designed for "churn." I've been psyched to have "spun in" folks like Marc Davis (into our Connected Life business unit), Cameron Marlow (into Yahoo! Research), Matthew Rothenberg (into Flickr), etc. It's definitely a drag when talented folks "spin out" of my group and leave Yahoo, but it happens. Sometimes they go to Google. Sometimes they come back from Google. In fact that happened to Pasha. ;-)

I've got nothing but respect and admiration for both Ed and Pasha, and definitely wish them well. We'll miss them, but Brickhouse is thriving. Go Fish!

Open Hack Day Bangalore: Oct 5-6

2007-09-11T16:02:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to say I'm headed to Yahoo's next Open Hack Day, this time in Bangalore! It's hard to believe it's been less than a year since our first Open Hack Day with Beck. That's one long year! Many of us agree it was the "all-time best day at work ever."

I'm really excited about the fact that I'm going to Bangalore. Even though I've been to India 7 or 8 times, I've never been to Bangalore and haven't been to India in about 5 years. So excited!

And I'm very excited to see what innovations get cooked up there. Yahoo's Bangalore hackers have a sterling reputation, and I know the entire region is a hotbed of talent. It should rock. See you there I hope... Sign up.

Richard Stallman in Berkeley on Sept. 12

2007-09-09T01:23:00.000-07:00

Sadly, I'm not sure I can make this as I've just come to know about it. But MacArthur Genius and personal hero Richard Stallman is going to be speaking at UCB next week.

This will be thought provoking for sure. If you don't know all about Stallman (or rms) go read the the excellent wikipedia article on him.

One thing missing from the wikipedia article was that he had to hire someone to type for him because emacs (which he created) gave him severe repetitive stress injury. (Emacs is famous for "chorded" commands that wrap your fingers into pretzels.) Or maybe this was just MIT legend.

O’Reilly and Battelle on Hadoop

2007-08-04T16:28:00.000-07:00

Doug Cutting's presence at Yahoo is noticed and celebrated by O'Reilly and Battelle. I'm pretty proud that the good folks of Yahoo Search (and especially Raymie) made this happen. Congrats guys.

Cool word of the day: Idearrhea

2007-08-01T10:51:00.000-07:00

Someone just intro'd me to the word, idearrhea - idea/rrhea, i.e. diarrhea of ideas. The word doesn't have much takeup yet, though there is an www.idearrhea.com with some really funny cat/kitten photos.

Marc Andreessen on Employee Retention…

2007-07-06T09:09:00.000-07:00

Well, not really. On winning.

I'm loving this post, and did my part to circulate it amongst the leadership here at Yahoo.

Marc's comments about innovation really resonated for me... People have often misconstrued my group's mission as being responsible for "innovation" at Yahoo. I've always hated this. Once a journalist said to me, "Oh... You guys are the engine of innovation..." I paused and said, "No... We're the grease of innovation... We're not about innovating for Yahoo, but rather creating a forum for every one of our employees to become better at their craft."

That's what things like Hack Yahoo, and Hack Days are about. A program like Brickhouse is more about giving every Yahoo an opportunity to get their ideas resourced (via something we've called a Brickhouse sabbatical), than it is about an "elite" segregated group of individuals doing it on behalf of the company.

Caterina, Chad and I used to always revert to musical analogies. We're like the roadies, building the stage, working the soundboards, the spotlights, etc. We also provide a "house band" of super talented session musicians. But it's the Yahoos (i.e. everyone else) who gets to climb up on stage and shine. Caterina, Salim and Scott are like the "A & R" folks at a label - listening for talent that we might want to "sign up" and bring back into the studio for an extended session.

BBC Post

2007-06-30T14:14:00.000-07:00

I must admit I've got a bit of "poster's remorse" regarding the BBC blurb here.

I've got some lame excuses about why I didn't do a better job with this, which I'll spare you (ok, I can't resist... Two r/t flights to Europe and back in the course of 9 days was part of the problem.) I tried to be non-partisan, favorably invoking Yahoo competitors like Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc. I was told that the audience would be the "non-techy intelligent layperson." I didn't mean to come off as if I'd invented ubiquitous computing, didn't care about privacy, or .

I'll be more careful next time, and/or correct some of these sins on this blog.

Maybe I'm being too sensitive. Some folks said they liked it. ;-)

This sounds familiar…

2007-06-29T00:39:00.000-07:00

From the Wall Street Journal... "Google has begun experimenting with the creation of offsite "skunkworks" operations to develop cutting-edge products and separating out parts of the business to be run as more autonomous units within the company."

Hmmm...

Best Magic of UK Hack Day? I disappeared!

2007-06-26T08:17:00.000-07:00

Matt offers a great post on the "magic" of Yahoo's Hack Days... I had the pleasure of attending the most recent Open Hack Day in London...

For me the most magical thing about it was my utter lack of involvement. ;-) I did not help organize, coordinate, oversee, judge, etc. I went strictly as a spectator... It's so cool when an idea takes on a life of its own... The team did an amazing job, perfectly capturing the spirit of the program (but with an appropriate and unique EU flavor...)

Reminds me: Tom Coates mentioned recently that he got a kick out of seeing the name Fire Eagle starting to do the rounds... It was the silliest name he could come up with. I like it.

Welcome Jerry, Yahoo’s new CEO!

2007-06-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

Still digesting the news... but I am extremely optimistic about today's changes. Surprising myself how much in fact. But you'd need to know me to know this has everything to do with Jerry's entrance, not Terry's departure.

I am a huge Terry fan. Frankly I wish I'd had more occasion to interact with him directly, but every time I did I learned something... Terry is a brilliant, subtle, and generous leader... Watching him get beaten up in the press over the past year was excruciating. It was a very painful lesson in the "pile on" mentality of the popular press. It did however have the fringe benefit of forcing me to do an honest inventory of the company I've chosen to be at, our assets and liabilities, challenges and opportunities, etc. I've got a confidence now that is rooted in introspection. The new Yahoo needs committed, passionate individuals that not only "get it" but are willing to think long-term about the immense, world-changing opportunities at hand... The public thrashing we've taken and the weakness in YHOO over the last year has at least served to shake loose those that aren't here for the right reasons...

Having Jerry as our CEO is incredible... It was Jerry who personally "green lit" and funded Pipes (for instance)... When Caterina and I pitched it to him, he not only "got it," but explained it back to us in a framework that deepened our own understanding. Having Jerry as CEO is gonna be cool!

Also want to give a shout out to co-founder David Filo, who is 100% engaged (and has been continuously for more than a decade.) Filo just attended Yahoo's UK Hack Day, where he hung out at the venue interacting with hackers, supporting the event, acting as a judge, etc. Jerry and David are as passionate and involved as any founders I've seen at any company - startup or Fortune 500.

Terry, it's too soon for goodbyes and thank yous... I'm extremely psyched that you're staying plugged in and will serve as our Chairman in an ongoing way. Jerry, welcome back to (overtly) running your company and let's do this.

Lightning Strikes at UK Hack Day

2007-06-16T22:14:00.000-07:00

Hack Day London Indoor Rain
Originally uploaded by Josh Russell

I'm at UK Hack Day, spectating and just enjoying the vibe here... Chad rec ounts yesterday's remarkable lightning strike on Alexandra Palace as festivities were kicking off... too cool!

Flickr is stupid, and late… but redeems itself.

2007-06-11T19:58:00.000-07:00

I love Stewart Butterfield.

This is why I am in Berlin right now btw...

Congrats to Last.fm (CBS has a clue)

2007-05-30T00:24:00.000-07:00

So last.fm is getting acquired, via LA Times...

I've briefly met the founders, and they seem especially clueful and nice... Good for them.

Surely much credit for CBS's major cluefulness is on accounta my friend Mike Marquez who joined a few months ago. Nice going Mike. Looks kind of expensive at a glance, but I trust Mike's run the numbers... ;-)

Tagging on MyBlogLog: transparent and accountable

2007-05-25T01:16:00.000-07:00

MyBlogLog adds tagging. Very cool.

I love the fact that this tagging is transparent and accountable, the kind of thing you'd especially want for tagging people (v. say digital media objects.) I can see who's tagged me with what... so you'd best be careful!

Totally inspired by Cameron Marlow.

Next Open Hack Day!

2007-05-22T23:56:00.000-07:00

I'm happy that I'll be attending Yahoo/BBC's upcoming Hack Day in the UK! Last year's inaugural Hack Day was a careeer/life hilight... This one looks to be another over the top event. It's in a "palace"... that sounds different! Check out the details at hackday.org and on upcoming. See you there.

KCRW, MBE

2007-05-22T00:02:00.000-07:00

Provoked by Chad's post...

Krista's sister works on web stuff for KCRW in Santa Monica. Or "the home of the homeless" as Harry Shearer says at the close of Le Show.

She gave Krista the "Sounds Eclectic: Covers Project" CD... I'm loving it. I love covers in general, and for me highlights include two Neil Young soungs (Out on the Weekend and Harvest), James Taylor's Fire and Rain covered by Dido, but most remarkably an acoustic rendering of Beyonce's Crazy in Love that blew my mind. (You gotta love the line, "Got me hopin' you'll page me right now!")

Crazy in Love

Cool!
There is a treasure trove of goodness at KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic site...

Thanks for the Birthday Wishes

2007-05-09T04:03:00.000-07:00

Due to facebook and plaxo, a lot of people seemed to know it was my birthday yesterday and sent their good wishes. Thanks!

I had a truly incredible day. Krista and I spent a couple days in Big Sur at the Ventana Inn. It was so peaceful, and relaxing. It's not "posh" or ostentatious, but also not too rustic or primitive. It was just the right balance, subtle.

The weather was ideal. What seems to have been a heat spell for the Bay Area made it just perfect on the coast.

On the morning of my birthday, Krista had arranged for massages at the Esalen Institute. I'd heard of Esalen for 25 years, since reading about it in the Whole Earth Catalog in my midwestern suburb's public library. (BTW, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to whatever freak kept that library stocked with counter-culture handbooks during my teenage years...) I didn't know Esalen was quasi-accessible to the public (with advance reservations.)

The setting was sublime. The bath house there is set up on a cliff... The massages take place in an open air setting overlooking the stunning coastline. A gentle breeze blows through and the sound of the waves lulls you into a sublime state. Finally when you are done, you soak in the sulphur baths... that flow from a natural hot spring. While there, we watched three whales frolic up the coastline. It was absolutely stunning.

As we were pulling away, Krista summed it up - "It's actually hard to believe that such a place exists."

It was a very happy birthday!

Happy Anniversary, Bob…

2007-05-05T14:47:00.000-07:00

He married Isis on the fifth day of may...

Legally here.

Freeway Collapse

2007-04-29T10:21:00.000-07:00

Freeway Collapse on Highway 580 Eastbound

Originally uploaded by Thomas Hawk.

Ugh! The freeway collapse was about 1.3 miles from my house, and unfortunately between me and Sunnyvale... That means I'm liable to have some "interesting" commutes for the next few months. Fortunately, Brickhouse is open for business!

I could have just been my paranoia but the neighborhood already seemed congested today... I heard one TV announcer suggest that commuters trying to get to 880 from San Francisco could head north and exit at Ashby. This basically turns my neighborhood (Ashby, San Pablo, Hollis, etc.) into the detour.

There have been choppers overhead all day... I am surprised we didn't hear or smell anything last night/this morning.

Saved by the bark…

2007-04-23T01:02:00.000-07:00

Last night at about 11:30pm, I'm sitting on the couch next to Rashi, who is curled up in a ball sleeping... I'm getting ready to pick up Krista from SFO... Outta nowhere we hear someone run up our front steps and knock on the door... and try the handle.

Rashi goes nuts, barking like crazy... Though she's just fifty pounds, she sounds ferocious when provoked like this... I head to the door and scream,

"Who is it?" already sensing trouble as we don't get many Sunday night, 11:30pm visitors.

"It's (garbled)..."

"Who?!"...

"It's (garbled)...", he says.

I run around to the bay window to try to get a visual, and at that point I see a cop car with the spotlight swinging from side to side on a search... I stand in the bay window, wave my arms and mouth and pantomime, "He's here!". Plus, Rashi is going ballistic and you could hear her a mile away. The cruiser stops, two cops get out... and for the next half hour proceed to arrest the dude in front of my house.

Rashi is going crazy. I've never seen her like this. She sounds like a wolf with bloodlust, and she's pacing back and forth... She's so amped up that i have to take her with me to pick up Krista.

I talk to a cop that explains that the dude just got out of prison, and he's been attempting breakins in the neighborhood. They'll take it from there... Thanks to the Emeryville cops, who actually went 50 ft. outside of their jurisdiction to deal with this BTW.

I'm still committed to this neighborhood. This is the first serious incident that touched us personally since Krista's car was stolen three years ago. Things are definitely getting better, and hopefully this was just random bad luck.

Upcoming 2.0 Launches!

2007-04-21T14:16:00.000-07:00

I knew it was coming, but was blown away when I saw it... Upcoming 2.0 has launched.

Upcoming has been one of my favorite Yahoo sites for quite a while... I cannot believe that such a small team kicks so much ass. Congrats guys!

Why the famous get famouser…

2007-04-15T00:07:00.000-07:00

Kottke points to a great article by Columbia's Duncan Watts...

The social context of content has everything to do with it's meaning. It's one of the reasons that I think that a purely pixel-based algorithmic approach to, say, image recognition is doomed. In optimistic moments, I've said that the computer vision community may produce a 98% reliable dog detector... But what we really want is a "funny" detector... or "cool" detector... that's gonna be a long-time coming... or maybe it's already here but involves analyzing people's actions around the pixels v. just the pixels in isolation.

Kurt Vonnegut… gone.

2007-04-11T14:54:00.000-07:00

Moments ago I learned Kurt Vonnegut passed.

I don't read much fiction, but I loved Vonnegut. I even picked up his more recent stuff... Like Dylan, even when he was not at his peak, he was still worthwhile.

Sometime around 1986 he did a lecture at the University of Michigan. I somehow weaseled my way into the post-event reception. There was a receiving line to shake Vonnegut's hand. What was outta whack was how formal everyone was... the entire affair was stiff and from another century. But I knew that Vonnegut was insane. So I got in the receiving line, and when I got to him I took his hand and dramatically dropped to one knee... Looked him in the eye, and said something like "You're ideas have moved me profoundly..." It was silly, adolescent and absurd... but somehow true to what I was feeling. Without missing a beat he squeezed my hand and said, "I'm so glad." We had a moment.

Bye bye sir. Your peephole has closed.

Salim Ismail joins Yahoo!

2007-03-14T20:54:00.000-07:00

I'm surprised that we were able to keep this under wraps for so long!

Mike Arrington's post at TechCrunch does a fine job of conveying why we think this is a big deal. There are a couple details that I can help clarify though:

"Tomorrow they’ll announce..."

Well, not really... I think that you just announced it Mike! Salim confirmed too! But hey, if you're looking for an official Yahoo! person with a working purple badge to actually confirm... I'll bite! We hired Salim!

He takes over from interim head...

That's not how I'd put it. Caterina's role in my group (and in Brickhouse in particular) is ongoing and formidable. She's not only been the driving force behind making this happen, but also will remain the "north star" that ensures the program rocks. As you point out, Brickhouse itself is "yet-to-be-launched" so we'll be saying a lot more about it and clarifying all this in the near future. But I couldn't be happier or prouder to have both Salim and Caterina involved. Lucky us!

In the really bad pun department... The only shame is that Salim isn't working on Y! Mail... after all, Salim Ismail... And my mentor Ramesh Jain... He's such an Artificial Intelligence pioneer they put AI smack-dab-in-the-middle of his name... Speaking of names, can you guess how many times Caterina has been spell-checked into "catering?" (Not to mention the problems she has with her last name...) Ok... I can hear you groaning. I'll stop now.

Welcome Salim!

We are hiring!

2007-03-01T22:52:00.000-08:00

Piggybacking on Jeremy's post...

Yahoo's Advanced Development Division is hiring. This is the team that's brought you Pipes, Hack Day, Open Hack Day, TagMaps, ZoneTag, Checkmates... and as Daniel Raffel wrote "other projects too secret to mention."

We need insanely creative, passionate individuals who are highly motivated to change the internet (and the world) as we know it. We've put together a supergroup already. You'll be working with bona fide rockstars of the industry. It'll be fun, lots of fun.

If you think you're "our kinda people", please drop us a line...

Thanks!

Tough but productive week for MyBlogLog

2007-02-23T15:30:00.000-08:00

Caterina has a great take that puts it all in perspective.

The team seems battle scarred and tired but exit the week wiser and with a better service. Nice going. May next week be just as productive... but less... um... exciting.

Pipes!

2007-02-07T13:16:00.000-08:00

Tim said it better than I could ever hope to...

I'm really proud that our team has launched Pipes tonight. It's still raw with plenty of rough edges... and it'd surprise me if more than a few folks will be able to connect-the-dots and see where this leads (... though Tim's explaining will surely help!) Still, it was time and the concept is "ready enough" to unleash IMHO.

My parents just arrived in the Bay Area, and so tonight I'll focus on them. In the upcoming days, I hope I'll find time to share why I'm so excited about Pipes and proud of the team. In the meantime, go smoke a pipe!

(BTW, I recommend that you check out the "Apartments near Something" pipe for an example of a smokin' pipe.)

The team themselves are the best resources for more info:
- Pasha, who deserves all the credit for both the idea and leading the team,
- Edward, whose passion is matched only by his technical skill,
- Jonathan, the man behind what may be the slickest AJAX application on the web,
- Kevin, who joined recently but completely took the design to a new level in a matter of weeks
- and Daniel, without whom this would be just another great idea that never would have seen the light of day.

And the endeavor was a Caterina Fake production, as all the above are members of her TechDev team.

There were many other supporters and contributors, but I'll avoid the slippery slope of invoking them because I'm mostly clueless.

Jeremy explains it too....

Recommended: Street Fight

2007-02-04T13:45:00.000-08:00

Street Fight is a 2006 Academy Award nominated documentary that chronicles the 2002 mayoral race in Newark, NJ. It's frightening, eye-opening... at times depressing... and at times inspiring. Thank god Cory Booker won the 2006 election and is currently Newark's mayor... Else this would have been impossible to watch.

MyBlogLog and Yahoo light up the blogosphere

2007-01-08T14:21:00.000-08:00

Quentin was first and Chad gave the details here: we've acquired MyBlogLog!

I'm totally stoked about this. In describing MyBlogLog, Chad used an "audio analogy." That definitely works, but I prefer the visual one: as powerful as blogging has been, we've been blogging "in the dark." Being a blogger meant the best relationship one's got with her visitors is through her logs - "Oo oo! 18.85.236.12 visited today at 11:04am!!!" And there's the comments of course, but we know only a fraction of visitors to the blog actually leave comments. See [1].

It's like we've been partying in the dark, and MyBlogLog turned on the lights! Now we can all see who's in the room.

Another analogy - the experience of reading blogs has been like attending a movie in the local metroplex. The cool thing about blogging is that it has democratized the process of making a movie. Now instead of just seeing blockbusters from the major studios, anyone can "make a movie." But the experience of consuming it is the same: a couple hundred strangers wander into a theater, the lights go down, and everyone faces the same direction staring at the screen. Protocol dictates little to no interaction with each other... (Isn't it annoying when there's a chatterbox in the next seat over?)

MyBlogLog turns on the lights, and invites people to look at (and dialog) with each other in addition to looking at the screen. Maybe the right analogy is a sports bar. The game is on the big screen providing the content and context. But the fun part is hooting and hollering with your mates, heckling the guys there to support the other team the next table over, etc. It's communal. It's interactive. It's participitory. It's fun.

[I've never been to a sports bar. Maybe I got that part wrong.]

This is a great way to start off 07. By the end of the month, we'll debut something equally interesting and impactful. What a great way to start off 07.

Five Things You Don’t Know About Me

2007-01-07T15:50:00.000-08:00

So Ken tagged me a while ago, but I’ve been chilling. Now I’m back in the saddle and ready to blog into 07. I’ll have more to say RSN (real soon now) about Yahoo. It's actually been somewhat amusing and illuminating watching the media frenzy from my unique perspective.

Anyway, here are five things you probably didn’t know about me!

1. I know a lot about gardening. For the past 20 years, my family has owned Flower King, a small flower shop in Livonia Michigan (between Detroit and Ann Arbor.)

Flower King opened when I was about 15, and my first job was doing demolition, painting, hammering, sweeping, etc. - literally helping to build the place. (My family has always rented out the florist component of the business, and run the outdoor/garden center.) Then (for subsequent summers up until I was about 23) I worked there... I got to know a lot about plants, running a business, and most importantly how to talk to people. The experience of working at Flower King helped make me who I am... Things I love about it:

intense hours (6am-10pm)
short, intense season (100 days)
intense physical labor (loading / unloading the trucks)
entrepreneurship (no one to delegate to)
family business (forged new aspects to my relationships with parents, uncle, siblings)

2. I am 50% WASP. Most people assume I’m 100% Jewish (given my name and the way I look), but I’m actually 50% genetically. My mom’s family (Grandma Thelma Jo Jones and Grandpa James Burris) are from places in Michigan like here and here,

and they drive pickup trucks and hunt, fish, work in auto plants, love Jesus and have names like Cotton, Woody, RJ, etc. My mom’s cousin (my second cousin) is Mark Farner, who was lead vocalist and guitarist for Grand Funk Railroad, the 70’s hard rock supergroup. We referred to him “Uncle Mark” (and due to his fame, his name came up a lot more than my other second cousins.) While this statement is oft-repeated and seldom true, I am in fact "one eighth Cherokee." My great-grandfather Abe Jones was full-blooded, and was driven from Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. (Abe was "Uncle Mark's" grandfather, and also accounts for his Indian blood and tribal recognition.)

3.

I have asthma. It was fairly intense as a child (I can remember being hospitalized twice and needing to get epinephrine shots and be placed in an oxygen tent.) It’s gotten milder and milder over the years, though it could still be triggered by a roomful of cats. I keep an over-the-counter inhaler around.

4. Like Sergey, I’m an ex-gymnast. In fact at one point my brother, sister and I held “Michigan State Champion” titles in our respective age groups and divisions.

My career ended when I was doing a double back pike dismount off the horizontal bar and ended up doing 1.5 flips and cracking my head on the bar. Ten stitches and a concussion later I was seriously rethinking my career in gymnastics. I still have a nasty scar. If I’d hit my neck as opposed to my head it could have been a lot worse. Apart from the risk and danger, gymnastics was an incredible sport for my mind and body. Deep core strength, flexibility, focus... It taught me a lot, and I’ve been coasting physically for a very long time on the foundation it gave me.

5. While at MIT I drove a 1980 Honda Civic with a “Fred Flintstone”

style hole in the driver’s side floorboard. I bought this car from a friend for $50. I spray-painted it flat black, and then had a friend do stencils on it. The damn thing ran and ran and ran... I ended up giving it to my artist friend William who drove it even more! I was in Cambridge recently, and the junkyard where I salvaged an alternator for this beast has been made into condominiums. It used to be right here.

Ok, now I am tagging Marc, Lucas, Edward, Dave, and Caterina. Guessing if some of these folks haven't responded by now, they don't want to play... but I'll give them another push! It took me a couple tries!

“Wisdom of Crowds” microconference at Yahoo on Wednesday 12/13/06

2006-12-10T12:57:00.000-08:00

And you're invited.

The TechDev Group is hosting our first ever "confab" (microconference) - details at http://confab.yahoo.com.

"Prediction Markets: Tapping the Wisdom of Crowds"
Wed Dec 13, 5:30-8:00pm
Yahoo! Headquarters, Building C, Classroom 5

Join us for a public “how to” session on prediction markets** moderated by James Surowiecki, New Yorker columnist and best-selling author of The Wisdom of Crowds. Speakers from Google, HP, Microsoft, and Yahoo! will describe how they are using prediction markets to aid corporate forecasting and decision making. Other speakers include the developer of Zocalo, an open source prediction market platform; the co-founder of InklingMarkets.com, a Paul Graham yCombinator startup; and Robin Hanson, the visionary economist and inventor whose pioneering work paved the way. The event is open to the public and will emphasize practical lessons and hands-on advice. After brief presentations from each speaker, Surowiecki will open up the session for discussion with the audience.

** A prediction market is like a stock market for ideas or information. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market
The market rewards good information whether it comes from elites or the masses. Prediction markets have built a track record of besting pundits and pollsters when it comes to predicting everything from political elections to quarterly sales figures.

Q: Are we not men?

2006-11-29T19:25:00.000-08:00

A: We are DEVO. D-E-V-O

I am turning into a bad traveller.

I cannot seem to sleep in strange beds. In NYC right now. Woke up at about 3:30am EST (which is 1:30am PST, still my biological time.)

But tonight I am happy. Turned on the TV... Not just the TV, but the very very nice 40" HDTV (which is a Samsung model that appears close to the LTN-406W for those that care)... And on HD-NET saw this concert: Devo and the yeah yeah yeahs in Central Park on July 22 2004.

We used to love Devo. But I haven't intentionally listened to Devo in nearly 20 years. It was fun watching myself sing along with every word.

Being up late watching Devo reminded me of the first time I saw the Beautiful World video, probably on Night Flight. From their Wikipedia entry "Devo created and directed many of their own videos, and the band has cited the video for the song "Beautiful World" as their favorite example of their video work."

The video works at an entirely different level than the "song." Over the course of a few minutes you see the sweet, sacharine images of our "beautiful world" unraveling into perverse carny devo funkiness... And only in the final moments do they deliver the punchline: "It's a beautiful world... (for you... BUT NOT FOR ME!)" Per the comments on YouTube: "devastatingly poignant irony that probably changed a few lives."

Both the yeah yeah yeahs and Devo were just so damn good. I'm glad I can't sleep.

Yahoo buys Bix

2006-11-17T00:10:00.000-08:00

I said it all over here.

So one thing to note... It turns out that the voice in my head does sound a lot better than the one that is being recorded. Something must be defective with the microphone, the Bix system, or whatever that keeps knocking it out of tune. Until I debug that system, I won't be posting any karaoke.

Also - we need to get some cooler songs into the Bix karaoke system.

Web 2.0 recap

2006-11-14T03:11:00.000-08:00

So the dust is clearing, and I thought I'd chime in regarding how I felt about the "Web 2.0 Summit." Look, it's not for everyone (double entendre intended, as I heard 5000 people were turned away.) But it's carved out a unique and valuable niche in the pantheon of conferences. Here's some personal highlights:

Seeing Jeff Bezos, Barry Diller, Mark Benioff, Eric Schmidt, Ray Ozzie, etc. up there doing their thing with John Battelle. I love the theater / sport of it. It's not about "learning anything", it's just fun watching John angling for a scoop or seeing if he can get a bigwig to squirm a bit. Mostly futile attempts BTW.

The hallways. Lots of folks (the badgeless) just surfed the hallways and got a lot out of it. It was a total schmooze-fest, but not in a bad way. Logistics were such that you could reach the people you wanted to connect with, avoid the ones you didn't want to connect with, and generally keep exchanges short.

The First Round Capital "Pavillion" hack. Brilliant, as reported by Fred.

Hanging out with Chris Anderson at a dinner on Wednesday.

Lunch with Barney Pell on Wednesday.

I thought that the Launchpad was great (disclosure: I was on the advisory board.) It was interesting to see some perrenial problems (sync, scheduling) being addressed with a w2.0 spin.

Finally, and obviously, it was a great experience getting on stage with Filo. The more time I spend with him, the more I come to appreciate and admire him. (Off a considerable base!) Better than sharing the stage with him was the time we spent prepping, talking to press, hanging out, etc. Inspiring.

Regarding W2.0, I've heard a couple of complaints. First, "The conference is now overrun with VCs." Yeah there were a lot of VCs there, but you know something, I respect a lot of VCs. Ain't nothing wrong with VCs by me. If I were in their business, I'd have been there too. Mentally conjuring the first ten VCs I can recall at the event actually puts a smile on my face. Most of those guys are hilarious.

Secondly, was that there was nothing "new." I really don't get this. We're two years into a... "revolution?" Well, how about "movement." A movement with gigantic, sweeping, over-arching principles that are visionary, epic, inspiring... (Thanks Tim.) And you're bored? You want something "new?"

There's tremendous value and craft to what Tim O'Reilly (and Chris Anderson, etc.) do so well. They offer us a framework, model and language for understanding phenomenon that are inherently true. They don't claim to have invented the phenomenon itself. This is what the prophets do, they tell us what we already know... and present us an opportunity to recognize it.

So, I don't need a new religion, I don't need a "Web 3.0." Frankly I personally could have done without the label "Web 2.0..." but hey, whatever gets us clueful and on the same page. One of the things I liked about the Launchpad was that I recognized the application of “Web 2.0” principles to old problems: sync, scheduling, etc.

So I'm not bored, I'm invigorated.

The hardest part for me at W2.0 was "sitting on" some of the upcoming work that will soon be coming out from my teams. There is mucho goodness on the way. I can honestly say that I saw hundreds of cool products, features and concepts presented but none of them inspired me as much as the work going on within our walls day-to-day. And I hope everyone can say that.

Yahoo Open Hack Day: Hell Yes!

2006-10-01T15:21:00.000-07:00

Well, that worked. :-)

As has been widely reported around the blogosphere, this weekend we pulled off Yahoo's first Open Hack Day.

The event was successful on so many levels it's hard to convey the way I feel. I will leave it to Chad, who deserves the credit for the event, to offer the official recounting. Beginning to thank people leads down a slippery slope, but I also want to call out Kiersten Hollars. Kiersten is purportedly in PR, but she basically ran point on just about every aspect of this event. Kiersten got almost no time in front of the spotlight, and my guess is that very few hackers who were there would even know who she is... But I assure you that the event could not have happened without her. Anyway, here are a few things that struck me...

The Developer Day trainings on Friday were incredible. The fact that Yahoo is offering its services (but in particular the YUI Libraries) to the world and getting our best and brightest on stage to offer their wisdom gratis is so cool. But here's someone who said it better than I possibly could:

I attended yesterday’s workshops and was really blown away. Yahoo! is the shit. Seriously, where else can you get the downlow on PHP from the guy who wrote it, sit next to the person who started Flickr as you learn how to hack the Flickr API, and get a tutorial on the Yahoo UI platform library from the people who designed them and then rock out to a private Beck concert, replete with a live puppet show? Punk. Rock.

The event had the unanticipated but delightful effect of accelerating the release of a flurry of Yahoo API's. In the last week BBAuth, Photos, Flickr, Upcoming, Mail, etc. That is very cool.

Fuckin' Beck! Beck totally got it. As far as I know, Beck isn't really on the "corporate event" circuit (to wit he headlined Shoreline's Download Festival on Saturday) and is probably peaking right now in terms of his popularity. (BTW I love the photo at left that combines the concert/corporate atmosphere.) The fact that he agreed to do this is a testament to the fact that he "gets it". The Beck show itself was filled with hackerly goodness (the meta-brilliance of the puppetshow projected behind the band, the on stage dinner party, etc.) After the show Beck took the time to walk around, check out the Hacks, interact with some hackers, etc. Beck (and his very cool band) were nothing but gracious and engaged. It was perfect.

The Open Hack Day logo. This was another labor of love, executed under tremendous pressure (t-shirts didn't arrive until the day of the event.) I think it's perfect. A visual pun - hacking code. Beck's folks loved it too and took a bunch. Hope they sport them!

The all-night nature of the event was so cool. It was great to see the tents, but also hackers sleeping on couches, in booths, on the floor, etc. I remember so many all-nighters I pulled in my younger days... I remember being so immersed in code, I'd dream code. I remember tag-team coding sessions with Martin (and John Maeda.) I confess I was not able to pull and all-nighter and actually crashed (in a soft bed) between 1am-5am. Folks like Matt Biddulph stayed up all night, despite Heather's efforts to rock him to sleep...

The spontaneous teams that developed. People came from all over the country and many with no idea what they'd be building or who they'd be partnering with. And yet, folks found partners... At least one of these impromptu teams actually won an award.

Michael Arrington. It is friggin' hard to emcee these events. Mike did it with grace, composure, humor, panache... He lent his voice, his endorsement, his goodwill... Mike's involvement was another moving act of generosity and I'm personally grateful to him. Go read TechCrunch.

The traditional media that covered the event mostly "got it wrong" but in a really endearing, adorable way. I'm referring mostly to the local television affiliates that sent anchor people in suits and ties and who needed explanations regarding the difference between "hackers" and "crackers." Hilarious. The blogosphere got it 99% right, mostly fueled by the bloggers that were onsite at the event. But there have been a tiny few that have speculated that this was a "Career Fair" in disguise, that it was all about Beck, that it was in some way disingenuous, etc. I could attempt to set the record straight but it's not worth wasting the keystrokes. To understand this event, you had to be there. If sadly you weren't, please take the time to talk to people that were rather than speculating. And not just the Yahoos... Talk to the folks who attended from Google, eBay, Microsoft, Adobe, etc., etc., etc.

Probably the best part about this is that we (my team) have the unequivocal support of Yahoo, across the org chart. An event like this doesn't fly under the radar. From the many, many (literally 100s) of folks that sacrificed their weekend to deal with countless last minute tasks (think stuffing welcome packets for 500), to the many teams whose toes we occasionally accidentally stepped on (only to have them turn around and offer unqualified assistance), to the huge support of our executives (Filo and Ash outlasted me on Friday night)... It's been an overwhelming show of support. Kris Tate said it best - we're a family. By the way, Kris's post impressed the hell out of me.

Chad and I introduced Filo (who introduced Beck) on Friday night. As I said then... "We're literally hacking Yahoo... [crowd cheers] and now the man who is giving us the axe... Yahoo co-founder David Filo!" We couldn't do something like this without Filo's implicit support... (and since I don't work directly with David, "Filo" is a proxy for the "seniormost levels of Yahoo.) It's my boss Ash Patel that is really directly empowering us with the resource and permission to make these things happen. A special shout out to Jeff Weiner too - I wouldn't be at Yahoo but for his vision.

The only negative Chad and I have been able to conjure: "This is gonna be hard to top." Good problem to have IMHO. We've already got some ideas :-)

Where should we stay in Kauai?

2006-09-27T13:45:00.000-07:00

At the end of October (right after ACM Multimedia), Krista and I will be taking a much-needed (for both of us) week of vacation.

We're headed to Kauai.

We still haven't figured out where we're staying. Thought I would solicit suggestions. These could range from areas of the island, specific places / rentals...

We're thinking that we want to stay on the North Shore, and are looking for a "cottage" or "bungalow." More rustic than polished. Doesn't need to be "on" the beach.

Let me know your thoughts! Leave a comment, or email me at bradley-at-alum.mit.edu. Thanks for any experience, advice, recommendations you have.

It’ll be del.icio.us!

2006-09-20T15:11:00.000-07:00

Del.icio.us is having its first birthday party (after three years.) It'll be fun! Joshua and the gang will be there in force, and you can ask him what it feels like to be an MIT Technology Review Innovator! If he's too busy, then you can ask Stewart!

I'll be there too, basking in the afterglow of our Open Hack Day. If that wasn't a smooth enough segue, then you can check out Chad's favorites tagged with yhackday on del.icio.us here.

And I would be remiss, dear hackers, if I didn't implore you to come to Open Hack Day. It's gonna be "off the hook" fun, cool, interesting, surprising... the list of people that are coming is already impressive and growing by the day. If you're a bona fide geek, hacker, nerd, coder, etc. then you will be kicking yourself come Monday morn when you read about what went down at this shindig. Check it out!

Cool Flickr Geotagging Examples

2006-09-10T04:08:00.000-07:00

Stewart recently showed me some very cool (and in some cases surprising) Flickr geotagging examples. Here's a few I loved.

Where is the neighborhood in Manhattan known as Tribeca?

Get your kicks, on Route 66

Food tour of Asia

What I love about the "tribeca" and "route 66" examples is that they show emergent knowledge in the system. Collectively, the efforts of many photographers map out a geographic element... Neat.

Sunday NYT Magazine story headlines a la Spell-With-Flickr

2006-09-10T03:37:00.000-07:00

The individual story headlines in today's New York Times Magazine are done a la Spell With Flickr...

From page 6:

Alphabet City: The headline typography for this issue came from the very place that the issue examines and celebrates: downtown Manhattan. Lucas Quigley, a contributing designer, went on a three-day excursion earlier this summer and photographed letters that appeared on theaters, dumpsters, shoemakers' shops, floor mats, hotels, constructions sites, plaques, scraped posters, and even the Amish Market near ground zero...

The cover story is "The Diaries and Notebooks of Susan Sontag". Yahoo Research Berkeley's ZoneTag is named in an homage to Sontag...

So go buy the Sunday Times.

CapitalOne Summit

2006-09-07T03:19:00.000-07:00

Had the pleasure of speaking today at a CapitalOne summit in DC.

Apart from the travel, I actually love doing these things. (I do wanna give JetBlue props though - pretty flawless service, and gotta love the TV. Watched the US Open while working.) Anyway, speaking with colleagues from Microsoft, Google and AOL, as well as CapitalOne, has been a really valuable experience.

At Virage, we used to strive that every employee had some customer touch and engagement. At Yahoo, it's so easy to change roles and join the ranks of our 500m "customers"... Every employee is most certainly a "user" as well... But it's way too easy to not rub up against the third leg of the stool, our advertisers. Gonna do what I can to make sure that my teams get more exposure.

AOL sent Ted Leonsis. Google sent Vint Cerf. MSN sent Joanne Bradford. Typically, DanR would have done this gig but he had prior obligations so I seized on the opportunity. It's been great.

Here's some liveblogging of Ted Leonsis' talk:

Leonsis: Ted Leonsis' secrets to happiness:
- Relationships
- Community
- Self-expression
- Giving back
- Pursuing a higher calling

Leonsis: "As marketers, you must leave more than you take. Gratitude is an unbelievably powerful concept. And saying thank you is an unbelievably powerful phrase."

Leonsis: "The happiest group of people by these measures are evangelical christians."

Leonsis: The Seven Web 2.0 virtues
- be generous
- it's good to share
- politeness matters
- be open
- listen
- respect individuals
- dilligence wins

Cerf:
IPTV is interesting not because of streaming, but because of on-demand possibilities a la iPod
IPTV is interesting because of interpretations of packets v. dumb raster display

Dylan marathon on AOL Radio (XM)

2006-09-02T21:51:00.000-07:00

AOL Radio is airing a Dylan marathon over this long weekend. It's back-to-back episodes of his XM radio show. Fun stuff, and I have to admit I've enjoyed his 'tween song banter more than the lost classics he actually plays. Check it out!

Google launches an espgame.org clone…

2006-09-01T19:03:00.000-07:00

Google has launched Image Labeler, a clone of Luis von Ahn's espgame. While it's conceptually a clone, it's been reimplemented in DHTML v. Java. Since CMU/Luis have patented IP around this, I'm guessing this is with Luis' consent.

upcoming:event=97532

2006-08-29T13:43:00.000-07:00

So congrats to our friends at Upcoming.org and Flickr for their Monday launches. Plenty of coverage all around the blogosphere... it's all been said. Here's what Upcoming did, and here's what Flickr did. Great stuff!

I'm really enamored of the event-related photos feature on Upcoming that knits these two products together. For every event on Upcoming, a canonical tag is generated that introduces a bit of passive structure. Attendees of the event can now use that tag on Flickr to unambiguously associate the Flickr photo with the Upcoming.org event!

I’m a little curious to see how tags like “foocamp06” win, lose, or happily co-exist with tags like “upcoming:event=97532” on Flickr. Cool reverse integration from Flickr back to Upcoming!

Even cooler! ZoneTag integration tying the two together is already done! Congrats Mor, Jeannie, et.al!

In the bad pun department, when press have cornered me into commenting about unreleased and unannounced product plans I say, “The only thing at Yahoo I can talk about that’s upcoming… is well… Upcoming.org.” They groan, but it works

Google into Enterprise Apps

2006-08-27T19:04:00.000-07:00

Google's extending into additional enterprise applications.

My buddy Dave Girouard runs Enterprise over at Google. Dave was VP of Product at Virage, and an absolutely brilliant strategist and business guy. He's been doing a great job with Google Enterprise Search, and now has extended his product line to other obvious categories.

Congrats to Dave, and Microsoft better keep an eye on Dave and team!

Come hack with us…

2006-08-26T22:42:00.000-07:00

The news is out! We're going to have a party and we want you to come! This is an "Open" Developer Hack Day. We're inviting you to come join us at Yahoo's Sunnyvale campus and spend 24 hours building cool stuff on Yahoo's platforms and API's.

More at http://hackday.org

Chad, Kiersten, Mike, Caterina, Leonard, et.al. have been planning this for quite some time. This is gonna be big, and gonna be fun.

More later... but for now... sign up and let us know that you're in.

Oh! And our emcee will be the inimitable Mr. Arrington!

Pitch your company at Web 2.0 Launch Pad

2006-08-21T20:42:00.000-07:00

Per John's blog, I'm part of the Advisory Board for the Web 2.0 Launch Pad.

If you think you got the goods, tell us about it!

Packets on a Plane

2006-08-17T18:16:00.000-07:00

I was bummed to see that Boeing is terminating its Connexion in-flight broadband service.

I recently enjoyed the service on the SingaporeAir long-haul flight from SFO-ICN and it was amazing. Even made a VOIP call, because... I could. Worked flawlessly. Changed the way I thought about flying.

While a bummer for Boeing, hopefully this isn't much of a setback for broadband in the sky.

Interesting(ness) post from O’Reilly

2006-08-14T22:13:00.000-07:00

Chad told me that Tim O'Reilly posted about interestingness today. I've been contemplating another post about interestingness for a while, and I was glad Tim beat me to the punch! Some of this I hope to discuss at the Adaptive Path UX conference Wednesday too.

I've been starting out most talks that I've given lately by showing two examples of "user-generated content" back-to-back. First I show the numa-numa kid:

Then I say something like, "As amusing as this is... does anyone else find this kinda depressing? If stupid human tricks, pratfalls, fratboy pranks and skateboarding dogs are the future of media... let me off the bus!"

Then I say, "But fear not. This is also 'user-generated content'":

pandaTwins
Originally uploaded by Sevenof9FL

Originally uploaded by Caleroalvero

dress
Originally uploaded by anetbat

And I fire up a slideshow of the 100 most interesting photos on Flickr. It's hard to describe the unfailing impact that these photos have... they are alternately moving, funny, disturbing, provocative... I go on, "What's cool about these is that they are not only user-generated... They are also implicitly 'user-discovered'... It's not as if I spent a couple hours finding the 'good stuff' myself. The Flickr interestingness metric percolated the 'cream' to the top of the pile. By 'implicitly' I mean that there's no explicit 'rating system'. [I talk more about the value of implicit v. explicit means of deriving value here...] To be clear, Flickr is filled with plenty of junk. In fact, we like it that way. There's not just a low barrier to entry, there's virtually no barrier to entry. Got a camera? Bam! You're a 'photographer!'"

"So Flickr is a system that accommodates taking a 'worthless' picture of a hangnail, or a breathtaking Ansel Adams-like landscape. The cool thing is that while creating a frictionless environment that serves both scenarios, we can also determine which of the two is likely more 'interesting' to the community at large."

The ability to seperate wheat from chaff, or more accurately personally interesting from collectively interesting, is subtle but huge. And it does so without the use of link flux (i.e. PageRank) but rather uses 'in system' heuristics.

Usually after invoking the Flickr example, I transition to Y! Answers. If there's a complaint I hear about Y! Answers is that there's a lot of noise in the system. Admittedly, "Umm.. my boyfriend caught me sleeping with one of his best friends?", or "Why is the sky blue?", or "What's up?" do not necessarily resonate with the "expand all human knowledge" meme. But what's cool is that we can create a system that accommodates everything from the ridiculous to the sublime... but knows the difference between the two! (Or perhaps more accurately is taught the difference by millions of users.) This is the power of interestingness!

At this point I usually drop in a dry remark, "At Yahoo we have spent a fair amount of time and energy focusing on systems that are noisy, where anyone can say anything at anytime, etc. One of the most popular datasets and testbeds for these kinds of conditions is popularly known as... [prepare for punchline] the web... and we've been working on it for about a decade..." ;-)

I'm not sure why this post took on the flavor of a running commentary on my own talk, but that's how it came out!

I want to also remind folks that my relationship to the products I often invoke in this blog is best characterized as awed bystander. All hail Serguei, Yumio, Stewart, Tomi, etc!

Talk is Cheap… Dreams are Priceless

2006-08-10T08:37:00.000-07:00

Last night, Krista and I went to see the play "Talk is Cheap... Dreams are Priceless."

The play is a one-man show by Jim Jarrett. It was fantastic, both in terms of execution and content.

The play showcases the teaching of Sandy (Sanford) Meisner. In fact, the play proceeds as if the audience were in fact a gathering of one of Meisner's classes, and Sandy confronts the audience as he did his students.

His teaching style was "unconventional" but absolutely thrilling, focused and of pure intention.

Krista's father William Alderson was one of Meisner's protoges, so the play had special meaning for Krista who knew Meisner as a child.

Go see this play!

Commentary on MySpace / Google

2006-08-07T22:11:00.000-07:00

Today I was a last minute standin for Andrei Broder on the "The Search Laboratories" panel at SES in San Jose. Also on the panel were Peter Norvig of Google and James Colborn of MSN.

Now in the realm of search, I am not fit to carry Dr. Broder's bag. He's truly a legendary character - to wit, after the panel a self-described "Broder groupie" approached me with a copy of one of his papers that she'd brought to get autographed. I kid you not.

The panel went great. The final question was directed at Peter and myself. The questioner asked (and I paraphrase):

"Today we read that Myspace partnered with Google. For Peter, do you have a comment? And for Bradley, was this a partnership you wanted?"

Peter replied, "I've been in here all day! No comment."

I replied, "Myspace partners with Google... Is this a partnership we wanted?"

Long pause.

"We already tried partnering with Google. Been there, done that."

Methinks I sold the line pretty well. ;-)

Plagiarized, but it’s cool

2006-08-05T18:52:00.000-07:00

Browsing the web, I came upon my eulogy for Martin Friedmann on a free homework site: 123helpme.com. It was listed under "Eulogy for a Friend." What's amusing to me is that someone (or perhaps just some automated crawler) thought this would have any reuse or remix value. Marty was so unique (and the eulogy itself tried so hard to capture this) that I can't imagine anyone else would find value in it. (Check it out you'll see what I mean.)

Then I found this eulogy for this young man, with a few lines lifted wholesale from Marty's...


Although what we’ve lost is tremendous, what he gave us is immeasurable.

To those who knew him no explanation is necessary. To those who didn’t, no explanation is possible.

So I hereby grant unlimited use with or without attribution. Have at it. If it helps anyone in any way, by all means....

Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” book rocks…

2006-08-03T14:23:00.000-07:00

On a flight today, I tore through Chris Anderson's Long Tail book. Loved it.

It was a fascinating experience. In a sense, I think we (and by this I mean a very big Royal We that likely includes anyone reading this) have been practicing much of what the book preaches for a very long time. It's coded into our DNA. It's the "Right Thing." But the book does a wonderful job giving us the vocabulary and framework. Chris modestly heaves credit at the "Long Tail practitioners" but he's being way too modest. As someone who spends a fair amount of time trying to explain things to people (in my case often the media), I've come to appreciate that finding the right framework, or analogy, or even turn of phrase is a delicate art form. And Chris is a brilliant artist.

I can't think of anyone who wouldn't benefit from reading this book. And Chris has made the book so accessible, everyone should...

Y! Answers: On-demand MicroBlogging

2006-08-01T11:34:00.000-07:00

Welcome Wall Street Journal readers! Lee Gomes wrote up a nice Q&A with me today about the new "bubble". Lee was gracious enough to include mentions of my dog Rashi and this blog, elatable. Thanks Lee!

I've been thinking (and talking) about Yahoo! Answers a lot recently. A huge congrats to Yumio, Lesley, Bob B, Tom C, Ofer, Tomi, Eckart and the gang at Y! Answers for the tremendous growth that the product has enjoyed - truly remarkable. As a (very interested!) bystander I'm blown away and grateful for what you all have achieved.

I recently mentioned how traditional web search is generally retrospective or forensic, but Answers lets one search for knowledge which does not yet exist. Cool stuff, still blows my mind.

That model is really from the perspective of the asker, and speaks to the "pull" that invokes the knowledge. There's another way to think about Answers from the perspective of the answerer... The "push" of knowledge from the answerers head into the world.

Blogging has been heralded as the poster child for "user-generated content" or "amateur publishing" or whatever buzzword you may prefer. And at a technical and procedural level this is certainly true. The process of becoming "a blogger" has never been easier.

The hard part (now that the barriers to entry have melted away) is having something worthwhile to say. That really hasn't gotten any easier. Moreover as a newly minted "blogger" there's an expectation that you'll have a consistent, steady stream of interesting postings for your readers to enjoy. Nothing sadder than a dead blog or inactive blog.

But what of the more casual "blogger?" Someone who has only the occasional gem of wisdom to share? Someone who may not want to carry the baggage associated with owning and maintaining a blog per se?

Another way to think about Answers is that it's a system by which would-be "bloggers" can pick off areas of expertise and easily "post" what they know. You can think of each answer as a micro blog post... But instead of shooting it into the ether(net) on your blog, leaning back and waiting for readers to visit (either by the compelling title of the post, the blogger's reputation, etc.) Yahoo! Answers delivers a ready-made audience. In fact each "post" is in direct response to demand. Each question is a little appeal to the world that says "I'd be interested in knowing about..." and each answer is a little release of knowledge that may in another context been a more speculative blog post.

I'm obviously not suggesting that Yahoo! Answers replaces blogging, or that the two are ultimately equivalent. It's just interesting and useful to recognize answering as publishing, and examine the somewhat fuzzy line between the two endeavors...

Bug (and other) identification services

2006-07-25T08:52:00.000-07:00

"Better Search through People" applied to image search? Or Yahoo! Visual Answers?

BoingBoing references a "bug identification service" called "What's that bug?" that allows folks to send in photos of bugs for identification. (Looks like Yahoo featured this three years ago too...

Based on a cursory glance at the site, this isn't exactly what I'd imagined. Folks don't actually upload photos directly but rather email them to the curators who do the identification. I was envisioning a site where folks actually upload content directly, and the community (presumably of entomologists) identify the critters.

There's a group on Flickr called "Guess what this is!". This is more of a guessing game. Then there's "What flower is this?" I've also seen geographic scavenger hunts on Flickr, i.e. the "Guess where ______" meme... There's also "Name that _____", featuring "Name that music video" and "Name that movie".

This theme, i.e. getting folks to help me name that plant | part | flower | etc. definitely scratches an itch. This is all coolness!

Flickr as “Eyes of the World”

2006-06-29T05:02:00.000-07:00

The Elephant's guides
Originally uploaded by Phil Gyford.

Stewart has referred to Flickr as the "Eyes of the World"... This is a totally apropos vision, but also a not so veiled reference to Stewart's hippie roots.

While I was a grad student, colleagues Ted Adelson and John Wang created something they called a plenoptic camera. The basic insight was to use a lens array, a flexibile piece of plastic that had dozens of micro-lenses etched into it, yielding an effect much like an insect's compound eye. Each lens imaged the scence from a slightly different point of view. This camera was able to derive shape, i.e. depth, from analyzing the resultant image. Think stereo parallax but in 2 dimensions and with many more samples. Also, since the "baseline" of nearby lenses was so short there was no course "feature matching" needed.

That's the insight as I recall it, and hopefully someone closer to the research can correct any errors I've made. I see that folks at Stanford have continued and extended the research.

In addition to the practical applications of this work (as demonstrated by the Stanford team the ability to change depth of field effects in a photograph after the fact), I remember hearing Ted Adelson talk about how they came up with the name "plenoptic" for the research. Plen from the latin plenus meaning "full", and optic from the Greek optikos relating to vision or "eye". The idea was that while a normal camera captured the scene only as rendered at one point in space-time, the plenoptic camera captured a "fuller" representation. (Actually if you think about it, space-time is completely packed with potential vantage points. While fuller than a normal camera, the "plenoptic camera" is still just imaging a few dozen points out of the innumerable possible ones!)

So what does this have to do with Flickr?

When I was visiting London recently, a colleague there told me a neat story. The "Sultan's Elephant" visited the streets of downtown London and shut down traffic for days. A Yahoo took his kids to see it, and he tried in vain to get a picture of the kids in front of the elephant. Unfortunately,because of the crowds, he couldn't get back far enough to get a decent perspective. From 10 feet away, it didn't look like "The kids in front of the Sultan's Elephant" but rather "The kids in front of some brown plywood."

Bummed, he went to Flickr to upload and tag the photos. While doing so, he discovered that by happenstance another Flickr user had taken the perfect shot of his kids and the elephant. This person must have been another 20 feet back in the crowd. How cool is that?! I thought this was a nice "eyes of the world" (and plenoptic camera) story.

(I will try to contact the parties involved and link to the actual photos in question.)

Relating back to the previous post, I recall soon after Flickr joined Yahoo asking Heather if there was a way I could solicit more photos of Westbeth. (A building in NYC I'm fond of...) She said, "Sure! I can make that happen for you!" But Heather, being the community manager of Flickr, had the means to rally the troops toward any cause... But I said, "No. I'm not interested in how you would do it... I'm interested in how one would do it..." And she suggested finding a relevant group (in this case maybe this one) and just sending up a "Would someone go take a picture of Westbeth for me?" flare.

(By the way, I never did this. 15 months ago, there was a single photo of Westbeth. You can see I lamely called to the photographer herself "More pictures of Westbeth please!" Now, there are dozens of photos... including exactly the shots of the courtyard I wanted like this one and this one. I did my part and contributed a few...

Heather's suggestion, leveraging the community to help "invoke" pictures is quite effective within Flickr. In fact, many of the group photo pools are calls to action to create "knowledge" on demand. In this respect, it's a lot like Yahoo! Answers... but instead of "knowledge" being a textual response to an explicit query, "knowledge" now becomes pixels...

By the way, if anyone has a line on how to get a flexible lens array like the one referenced above, please let me know! Turns out these are hard to come by, unless I want to have them manufactured by the gross.

Searching for what doesn’t exist…

2006-06-27T06:57:00.000-07:00

As an industry, we've made a ton of progress in search over the last several years. Yet there is a subtle but profound limitation to "web search" as currently realized: search engines can only return results that... well... you know... exist.

At a glance this doesn't seem to be much of a hindrance. It's obvious, expected, rational. I've heard (a most excellent and engaging) schpiel from Google (Craig Silverstein) that acknowledges that their current search index captures only a fraction of the information that's "out there." The punchline of Craig's talk was that they'd only indexed a tiny fraction of what's possible - hence the efforts to digitize, crawl the "dark web", extend to other media types, etc. The spirit of the talk was indeed inspirational, in the vein of "we're just getting started..."

But the very comment that we're only x% "done" implies that there is some finite body of knowledge out there, and if we could only digitize faster, crawl harder, buy more servers, etc. then we'd be able to improve that percentage and ultimately get "all" that information into the index (and presumably sleep well at night again.)

Noble as this goal may be, if you pause to think about it, it's obvious (to me anyway) that humankind's "potential knowledge" is greater than our "realized knowledge" to date. This is admittedly "cosmic" or metaphysical, but I mean this in a practical sense as well. Barring apocalyptic scenarios, there are more web pages yet to be written than have already been written. (For the sake of discussion, let's use "web page" as proxy for discrete knowledge element while confessing that we've already moved beyond the "page" as a paradigm.)

Where am I going with this? Perhaps not surprisingly, Yahoo! Answers.

Some of the magic of Yahoo! Answers is revealed through examining its provenance. The category of knowledge search sprang up in Korea. In Korea exists what is arguably the world's most sophisticated online population... but they are disadvantaged by the lack of Korean language documents (relative to English language.) Didn't matter how hard we crawled, how much attention we put on ranking and relevance, etc. If the document itself did not exist, then web search wasn't going to find it, rank it, present it, etc.

Y! Answers turns the current search paradigm on its head. Rather than the current industry search paradigm (connecting the average 2.4 keywords to some extant "web page" out there), Y! Answers attempts to distill knowledge out of the very ether... Actually, "ether" is rather inappropriate term as Y! Answers attempts to distill knowledge from a very real asset: Yahoo!'s pool of half a billion monthly users. It turns this audience into the world's most liquid knowledge marketplace.

(This also reminds me a bit PubSub's schpiel about "prospective" vs. "retrospective" search. The premise here is that PubSub could "search the future." What's different about Y! Answers is that PubSub had a relatively passive relationship to the knowledge itself: "We'll tell you when..." Y! Answers actually has the reach, platform and mechanism to invoke the knowledge versus passively monitoring it. Moreover it evokes it in a "lazy migration", generating knowledge precisely in response to demand for that knowledge.)

It's fun and illuminating to think about all of the knowledge that doesn't yet exist on a web page. Trust me, there's lots. One obvious category is what might be referred to as "colloquial" knowledge, i.e. the shortcut to my house that the online mapping services always seem to get wrong. Or "Where's a good place to get authentic matzah ball soup in Times Sq. at noon where I won't have to wait in line?" The kind of stuff my mother and father know from a collective 142 years on the planet... but alas, they've never authored a web page (let alone written a book, made a movie, etc.) so the only beneficiaries of their wisdom to date have been their immediate friends and family. (Tom Coates will rap my knuckles for invoking the dreaded "parents as naive users" meme...)

Yahoo! Answers serves many, many more purposes than just colloquial knowledge however. It's fascinating to spend time in there... it's an incredibly revealing lens into the multitude of categories underserved by web search today. While the original motivation for knowledge search might be attributed to "lack of Korean language documents," the success of the product worldwide indicates that this was just the tip of the iceberg... there is something more substantial, subtle, and universal going on: knowledge yet to exist > knowledge that exists. I find something incredibly uplifting and optimistic about this.

And with a push of the "Publish" button, yet another web page springs into existence. This one unasked for, but hopefully useful all the same.

Ps.
Tempted to title this post, "I still haven't found what I'm looking for..." but reconsidered...

CNBC Asia Squawkbox

2006-06-23T21:04:00.000-07:00

Just got back from Singapore for this, and did a 4m piece on CNBC Asia's Squawkbox. I don't believe there's a public copy, but Yahoo's can find the clip on backyard.

Took everything I had to pull myself together past the jetlag and mental fogginess for the 4m piece.

Hope to post more about the trip, specifically what I discovered during those sleepness nights channel surfing - i.e. my new favorite TV show "I Shouldn't be Alive" (Discovery Channel) and other faves from the National Geographic Channel.

My New Job!

2006-06-22T18:21:00.000-07:00

I've been very eager to publicly announce this. There were some pretty good excuses as to why this has taken me more than a month. I've been wicked busy, and moreover there were some org changes I wanted to implement before announcing. Drumroll...

I've got a new job at Yahoo!: VP of Product Strategy, reporting to CPO Ash Patel.

This is something that I couldn't be happier about. In addition to the groups I've helped build and will be bringing over from Search, I've also inherited a number of very exciting, impactful groups. The Product Strategy Group now includes:

Yahoo! Developer Network - led by Chad Dickerson

Technology Development Group - led by Caterina Fake

Advanced Products Group - led by Scott Gatz

Yahoo Research Berkeley - led by Ellen Salisbury

Product Practices Group - led by Irene Au

Y! Agile Process Group - led by Gabby Benefield

I'm going to take some time and try to do a blog post about each of these groups. Each one is exciting and represents huge opportunity to effect change within or outside of the company.

I don't wanna get mushy here, but this is an appropriate time for me to pause and offer my thanks to those who have made my experience at Yahoo to date so rewarding. Specifically those in Search who encouraged me and helped me "invent" this role and group: Jeff Weiner, Eckart Walther, Qi Lu, Andrew Braccia, and Tim Cadogan. A special thanks to Prabhakar Raghavan, Marc Davis, Joe Siino and Usama Fayyad for our collaboration around Yahoo Research Berkeley. Thanks to Toni Schneider and Jeffrey McManus for the incredible work getting YDN off the ground. Thanks to Ash Patel for recognizing that what we incubated in Search could, and should, graduate to Yahoo!, Inc. Quick shout outs to Toby, Jerry, Dan, Sue, Terry, Zod, Kwok, Kathryn, Jennifer, Tim R, Ken N, Joff, Tomi, Ken H, Raymie, Stewart, Thrall, Ramesh, Karnes, Ethan, Volk, Kaigene, Hyrkin, Mandelbrot, etc., etc., etc. Apologies to the many, many I've neglected...

You'll note that I've deliberately not mentioned any of my team, because they're gonna get special love in upcoming posts.

I'm actually speaking at Supernova tomorrow and am going to share a bit about "Innovation at Yahoo!" There is something very special happening at Yahoo! of late, and it honestly feels like we're just getting started. I'm privileged to be a part of it. Can't wait to share more with you all.

Back from London

2006-06-07T22:15:00.000-07:00

I was just in London for the Content 2.0 conference. I really enjoyed it, especially Marc Canter's opening keynote. (Went out to dinner with Marc too.) Managed to grab dinner the previous night with the TechDev UK gang (Tom, Simon and Paul), and check in on some fantastic work they've been doing. Can't wait until it sees the light of day. I’m very happy to say that Paul Hammond has jumped right in and is contributing hugely after only 5 weeks. Very cool.

In Heathrow on the way back home, bumped into a distant acquaintance, movie director Alfonso Cuaron. Alfonso directed Y Tu Mama Tambien and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. He is a mad genius to be sure. While we were waiting to board the plane his wife called and said he'd forgotten his wallet at home - again. He had literally $20 in his pocket (and was flying to the States for a few days.) He said it happens all the time, and no he didn't need to borrow any money as they'll take care of him on the other side.

Talking shoes…

2006-05-23T22:10:00.000-07:00

Nike and Apple have announced Nike+iPod. This lets your shoes talk to your iPod and communicate things like distance, time, pace, calories burned, etc.

This is freaking cool. Cheap too at $29. Wireless! I'm curious to see if the Nike+iPod system will be hacked in interesting ways.

This immediately reminded me of something I saw 10 years ago at the Media Lab 10 year reunion. Professor Neil Gershenfeld demonstrated a prototype that allowed people to exchange business cards with a handshake (using "shoe computers.")

I was a contemporary at MIT with folks like Steve Mann (referred to here as the "grandfather of wearable computers", and Thad Starner (who actually UROP'd for Martin and me back in the day.)

I must admit feeling somewhat annoyed at these early experiments in wearable computing. The get-ups surely looked ridiculous. Steve and Thad were totally conspicuous as they walked around campus. (Remember, ten+ years ago we're talking about tens of pounds of gear.)

Now I experience trauma and seperation anxiety if I'm out of contact with my Treo for more than a minute.

Thanks Steve, Thad, Sandy, et. al. for your brave pioneering efforts in this field. Thanks Nike and Apple for something very cool, though admittedly not for me.

50th Homicide of the Year

2006-05-16T19:28:00.000-07:00

64th and San Pablo

Originally uploaded by bradley23.

Less than a week ago, Oakland's 50th homicide of the year went down about 6 blocks from our house. We heard the shots (there was a flurry).

So sad.

Rashi makes the front page of dogster!

2006-05-09T08:58:00.000-07:00

bradley and rashi

Originally uploaded by bradley23.

Rashi made the front page of dogster today! She's getting a lot of requests to be Puppy Pals with other doggies. Woof woot!

Marketwatch Video

2006-04-25T19:19:00.000-07:00

Video of Bambi Francisco interviewing me about Yahoo's Social Search efforts

Well, here's my haircut. I wish I had a chance to redo this. I threw my upper back out yesterday and was in a lot of pain. Part of why I was sitting so stiffly in the chair. Sigh.

Tomorrow I'm on a panel at Berkeley SIMS with Brewster Kahle and Mimi Ito. I'm fans of both, but never met them - so that'll be exciting.

Douglas Hofstaedter, ambigrams and gridfonts

2006-04-25T11:39:00.000-07:00

I was reminded of Douglas when I saw the BoingBoing ambigram. Douglas introduced us to the practice of ambigrams (credit to Scott Kim) when I took courses with him as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. (Here’s something really quite mindblowing – we’re talking 18 years ago!) Anyway, these were very interesting courses offered through Michigan’s great cognitive science department. Douglas was at the peak of his fame, having just published his magnum opus, Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I think he was on sabbatical from Indiana University at the time.

One of the exercises in that class made an incredible impact on me. We were asked to design fonts… but with the constraint that the fonts had to be executed on a 2x3 grid, connecting only adjacent dots. And no cheating – you couldn’t use any embellishments (for instance the thickness of a line, or color of a line, go for a “long diagonal”, or anything of that sort..) A few other rules were imposed – we were to design just the lower case version (no capitals or punctuation marks, etc.) The lower case letter “a” was to be the typeface version not the handwritten version, (i.e. like this “a”, not like this “a”.) There were probably a few other rules that have been lost in the passage of time.

The first time you try to design a font, you run straight up against the absurd constraint of the grid. It’s an absurdly small footprint that leaves very little room for “creativity.” Just executing the alphabet against this backdrop is an accomplishment.

Later, as you execute your fifth and tenth and twentieth font from start to finish, you begin to attain some level of craftsmanship. You begin to discover the relationship between letters, i.e. doing the “b” this way is going to have obvious implications for the “d”. You begin to describe the fonts in various ways, and creativity and style begins to rear its head.

Font 1

For example, Font 1 (and I’ve just executed a-c and s-u as examples) is a highly stylized serifed font with lots “diagonalness.” The “diagonal” theme is evident throughout. A subtheme might be the disconnectedness of the “s”. Perhaps I could have resonated that theme against the “a”, omitting the segment that connects dot 6 to dot 9. As “font designer” (he said puffing himself up,) I chose not to, but concede it would have been a reasonable option.

Font 2

Font 3

Fonts 2 and 3 also has an obvious themes, and interestingly the “t” and “u” designs overlap between them. I’m dubious about the “u”’s and perhaps if I followed through and designed the “v”’s it would have led to significant changes.

In Douglas’s class, we’d sit there and review each other’s gridfonts for hours. We’d question design choices, labor over the tiniest of lines and the “grave” implications it would have for other letters in the alphabet.

The gridfont exercise bears many gifts. Working in a world of absurd reductionism, the essence of design, style, and creativity emerge in zen-like moments of insight. It’s as if other approaches toward design philosophy were “Newtonian,” and gridfonts was an electron microscope that revealed the quantum building blocks of creativity. This post probably won’t make a lot of sense unless you get out the graph paper and invest the energy to actually follow through on the exercise. Recommended!

Ambigrams are another lovely way of introducing these kinds of constraints. There are many flavors of ambigram, that exhibit any variety of symmetry. Check out Scott Kim’s page for more. Again, ambigrams are kinda fun and novel to look at but any real benefit is derived from trying to construct them. It’s another great way to exercise muscles you’ve forgotten you have…

They say, “Necessity is the mother of invention”. Now that I’m deliberately contemplating that old saw, I’m reminded that it’s a multi-faceted statement. I’ve always taken the primary sense to be solutions follow need… As Y Combinator’s motto says, “Make something people want!” (That’s the greatest motto an incubator could have IMHO.) But there’s another sense… Fat and happy doesn’t breed creativity. Constraints breed creativity. Nobody builds a catapult out of bubble-gum and baling wire if they don’t have to… Now go listen to the “Mothers of Invention” and find out what creativity really is...

Ye Ol’ School Barber Shop… a Classique!

2006-04-24T22:47:00.000-07:00

I was in Boston today, presenting at an internal IDG conference.

After the conference, I tried to jam in a haircut at the Great Cuts right around corner from the Charles Hotel where I was staying… I noticed over the weekend that I’m due to be videotaped tomorrow morning and wanted to prune what had become a “full-on raging ‘fro” as Bobby would say. (This reminds of the time that I let the ‘fro grow really big and then parted it on the side. Coupled with major black “Buddy Holly” glasses I was going for hyper-nerd, but was assured by both friends and strangers that this was not working at any level. Bob titled a Spahn Ranch song after the episode – “Part (with Laughter)”, which (apart from the title) was not about my coiff.)

I am not sure what this video thing is but it’s with Bambi Francisco (whom I’ve never met) and I think ends up on marketwatch.com’s website but probably gets most its distribution through Yahoo! Finance links. Anyway, I’ll post a link once I figure that out.

Without even walking into Great Cuts I could see that there was a lineup that amounted to a long wait. That wouldn’t work for me because I needed to catch a flight out of Logan. Oh well. On the way to the airport, I started wondering if I’d seen a barber at the airport there before. Yeah, I thought I had...

There in Terminal C, I found it. Until I was actually sitting in the chair, I didn’t really notice what I’d stumbled upon… This was an authentic “Ol’ School Barber Shop”… the “Classique Hair Salon.” Classique is classic. It was right out of a Scorcese movie set. There was a neck brush perhaps made of horsehair, and I kid you not – a leather strop on the barber chair. A shelf full of tonics and oinments, most from vendors that probably no longer exist. He removed his trusty scissors from a little black leather case that was chock full of implements. (Occurred to me that it was odd having all this weaponry so close to the security checkpoint.) The barber (alternately Vincent or Vincenze as the mood hit him apparently) had a slew of certificates on the wall. One, dated 1979, congratulated Vincent on ten years of service and was from “Roffler”. I wondered what “Roffler” was, and later noticed on the shelf a nasty squirt bottle of “Roffler Super Thick and Rich” shampoo on the shelf. Also check out the trophy, with the upside down “’76”. Reminds me of the most excellent ween song “Freedom of ‘76” which would be the perfect background music for this experience… “A bacon steak, a perfect match…”

I did the math and realized he’d been cutting hair for at least 37 years, which I figured made him at least 57. He looked fantastic for that age, awesome in fact. He had his hair in a modified pompadour… He actually needed a haircut, which I thought was ironic. “Physician – heal thyself.” Carmine sat there at her manicure station and devoured an orange.

While in the chair a TSA guy ambled in and mumbled “Howya doin’?” to Vincent and Carmine, who mumbled something back. He sat down, grabbed the paper, kicked his feet onto the coffee table and started reading. I wondered for a moment was waiting for a cut when I noticed that although probably 30 years old, he was bald on top and already closely shaven on the sides. I understood then that this was his daily practice, to make the rounds during his coffee break and just kick back and read the paper.

He didn’t say another word for 15 minutes, then got up with a “Seeya” and sprang off.

My haircut proceeded in silence, without any chitchat whatsoever. It was a good haircut, thoughtful and precise. It cost $17 and I gave him $21. I then asked him if I could take a few photographs. He asked why, and I said, “Because you’re a relic! A real ol’ fashioned barber shop!” He said, “You got that right! Sure, take some pictures… but not of me!”

It was fun. I made the flight on time. You can see the fruits of Vincent’s crafts when the Bambi thing goes live.

Remix this!

2006-04-14T19:18:00.000-07:00

The YRB posse has released yet another great product: the San Francisco International Film Festival Remixer.

A non-linear editor in a browser, the SFIFF remixer rocks. Kudos to Ellen, Marc, Jeannie, Brian, Peter, Ryan, Patrick, etc.

My free video is loading…

2006-04-11T22:11:00.000-07:00

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, Disney is making not only good content - but their best and most valuable content, i.e. Lost - available online... for free.

My first reaction was disbelief. My second reaction was delight. My third reaction was - "Damn. I just paid $34.99 for the season pass of Lost on iTunes."

This really does change things. As the WSJ reported, this is just the first domino to fall... others will follow suit. Congratulations Disney, and here's hoping that the model exceeds all your expectations. If this actually works (for users, advertisers and Disney), many good things ensue.

danah and OReilly

2006-03-30T21:19:00.000-08:00

Which of these pictures does not make sense:

danah's mention

The Love Machine

2006-03-16T05:21:00.000-08:00

Last week Prabhakar and I presented some of Yahoo's past and future strategies to a bunch of Benchmark Capital portfolio companies at their recent shindig in Half Moon Bay. Prabhakar presented his compelling vision for Yahoo Research (which I've seen umpteen times before but excites me anew each time.) He also touted some excellent recent hires (including an exciting one that I’m sorry I can’t talk about because it's not announced yet.) He covered the joint Yahoo and O’Reilly developed Tech Buzz Game. This game is a “fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends.” Very intriguing concept, worth checking out if you haven’t yet.

One of the highlights of the day was giving Philip Rosedale a ride home to San Francisco which gave us a solid 45 minutes to catch up. I’ve been friendly with Philip since he was CTO of RealNetworks (a long time ago) and have stayed in touch and watched as he and team have developed SecondLife. What’s happening in SecondLife is mind-blowing and almost too much to get my head around. I'll take every chance I can get to talk to Philip and glean what insight I might from someone who is literally a "pioneer in cyberspace." (I'm quite deliberately using this vintage '96 colloquialism cuz it fits so damn well. Forgive me.)

Once we were cruising up Highway 92 back toward civilization, I asked Philip what ground-breaking unconventional management techniques he applied at Linden Lab (makers of SecondLife) certain this would be be good fodder for the ride... I wasn't disappointed and he told me about a few…

The first is “The Love Machine.” The Love Machine is a simple way for Linden employees to give and receive “love”… where “love” in this context is work-related appreciation. It’s a page on their intranet with three fields, “From”, “To”, and “Why” (an 80-character free text field.) That’s pretty much it. People can (and do) give “love” to each other. It’s a way of saying “attaboy” or “thanks” or “I noticed.” There’s visibility into all the love you’ve both given and received. What’s interesting about this is that “love” is not only a morale builder, and a way of getting peer feedback, but is directly tied to money. (Philip mentioned that given Linden’s stage as a company right now, this variable bonus is relatively small… but will grow as Linden grows.) Philip also talked about “Taskzilla”, a mod of Bugzilla that basically allows for transparency and collective prioritization around the company’s focus.

Against the backdrop of Prabhakar’s Tech Buzz Game, we talked about a scenario where employees acquired “whuffie” (or cred) within the company not because of a title, or a degree from a good school, or from their ability to schmooze with those that hold and confer the power, etc. but rather from empirical demonstration that they can make strategic decisions that are net beneficial for the company. Imagine upon entering the company, every employee is granted 1000 “shares” of decision currency. You can spend your currency by buying into (or out of) various corporate issues in an open marketplace (a la Taskzilla.) Decisions are forensically judged to be good or bad by the employee community itself, and dividends paid out to those that got it right. Imagine the hallway conversations:

“I went ‘all in’ for the broadcast.com acquisition, so I’m basically decision-bankrupt…” Or
“I made a killing by endorsing the Overture acquisition… I could basically single-handedly end the operations of Yahoo Germany if I wanted to...” the QA engineer said smugly.

Puh-lenty broken about the above scenario, and not suggesting this scheme would work, promoting it as viable, or any such thing. (I’m feeling increasingly required to make these disclaimers on this blog as I continue to get misinterpreted and quoted out of context.) As an example of the many, many ways such systems can unravel, check out Business 2.0's reference on how Microsoft's attempts to establish a "meritocracy" have devolved into a popularity contest. (Though note that the Microsoft system is not democratic and is closed-door... The hope is that cronyism can be at least partially mitigated through large sample sizes and more transparency.)

I once had a manager who said, "Plan for the day when the salaries of all the company's employees are found sitting on the printer. It's only a matter of time before it happens." Ironically, plan as one might, I'd guess that list is sure to piss off nearly everyone irrespective of how it's designed. It's also not clear that "minimizing employee angst" is the right objective function for this optimization anyways.

So I’m just saying... fun stuff to think about. A fun thought experiment... And interesting to contemplate how the next generation of enterprise software might allow for more and better metrics by which to acquire subjective measures of an employee's contribution. Right now, so much of this is anecdotal, tedious, and perfunctory. "It's review time people, so please fill out your self-assessment, your peer reviews, review your direct reports, etc. and submit by next Wednesday." Something like The Love Machine provides a perpetual feedback loop that is easy, fun, instantly gratifying... and meaningful (to a degree.) Note Philip doesn't base an employees entire salary on this data... just a small discretionary spiff. Love gets you icing, not cake. The Love Machine should be primarily a measurement tool and not have the quantum effect of changing the system it's measuring. Though you wouldn't want people gaming the system too much in order to acquire Love, if the Love Machine tipped the culture toward becoming more conscientious, more aware and connected to how one's contributions affected others, etc. - that's probably not a bad thing.

Tacit is an example of a company that's doing extremely cool social engineering within the enterprise. By installing a proxy next to your mail server, they passively monitor email traffic and can autogenerate a "yellow pages" for your company that can answer questions like "Who's our resident expert on sockets-based networking protocols?" Putting (for now) the huge privacy and policy issues aside, this is pretty friggin' cool. One of the things that's interesting about it is the implicit harvesting of this information (vs. requiring me to fill out a skills survey or profile.) "Expertise mining." An aside: I think Tacit is one of the coolest names for a company I've heard, partly because it captures so well what they're about. They've got a bunch of a-list investors (including Esther), but the company has been around a while and has yet to realize its potential. Hope they can put the pieces together and make it work. Their CEO David Gilmour is a seriously bright (and nice) guy.

Cameron innovated around this idea recently (and is threatening to do more on Hack Day) but sadly I can't say any more publicly.

Zoom into the Room

2006-03-07T10:43:00.000-08:00

Hot on the heels of ZoneTag, we're releasing another spiffy mobile prototype - a "mobile friend finder" we're calling CheckMates.

In addition to some very cool features (an incredibly intuitive mobile interface, leveraging Flickr for both the social network and a place to park my geopresence, etc.) I love the support for "private maps". This allows for pinpointing my location within a venue. It rocks IMHO. Great job Chad, Karon, Sam, Ed, Jonathan, etc.

Chad does a great job describing how this work evolved.

And Edward gives yet more detail.

Capture v. Derive

2006-03-05T09:06:00.000-08:00

Universal Law: It is easier, cheaper and more accurate to capture metadata upstream, than to reverse engineer it downstream.

Back at Virage, we worked on the problem of indexing rich media - deriving metadata from video. We would apply all kinds of fancy (and fuzzy) technology like speech recognition, automatic scene change detection, face recognition, etc. to commercial broadcast video so that you could later perform a query like, "Find me archival footage where George Bush utters the terms 'Iraq' and 'weapons of mass destruction.'"

What was fascinating (and frustrating) about this endeavor is that we were applying a lot of computationally expensive and error-prone techniques to reverse engineer metadata that by all rights shoulda and coulda been easily married to the media further upstream. Partly this was due to the fact that analog television signal in the US is based on a standard that is more than 50 years old. There's no convenient place to put interesting metadata (although we did some very interesting projects stuffing metadata and even entire websites in the vertical blanking interval of the signal.) Even as the industry migrates to digital formats (MPEG2), the data in the stream generally is what is minimally needed to reconstitute the signal and nothing more. MPEG4 and MPEG7 at least pay homage to metadata by having representations built into the standard.

Applying speech recognition to derive a searchable transcript seems bass-ackwards since for much video of interest the protagonists are reading material that is already in digital form (whether from a teleprompter or a script.) So much metadata is needlessly thrown away in the production process.

In particular, cameras should populate the stream with all of the easy stuff, including:

roll

pitch

yaw

altitude

location

time

focal length

aperture setting

gain / white balance settings

temperature

barometric pressure

heartrate and galvanic skin response of the camera operator

etc.

Heartrate and galvanic skin response of the camera operator? Ok, maybe not... I'm making a point. That point is that it is relatively easy and cheap to use sensors to capture these kinds of things in the moment... but difficult (and in the case of barometric pressure) impossible to derive them post facto. Why would you want to know this stuff? I'll be the first to confess that I don't know... but that's not the point IMHO. It's so easy and cheap to capture these, and so expensive and error-prone to derive them that we should simply do the former when practical.

An admittedly slightly off-point example... When the Monika Lewinsky story broke, the archival shot of her and Clinton hugging suddenly became newsworthy. Until that moment she was just one of tens of thousands of bystanders amongst thousands of hours of archival footage. Point being - you don't always know what's important at time of capture.

So segueing to today... Marc, Ellen, Mor and the rest of the team at Yahoo Research Berkeley have recently released ZoneTag. One of the things that ZoneTag does is take advantage of context. I carry around a Treo 650 with Good software installed for email, calendar, contact sync'ing. When I snap a photo the device knows a lot of context automagically, such as: who I am, time (via the clock), where I am supposed to be (via the calendar), where I actually am (via the nearest cell phone tower's ID), who I am supposed to be with (via calendar), what people / devices might be around me (via bluetooth co-presence), etc. Generally most of this valuable context is lost when I upload an image to Flickr via the email gateway. I end up with a raw JPG (in the case of the Treo even the EXIF fields are empty.)

ZoneTag lays the foundation for fixing this and leveraging this information.

It also dabbles in the next level of transformation from signal to knowledge. Knowing the location of the closest cell phone tower ID gives us course location, but it's not in a form that's particularly useful. Something like a ZIP code, a city name, or a lat/long would be a much more conventional and useful representation. So in order to make that transformation, ZoneTag relies on people to build up the necessary look-up tables.

This is subtle, but cool. Whereas I've been talking about capturing raw signal from sensors, once we add people (and especially many people) to the mix we can do more interesting things. To foreshadow the kinds of things coming...

If a large sample of photos coming from a particular location have the following tag sets [eiffel tower, emily], [eiffel tower, john, vacation], [eiffel tower, lisette], we can do tag-factoring across a large data set to tease out 'eiffel tower.'
Statistically, the tag 'sunset' tends to apply to photos taken at a particular time each day.
When we've got 1000s of Flickr users at an event like Live8 and we see an upload spike clustered around a specific place and time (i.e. Berlin at 7:57pm) that likely means something interesting happened at that moment (maybe Green Day took the stage.)

All of the above examples lead to extrapolations that are "fuzzy." Just as my clustering example might have problems with people "eating turkey in Turkey", it's one thing to have the knowledge - it's another to know how to use it in ways that provide value back to users. This is an area where we need to tread lightly, and is worth of another post (and probably in fact a tome to be written by someone much more cleverer than me.)

Even as I remain optimistic that we'll eventually solve the generalized computer vision problem ("Computer - what's in this picture?"), I wonder how much value it will ultimately deliver. In addition to what's in the picture, I want to know if it's funny, ironic, or interesting. Much of the metadata people most care about is not likely to be algorithmically derived against the signal in isolation. Acoustic analysis of music (beats per minute, etc.) tends to be a poor predictor of taste, while collaborative filtering ("People who liked that, also liked this...") tends to work better.

Again - all of this resonates nicely with the "people plus machines" philosophy captured in the "Better Search through People" mantra. Smart sensors, cutting-edge technology, algorithms, etc. are interspersed throughout these systems, not just at one end or the other. There are plenty of worthwhile problems to spend our computrons on, without burdening the poor machines with the task of reinventing the metadata we left by the side of the road...

Lowering Barriers to Participation

2006-03-02T00:10:00.000-08:00

In a previous post, I mentioned our efforts around lowering barriers to entry for participation, i.e. empowering consumers with tools that transform them into creators. Tagging is perhaps the simplest and most direct example of how lowering a barrier to entry can drive and spur participation.

Tagging works, in part, because it's so simple. Rather than being forced to tag Rashi (the name of my puppy) in a hierarchical taxonomy: (Animal => Mammal => Canine => Rhodesian Ridgeback => Rashi) I can just type Rashi. The instructions for tagging on Flickr are vague; likely the less said the better. You learn by watching and doing, making mistakes and fixing them... sometimes tagging for oneself, sometimes for ones friends, sometimes for others. Tagging, while initially uncomfortably unstructured (staring into that blank field it's easy to freeze up with "taggers block"), becomes painless and thought-free. Note that there is no spellcheck against submitted tags. People commonly invent tags that have no meaning outside of a shared or personal context, for instance specific tags for events.

In the great taxonomy/folksonomy debate, dewey-decimal fans generally invoke semantic ambiguity as a place where tagging will breakdown. Stewart invoked these illustrative examples in his blog post that introduced the Flickr clustering feature. For instance, the word "turkey" has several different senses - turkey the bird, turkey the food, and Turkey the country.

Forcing a user to resolve this ambiguity at data entry time would be a drag, and we'd likely see a huge dropoff in the amount of user metadata that we collect. (Moreover, we really couldn't. As pointed out before, tags must be allowed to take on personal meaning - "turkey" might be the name of my school's mascot, e.g. the Tarrytown Turkeys, or a pejorative term I apply to a bad snapshot...) What Flickr can and does do, is provide an ipso facto means of resolving this ambiguity and browsing the data: Flickr's clustery goodness.

So check out the turkey clusters. Flickr uses the co-occurance of tags to cluster terms. In other words photos with the tags "turkey" and "stuffing" tend to be about the food, "turkey" and "mosque" tend to be about the country, and "turkey" and "feather" about the bird.

There are limitations with this approach. Co-occurance means that there exist more than a single tag for a given photo. Something tagged with just "turkey" is shit outta luck, and doesn't get to come to the clustering party. Precision and Recall tolerances within the Flickr system are very different than in a tradition information retrieval based system. A lot of what we're going for here is discovery as opposed to recall; there photos that don't come to clustering party aren't really hurting anything. Moreover, the system doesn't really know about the semantic clusters I defined in the above paragraph: "food", "country" and "bird". In fact I just assigned those names by looking at the results of the clusters and reverse engineering what I intuit is going on.

In fact, in addition to these tidy clusters onto which I can slap a sensible label, there are also several other clusters which aren't immediately recognizable. One is the "sea" cluster; apparently lots of people take pictures of the sea in Turkey. The other, which is harder to divine, seems to contain a lot of words in which appear to be in turkish. (Reflections on multi-lingual tagging deserve their own post.) This reverse engineering can be fun, and I'm sure there is a game in there somewhere that someone has already built. (Lots of folks have come up with interesting Flickr games, i.e. "Guess the tag!")

Ambiguous words like "turkey" or "jaguar" (cat, car, operating system) are illustrative. Clusters against tags like "love" (again an example Stewart invokes) are downright fascinating. Here we have clusters corresponding to (again reverse engineering/inventing labels) symbols of love, romantic love, women (perhaps loved by men), familial love, and pets. Pretty cool.

Another thing that's cool is that these clusters are dynamic. The clustering shifts to accommodate words that take on new meanings. As Caterina pointed out to me, for months Katrina was a tag mostly applied to women and girls; one day it suddenly meant something else. The clusterbase shifts and adapts to accommodate this.

Per my first post - I'm just documenting my observations, celebrating Flickr and not breaking any new ground here. Hooray for Stewart and Serguei and team that actually create this stuff! Hooray for Tom and the other pundits (like Clay and Thomas) who have already figured out most everything there is to know about tags!

The reason I'm hilighting this feature is that a few folks misunderstood the pyramid in my first post to be Yahoo's strategy... on the contrary it's just an empirical observation that these ratios exist, and that social software can be successful in the face of them. We're flattening, dismantling, and disrupting this pyramid every day!

Flickr clustering speaks to our unofficial tag line, "Better search through people." What I love about it is that it's not "human or machine", or heaven forbid "human versus machine", but "human plus machine". We let people do what they're really good at (understanding images at a glance) and keep it nice and simple for them. We then let machines do what their good at, and invoke algorithms and AI to squeeze out additional value. There's also a cool "wisdom of crowds" effect here, in that the clusters are the result of integrating a lot of data across many individuals.

Some of our folks at YRB in Berkeley will be prototyping some additional very cool "wisdom of crowds" or "collective intelligence" type stuff RSN (Real Soon Now.) More about their work in an upcoming post. In the meantime, get a taste of it in the ZoneTag application. It applies many of the these principles to the task of associating course location with cell phone tower IDs - a cheap, simple way to squeeze location out of phones before we've all got GPS.