Richard Stallman in Berkeley on Sept. 12

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

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

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…

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.