everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Year: 2005

  • Lizards & pork chop hats = entertainment

    Now wonder the rest of the world thinks Japan is crazy. Here’s a video of an old game show featuring lizards and girls with pork chop hats. (pointer and further commentary on BoingBoing)

  • Tag Cloud

    I’m playing around with Tag Cloud and put a large chunk of my OPML into it to see what all the blogs that I watch are talking about. Looks like there’s an unhealthy obsession with Google 😉

    I’ve been thinking a lot about how to creatively manage the flow of news that comes across and using ambient technology to aggregate and summarize. Jon Udell talks about a server log that chirps like a cricket if all is well. Extend this to have it bark like a dog if something needs looking at, it would be great to see these same principles on a meta-view of your RSS feeds. My colleague Russell Beattie has done some thinking on a feedback loop for readers to prioritize content and suggest related info. My other colleague Chad Dickerson goes into how Tag Cloud works (and got me into looking at Tag Cloud in the first place) and how it leverages Yahoo’s Term Extraction API to summarize the concepts in what the software has gathered.

    The Tag Cloud image above is a screenshot, the realtime image is here.

  • Yahoo to connect to TiVo

    Via the New York Times, Yahoo and TiVo announce that TiVo users will soon be able to access Yahoo information (Weather, Traffic) and Yahoo users will have shortcut to their TiVo from their personalized Yahoo television listings.. (I just checked and the link to add to your TiVo’s To Do recording list is already there!) I’ve been playing around with watching video clips that come through an RSS feed running off of Yahoo Video Search – it’d be cool to get this feed’s content piped into my TiVo. The TiVo’s remote is so much better suited for watching video than my laptop’s trackpad!

  • James Fallows on Yahoo & Social Media

    I was pleased to see this weekend’s piece in the New York Times by James Fallows attempting to get a vision of what is driving Yahoo innovation and scored the following quote from Jeff Weiner, Yahoo’s SVP of Search & Marketing,

    “You can look at the evolution of search as a play in three acts,” said Jeff Weiner, the senior vice president for search and marketing. “The first is the ‘public’ Web, where if different people type the same query they’ll all get the same results.” The second, he said, was purely personal search – finding a file or photo, usually on your own machine.

    “The third is the one that we are very interested in,” Mr. Weiner said. This is “social” or “community” searching, in which each attempt to find the right restaurant listing, medical advice site, vacation tip or other bit of information takes advantage of other people’s successes and failures in locating the same information.

    If you haven’t had a chance to play around with Yahoo’s MyWeb 2.0 beta, check it out and create your own slice of the web with you and your community.

  • RSS is the TCP/IP Packet of Web 2.0

    Reading through Richard MacManus’ excellent recap of coverage of Microsoft’s live.com launch event I followed the link to Nivi’s comment on CrunchNotes that "live" spelled backwards is "evil" therefore if Google is not “evil” that means that Google = Microsoft. (clever!)

    This lead me to Nivi’s post about how new services out there which generate or transform dynamic RSS feeds are really acting as relays for information packets.  We can view these new services as command line interfaces for an internet operating system. So, (take a deep breath as we gloss over some technical details to make a leap of generalization) extending the analogy,

    • Search Engine APIs = command line interface to file systems
    • Tags & other categorization engines = transforming DLLs that filter and transform relevance
    • RSS = protocol level information packet
    • Internet = information bus

    Where do blogs & wikis fit in this picture? Are they the user interface by which we browse this internet-scale OS or are they the scripting platform where we can pull together several API calls into a unique output which we publish as "plug-ins" to the standard utility that comes with the "plain old browser service" (POBS). Ok, time to get some coffee.

  • Put them in a box and keep ’em there.

    I really should go to bed as I’ve got an early commute tomorrow but I can’t stop playing with Think Tank.

    As a publicity stunt, Yahoo! Australia has put a few ad execs in a box and pointed a bunch of web cams at them as they scrum their way through ad campaign ideas for products submitted by users. It’s especially good fun because you can type messages and post pictures that will flash on a wall in Sydney seconds later. The real challenge is to then tune into the sound-enabled webcam to listen and see if you can get a reaction from two people in the room, on the other side of the world. I know what I’m doing with my son this weekend!

    From the site:

    Yahoo! Think Tank puts some of Australia and New Zealand’s leading creative minds under your control. Between the 3rd and 17th of November 2005, put this resource to work on any brief you can imagine, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Submit a brief online, control their working environment, judge their creative output and watch every minute of it live online.

    Need an idea for a pitch? Submit an idea.

  • Aliens Among Us

    Tyler & I riffed on a cool plot line for a movie.

    678715072_l.jpgAliens, who have come to appreciate our candy, particularly Laffy Taffy (a name which cracks up Tyler every time), have figured out a way to stock up on their supply without freaking us all out. Every Halloween, they come visit and make the rounds of various neighborhood and use the special code phrase, “Trick or Treat” and get thrown an assortment of goodies. Because it’s Halloween, they never have to cloak themselves or sulk about and if they ever get asked about they even get complimented for their “costumes.”

    OK, it sounded better when we talked about it. Let us work on it more.

  • Yahoo Maps Beta & Event Browser Mashup

    It’s out in the wild! I was floored when I first saw this and now I’m totally psyched to announce that Yahoo Maps is in beta with a spanking new interface. Be sure to check out the multi-point driving directions (useful when you’re picking up friends on the way to the mountains) and integration with local (type “pizza” in your home town and write a review of your favorite). As before, traffic conditions are just a click away (which is vital with my new commute) but Flash ads it in as a nice overlay.

    APIs you ask? But of course, not only AJAX but Flash! Chad Dickerson & Co. has already hacked together an innovative interface which uses Yahoo Maps and Yahoo Local APIs to “browse” events in a whole new way. Inspirational.

    More on Yahoo Search Blog, Jeremy Zawodny’s blog & Techcrunch.

  • 500 pieces of candy in 90 minutes

    500 pieces of candy in 90 minutes

    All the kids in Alameda have the day off from school on Halloween which just makes the waiting worse. Tyler woke up early, moaning that evening was hours away. It was 5:30am – I told him sleep makes time go by faster and convinced him to get back in his bed.

    I got back from work a little early, just in time to see things in full tilt. The kids were wild with anticipation and had already taken a few walks up and down the street to check out the various displays that our neighbors had put up. Our street is really popular with the trick-or-treaters so everyone was busy getting ready and by dusk we had all put on our costumes, filled our candy bowls, and were ready for the onslaught like soldiers peering over the battlements – the calm before the storm.

    By 6:15pm the street was heaving with all manner of goblins and ghouls. Lots of Spidermen and Things this year but my favorite was the one kid dressed up like Willy Wonka. After making her rounds, Julia came to help me hand out candy to the visitors which was a big help because sometimes we had 10 or 15 people holding out their bags at once. She got into it though and took time with each one (“Here you go Mr. Spiderman.”). Whenever someone with a particularly scary costume walked up, she would pull her princess hat down over her eyes and ask me to handle it.

    We were “sold out” by 7:30 and I turned the lights out and put a sign on the door. Another year done.