everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Month: January 2006

  • But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. . .

    I was hoping to just let the dust settle a bit before choosing to post but then I was reminded that my last post on weird Japanese exercise devices seems to be an odd welcome to anyone looking for a perspective on the latest hullabaloo from someone focused on social media projects at Yahoo.

    Early yesterday morning, I posted my befuddlement on an internal mailing list. An active discussion followed and many agreed that the quote seemed strangely out of character. Anyone who has heard our CFO speak knows that giving up the good fight is totally at odds with the Sue Decker we know.

    Yahoo’s been in the business of connecting people to what they want for ten years and have gone from being a simple directory of useful links to a full suite of services that range from Fantasy Sports to Web Hosting. Not only is Yahoo testing innovative and experimental ways to search, we also provide you with answers. We’re hiring some of the best minds to think long and hard about not only what the next generation search engine will be but, more importantly, what the next generation of the internet will look like. Hint: it’s not just on your PC anymore.

    One of the reasons I joined Yahoo is because I saw that they was a vision for an internet which kept people in the center. Powerful tools married to funny and sometimes irreverent design choices. You could read the documentation and see that it was written by a person. It was good to know there was a news desk deciding which ten headlines to put on www.yahoo.com. When your IM client actually laughs at you, it was refreshingly goofy.

    Back to the title of this post – we still have a long way to go. Sure, we all are working feverishly on search but I think the context that was missed in the Sue Decker quote was that there is so much more to do around search that is equally interesting and important. The more people I meet at Yahoo, the more I am amazed at the energy and enthusiasm for this next phase. You can see the pieces coming together – tagging, social networks, user ratings & recommendations, geographic and temporal identifiers, developer outreach, RSS in and out – everyone here is sucking it all in and amped up in anticipation of how great it’s going to be to build the stuff we only dreamed about in the past. Trust me, there’s some real cool stuff coming down the pike.

    One of the great things in my job is that I get to talk to people across the company, in many different business units and regions. The excitement over social media and how open interaction with our users can infuse our products with relevance and humanity is not limited to just one department – every Product Manager is thinking through the possiblilities of what the new people-powered internet will look like and is hard at work putting these ideas to work. Yesterday, there was a mini-trade show of sorts where one group was showcasing all the great platform tools they are building and were showing them off to anyone interested just to get folks thinking how these services could play with each other. It was great to listen in on some of the hallway conversations taking place – new services being born every minute.

    Yahoo has only just begun but the pieces are coming together and, as the title of this blog suggests, there’s going to be an arc that will flash two experiences together (search & community) to create a new online experience that will be a quantum leap ahead of what we have today. This new environment will have us looking back at the days of keyword searching as quaintly as we now look back to the blinking C:\> prompt of old.

  • Apple Core

    Izumi gave Julia an apple for a snack and a couple minutes later this was all that was left! She sure doesn’t leave anything to waste.

  • Gallop your way to a better figure

    joba.JPG

    $2,000 will get you the latest in Japanese massage chair technology. The Joba is fully equipped to simulate a leisurely ride on a well-behaved horse. Research at Panasonic, where the Joba is made, have shown that this mechanical saddle gently stimulates the glutes and lower torso and is great low impact exercise for those with bad knees (the greying of Japan has had a tremendous impact on the home health care industry).

    One could image a bundle deal with a DVD featuring vistas of the Great Plains put to the music of Merl Haggard!

    (Thanks to Terrie for the pointer)

  • Harlem Globetrotters

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    Tyler and I had the good fortune to catch the Harlem Globetrotters when they were at the Oakland Coliseum last Friday. Our neighbor works at and ad agency and they had a few extra comp tickets that got us right up close. Our seats were only five rows back and from there, Tyler spotted a classmate who had courtside seats (where this photo was taken).

    They were just as good as I remembered them when I went to see them at Madison Square Garden when I was Tyler’s age. Amazing ball tricks and some cool stunts with a trampoline, a three-way lay up which I caught on video.

  • Hana-kuso

    Sometimes are kids come blurt out the strangest things. Just tonight, out of the blue, Julia let us know that, "When I’m picking my nose. . .  I’m looking for diamonds."

    Izumi and I looked each other just to make sure we heard the same thing then, busted out laughing.

  • Kill the Paperboy

    Sometimes and idea gets floated that is so out of whack with current trends that you wonder if the author is just trolling for pageviews. Predicting the death of Google seems to be the latest parlor game and BusinessWeek columnist Jon Fine has the latest with his post, Putting the Screws to Google.

    What if 2006 is the year big media players take aim at Google’s kneecaps? No, not with more lawsuits; the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers — on behalf, in part, of BusinessWeek’s parent company, The McGraw-Hill Companies — and Agence France-Presse have already sued the search behemoth. Rather, picture this: Walt Disney, News Corp., NBC Universal, and The New York Times, in an odd tableau of unity, join together and say: “We are the founding members of the Content Consortium. Next month we launch our free, searchable Web site, which no outside search engines can access.” (A simple bit of code is all it takes to bar all or some major search engines from accessing a site.) “From now on we’ll make our stuff available and sell ads around it and the searches for it, but only on our terms. Who else wants to join us? Membership’s free.”

    This is just nuts. Of course media companies are jealous of Google’s $450 share price. I’m sure many a publisher thinks that the site was built on the back of their content and feel they should get some of the advertising revenues sold next to the search results. But to try and build your own search engine and ask your readers to come seek you out just seems as shortsighted as previous efforts to wall off information in pursuit of higher margins.

    The overwhelming trend and momentum of the information economy is towards universal access. Powerful tools such as the search engines which indexes the information and social networks such as blogs and RSS feeds which act as filters to point to and annotate the good stuff only get better with greater access and distribution. With greater access everyone gets a piece of the growing pie. The more content from a site that gets indexed and added to the ecosystem the greater the share of the attention and traffic that clicks through to read the referred to articles and the greater the chance for the publisher to engage the reader and draw them in with more related material. The more good stuff is out there, the more folks will use the ecosystem as a source of information making the pie even larger.

    The newspaper sites should be focused on how to convert a casual reader that might come across their site by way of search engine hit or blog post refer to an engaged reader that will click through to more information and benefit from highly relevant advertising related to what they’re reading. Trying to choke off a search engines access to their information and force readers to come to their own search engine is like laying off all your paperboys because you can make better margins by asking your readers to drive to your downtown offices and pick up the paper themselves. “Come on by, your copy will be waiting for you!” Not likely.

    The other aspect of the Content Consortium that I just don’t see working is the bickering over shared costs of the infrastructure, how to effectively cooperate on ad sales, sharing profits, coming to agreement on technology, and index update times.

    Would you base profit-sharing based on the number of articles you upload into the index? That would really tick off the news weeklies that have far fewer stories than the daily papers. Would the wire services get credit for one liner “flash” headlines?

    Yahoo spends lots of time continually thinking how to improve our search engine. We have an entire research team dedicated to thinking about this. I don’t think a search engine is a commodity. Who’s technology will they use? How will they agree upon relevance? I can see the publishers debating this one for decades.

    I could riff on and on about this but at it’s core, pulling all the news off the search engine goes against what everyone wants, except the publishers. Putting up walls or creating scarcity by killing distribution of your product is the wrong way to build a buisness but a great way to kill one.

  • Yahoo acquires WebJay

    Yahoo announced today that it has acquired the shared playlist service, WebJay. A one man operation that is the brainchild of Lucas Gonze who will be joining Yahoo and spreading the joy. In his own words:

    From the audio and video perspective, the meaning of playlists is that they’re the container format for the internet. CDs are over; mixtapes are only an analogy;

    – sourced from tnl.net 

  • Apple Rumor Mill – Place Yer Bets!

    As much as I hate the prediction game, the temptation is just too great. With the keynote less than 24 hours away, here’s a roundup of some of the latest rumors of what’s going to come out of Steve Jobs’ pocket tomorrow followed by my picks.

    My pick is for the Intel-based machines to lead off, followed by an introduction of a 2GB Shuffle that syncs via Bluetooth, demos of the lates iLife & iWork and a “just one more thing” being the unveiling of a Mac Mini as a TiVo that has video-out ports to support HDTV.

    Some background: Behind the Magic Curtain, an Apple insider describes what’s involved in preparing for the Keynote.

  • Fore!

    I’m not much of a golfer. I never did understand the attraction of hitting a little white ball around and then, as is usually my case, looking for it in the bushes. I never gave the sport a chance when I was young and had a chance to get into it. I guess patience comes with age and I’m now beginning to appreciate what people see in the sport. The singular focus, you and the terrain, and the satisfaction when you do make good contact, that ping of the club against that little white ball.

    There’s a public golf course about a half mile from our house and on Saturday my neighbor was taking his boys over to whack a bucket of balls at the range. Tyler and I tagged along (99 balls cost you $8) and Izumi let me borrow her clubs (she’s got a cute, pink driver that’s
    real fun to use). It was Tyler’s first time at a range and he did pretty well. He did lament that there were, “no windmills” like the mini-golf place down on the Santa Cruz boardwalk but, nonetheless, he enjoyed himself.

    I also go a few good shots out there and, after hearing a round of 18 holes is only $25 for Alameda residents, think I may try to get myself out there one of these days. They give free lessons to kids on the weekends and it looked like Tyler had a thing for this club and ball thing so maybe we’ll get him out there as well!