everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: Milestone

  • “We can’t control the puppets”

    “We can’t control the puppets”

    Success on the internet is not a zero sum game. New activity can come from any corner and audience and attention often expands to meet this demand. Much has to do with the spirit of “giving back” which is one of the principles upon which the internet is founded. Take what you need and when you can, give something back to make the online world a better place for the rest of us.

    This same spirit is what drives the Hack Day efforts at Yahoo. “Mash up or Shut Up” was one of the early mottos for Hack Day. It encapsulated the idea that grumbling about a shortcoming or missing feature is a waste of bandwidth. Tackle the problem yourself and lead the way. Be resourceful, lead by example, show us how it works. Sell your idea with a prototype, not a powerpoint.

    This past weekend Yahoo opened its doors to outside developers, invited them to pitch tents on the grassy commons. We showed them the knobs and levers they could use to make the world a better place. Many Yahoos cleared out their busy schedules to welcome people from all over and show them around. I was working the tables at registration and it was really great to meet people from as far away as Canada, Chicago, Florida, and New Jersey. No one really knew what to expect when the weekend started but we were all pleasantly suprised.

    When Beck was first pitched to play at Yahoo (through a skateboarding connection!) the organizers were thinking it’d be cool to have him play a few tunes on acoustic guitar while sitting on a stool in our cafeteria. Not only did Beck say he’d be happy to play to a crowd of Yahoo hackers, he countered that he wanted to bring his full stage show. Another pleasant suprise.

    Wonderful things happen when you let your audience participate. Yahoo understands that we are defined by the people that use our services. If we give them the tools to participate, both with Yahoo and with each other, we will all be pleasantly suprised by what they give back. The world will be a better place and audience attention will expand to support what gets created.

    Hack Day was started to let Yahoo engineers in the search group scratch an itch and show off their coding chops to their colleagues. With each successive Hack Day, the group of participants grew so now anyone, regardless of location or business unit can be part of it. It only made sense to continue this inclusive trend and open it up to outsiders. Expand the pool and raise the bar. Isn’t that how evolution works? I am so proud that Chad, Bradley, and the executives at Yahoo followed through on their intuition and made this event happen. It was a risk that they didn’t have to take. The standard developer’s conference is usually more structured and shys away from marshmallow guns.

    We do things a little differently at Yahoo and I think our approach will pay us back in many unexpected ways for years to come. The barriers to participation are lower than they’ve ever been, the only thing holding you back is your creativity. Come on by and help define the world you live in.

    Selected Coverage:

  • Yahoo Publisher Network

    As a blogger and old school web publisher (Tokyo Q, one of my first efforts, is now enjoying its 10th year of service), I love to talk about tools that help publishers take advantage of the internet as a delivery channel. Coming up on my first anniversary at the big Y, I am now putting my back to a project that I believe will have a huge impact on Yahoo’s partnership with online publishers. As Product Manager of the Yahoo Publisher Network, I hope to create a place where everyone from the casual blogger looking for extra widgets to the online editor of a major media site can come learn about and manage everything Yahoo has to offer to support their craft.

    I enjoy working with a team towards the common goal of putting out a product that is used by people around the world and look forward to doing this with the YPN team. I’ll be working with Cody Simms who I met during my first week at Yahoo and see as a kindred spirit in the quest to get the word out about all the cool things Yahoo does. I am also looking forward to working with folks like David Zito, Andrew Negrin, John Lindal, and a host of other really talented developers. It’s rare that you have a developer team as fired up about a project as the Product Manager and it’s clear I’m going to have to work hard to keep up with them.

    I will be spending time at the Yahoo Burbank offices learning about the advertising side of the business. All the systems that power the ads that run next to the Yahoo Search results and on partner sites across the web are optimized to serve not only the user, but also the web site publisher and advertiser. Balancing the needs of each of these parties is an art, especially in these times when the proverbial invisible hand is trying to figure out where to push.

    I admire the work the Yahoo Developer Network has done to document various Yahoo APIs and UI libraries for the developer community. Chad Dickerson and those before him have done great work in turning Yahoo inside out and embracing a new world which now extends beyond the yahoo.com domain.

    I hope to bring this same collaborative spirit YPN. Provide tools that make it easy. Push the technical hassle into the background, let the publisher focus on their readership, building an audience, matching products and services to that audience. It’s not hard to stitch two web services together to make a compelling mashup, we need this same ease of use and community for online publishers.

    A few of us spent a morning last Friday walking about 30 Yahoo employees through setting up and accessorizing their blogs. Everybody got up and running but there is still a huge opportunity to make it easier and more integrated. Building a readership is hard enough, the tools and utilities to support your readers need to be easy to integrate. The individual pieces are in place, we just need to put them into a package and create a home where a community of publishers can learn from and help each other succeed. Wish me luck!

  • Chinese Blog tops Technorati 100

    Technorati has been keeping track of the increasing number of blogs in languages other than English reporting at their last State of the Blogosphere that English is no longer the dominate language of blogs; the majority of blog posts are now in Japanese.

    The number one blog on the Technorati 100 is now, 老徐 徐静蕾 新浪BLOG by Xu Jing Lei taking over the number one spot from BoingBoing earlier this month. Using Yahoo’s updated Babel Fish service, this title of this blog translates roughly to, "Old static flower bud." I think there’s  a cultural nuance that I’m missing here. Anyone know what this blog is about?

  • 2005 in Review

    I sort of let the holidays wash over me without taking the time to do much more than the bare minimum. I guess it’s age but it seemed like the Halloween > Thanksgiving > Christmas medley roared through before I could soak it in. I believe that is what happens as you get older – the notion of 12 months making up a year and the need to mark the passing of each one seems more and more arbitrary, unnecessary, and a bit artificial. Anyway, that’s my lame excuse for only now getting around to sending you my annual update.

    This has been a year of putting down roots. It was our first full year in the San Francisco Bay Area so we spent most weekends exploring our new home. A couple of highlights:

    January

    Six Apart, the startup I worked at with my sister Mie, moves to the city and I start to commute to the city, usually by bus but when the weather was nice, by ferry which was spectacular. Tyler learns to ride his bicycle without training wheels and we join the Yarrington’s for a snowboarding trip up at Tahoe.

    February

    A quick trip out to Hawaii to relax a bit with Izumi’s parents. Sun, Sand, Surf, and garlic shrimp on the North Shore. I take a Howard Rheingold book and get hooked on SMS and the fact that I can text a friend in Scotland while waiting in line to get on a submarine in Waikiki.

    March

    We visit the Russian River for the annual Barrel Tasting festival. We taste some wonderful Champagnes and Pinots and later commune with the Redwoods and Izumi finds a giant four leaf clover. Tyler takes up t-ball and akido. We start reading the Harry Potter books together. Julia learns the theme song to the movie. My Japanese Grandfather passes away peacefully while taking a bath.

    April

    Izumi passes her written test for a California license on the third and final try. I try my hand at professional blogging and conceive, install, design, and write for dymag-usa.com, a site to promote the motorcycle wheels made by Izumi’s father’s company.

    May

    Intrigued by Daddy’s interpretation of Professor Dumbledore, Tyler takes up reading and uses a bookmark to mark his place in Green Eggs & Ham which we nibble over the course of a week. One last trip up to Tahoe where, amazingly, we ski in t-shirts.

    June

    Izumi and the kids head off to Japan for two months so that Tyler & Julia can get a taste of Japanese school. Julia’s happy to follow in Tyler’s footsteps and attend the “little t school” where Tyler went last year. Daddy catches up on some live music and sees Les Claypool, Oliver Mtukudzi, and the Devo cover band Mongoloid all one month.

    July

    Daddy, hating spending time in a big empty house by himself, finds things to do on the weekends. He goes sailing on the bay and lets his sister drag him out to a rave and ends up having a good time.

    August

    The family is rejoined in Japan where I spend a short week hitting old haunts but not able to meet everyone I would have liked. Julia’s talking up a storm in both English and Japanese and is becoming her own person. She masters the art of the batting eyelashes.

    September

    After getting my picture in the paper as a business blogging expert, I decide it’s time to push on and leave Six Apart for Yahoo. To celebrate, I buy an iPod Nano and listen to podcasts during my daily drive down to Silicon Valley. I visit my relatives out in Tennessee but decide not to try the wakeboard this time.

    October

    Mie and Dav get married, my parents visit San Francisco, and we buy a Tivo. For Halloween Julia is a generic Princess in Pink and Tyler is a Ghost Buster. We hand out $60 in candy in less than two hours and Tyler loses his first tooth and I get my first traffic ticket.

    November

    We visit the Mystery Spot in the Santa Cruz mountains and Izumi gets sick. We join a local health club situated in an old naval aircraft hanger. Tyler and Julia take up soccer lessons.

    December

    Julia gets four Barbie for Christmas and Tyler now favors his new Bionicles and Transformers over Thomas the Tank Engine. Packing our bags for a long weekend down in Monterey, I’m reminded that this is where we spent our New Year’s last year. It looks like First Night on Alvarado Street is getting to be a Kennedy family tradition. As we head into our second year on the West Coast, we look at doing more of the stuff we liked and less of the stuff we didn’t. I do believe taking stock of the year is a useful exercise and I thank you for indulging me.

  • Rocketboom now available on Tivo

    Rocketboom, the daily video newscast is now available for download to your broadband connected Tivo.

    We differ from a regular TV program in many important ways. Instead of costing millions of dollars to produce, Rocketboom is created with a consumer-level video camera, a laptop, two lights and a map with no additional overhead or costs.

    Podcasting News

    It’s also distributed via RSS and does a complete end run around traditional network and cable distribution channels. Subscribe today for your first taste of citizen media in the living room.

  • Blogs on the cover of BusinessWeek

    It’s going to be another busy week – BusinessWeek has a lengthy cover story on why companies need to pay attention to blogs.

    Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite.

    At the same time BusinessWeek Online launched five new blogs (powered by Movable Type) at Blogspotting.net

  • del.icio.us goes pro

    Joshua Schachter, the creator of the social tagging system that has taken the blogging community by storm and is often pointed to as a prime example of "folksonomy" in action, announced that he’s quitting his job, taking on investment, and devoting himself full time to del.icio.us.

    Hooray, another one leaves the nest to pursue his dream!

  • Nando Rebranded

    A sign of the times perhaps. Nando Times, one of the first online media organizations is being re-branded by it’s parent as McClatchy interactive. Nando, launched in 1994, was shorthand for The News & Observer and was, in the early days, the first place to go for quality news online.

  • Yahoo cuts to the chase

    We’ve seen it played out over and over again. The internet has enabled consumers to go directly to the production plant for disintermediated product. Covered in detail in Michael Lewis’ book, Next, the internet has upset age old business models, putting raw materials within reach of the everyman and providing a platform for a thousand new business models to bloom. 2004 was another banner year for online vendors as more go with a source that, because of its virtuality, can offer better inventory and price that a brick & mortar counterpart. Amazon vs. the Mall; it’s like watching mountains crumble into the sea.

    Today’s announcement by Yahoo that it will source quotes directly from the stock exchanges is another notch towards the reinvention of the information industry. Reuters, the traditional source of market data, built its business on charging a premium for market data which it sourced from the markets, both in bulk from the exchanges, but also aggregated, from the banks that wanted to list their prices on the Reuters network. It is rare when you have a business model that allows you to charge not only for subscriptions but also for contributions. As any CEO of a public company will tell you, it is hard to fix something until it’s broke.

    “This significantly increases our ability to extend our brand outside of our network,” said Craig Forman, vice president of information and finance at Yahoo. “We will have more control of financial information that we can then distribute.”

    Depending upon the deal they cut with the exchanges, Yahoo may become the preferred provider of market data on the internet. Superior price and integration options are something that I’m sure they will aspire to and advertising can help offset their costs, an option that’s not part of Reuters’ corporate DNA. Abstracted to our earlier example, is Yahoo going to become the Amazon of Financial Data while Reuters continues to charge a premium for access to a relatively closed network of proprietary information? We certainly do live in interesting times.