a blog by Ian Kennedy
Introducing Tag Maps, the latest shiny toy out of the Yahoo! Research Labs. Basically they’ve pulled in the geo-coding information from flickr and extracted tags to clump together a people-powered view of the world on Yahoo Maps. Be sure to also check out Night Explorer and Trip Explorer for different views of the world.
Badges you say? But of course!
Holy crap this year started off with a bang! I’ve been lumbering in a post-holiday daze for the past couple of weeks but a quick succession of events snapped me out of it.
Yahoo! acquires MyBlogLog – I’ve been using the service for quite some time now and have been singing it’s praises internally. The design leaves a little to be desired but that’s just superficial. At its core, is a gem of a concept. What better way to tap into the ego of your readers than to feature their face on your blogroll? If you’re a MyBlogLog user, you’ll see your face on the Recent Readers “faceroll” on the sidebar. Not seeing your face? Go sign up then. This service has a built-in user acquisition strategy.
I like the way their stats package is laid out as well. Left to Right you have:
As an added bonus you have a view of what other sites your members visited across the web as well as the other MyBlogLog communities that your members have joined so you get a real sense of your audience.
But the best part of this service is that it takes a very basic human instinct – curiosity – and spins it into a driver to build community in a very unobtrusive way. Once you join MyBlogLog you’ll find yourself getting automatically added to other MyBlogLog communities. No spamming your friends with yet another social network, no invite requests, it’s all transparent and driven by your behavior. The default is after 10 visits (this can be changed). What this means is that after showing up on someone else’s Faceroll 10 times, it’s assumed that you’re a frequent enough visitor that you don’t throwing your lot in with that community and your face showing up on that blog’s community page.
As you click around the community pages you’ll see faces you recognize or others that just look interesting. As my 4 year old daughter showed me, sometimes you just click on someone to see what they’re about. “Who’s that!” she said as we clicked on someone named Andi. Lo and behold – this afternoon as I write this, I recognize Andi’s avitar on my Faceroll – she saw that we stopped by and counter-clicked through to my site to see who the hell I was. If you’re reading this Andi, “Hi!”.
So hands down, the Faceroll thing is much easier to remember than looking at a random IP address or top level domains in your referal logs. It’s a great way to get to know your audience. The other great thing is that your visitors that are coming to you from MyBlogLog all have websites they claimed. You get to not only put a face to a visitor, you also get to see what they write about, what sites they like to visit, and who visits them. Of course this all means that to be an upstanding member of a community, you need to have a website that features MyBlogLog – goodbye inbox, we are now shifting the conversation over to comments & trackbacks. As MySpace taught us, no one sends email anymore, all casual conversation takes place on each other’s friends pages. MyBlogLog enables any website anywhere to become your own friends page – hello inbox 2.0!
Part of Yahoo’s mission statement is about helping people connect to their passions and communities and MyBlogLog falls right into that line. Welcome aboard Scott and congratulations Bradley and Chad for making this happen.
The other thing that happened? Apple just reinvented the cellphone. I’m off to Moscone this afternoon to check it out.
Prediction Markets is a relatively new field of study which embraces using speculative markets to make better decisions. The idea is that if you can abstract a complex decision into a commodity which can be traded, and thus priced, the signal that you get back from the market will cut through the noise and lead you to better decision-making.
Wednesday evening Yahoo held a confab on Prediction Markets on the main Sunnyvale campus. We heard from James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, a hugely influential book for me, and Robin Hanson, infamous for his idea that a prediction market could be used to accurately determine the next terrorist attack. We also heard from folks from HP, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo who described how prediction markets are used within their companies. Finally, we heard from a couple of vendors of prediction market software including inklingmarkets which offers a hosted solution for companies interested in setting up their own prediction markets and used the event to announce their beta site, worthio, which applies digg-like voting mechanism to the US stock market.
In a fortunate coincidence of timing, the very same moment 200-odd people were debating the value of running markets to gleen information and the importance of making participation simple in order to get maximum participation, Yahoo Answers was hosting an event for 40-50 of their top moderators right downstairs.
In terms of harnessing collective intelligence, Answers has been a huge success and it was fascinating to see the emotional attachment members of the service have to the site. I was lucky to catch part of the awards ceremony and saw one of the users (I didn’t catch her name or handle) actually hug one of the product managers as she came up to receive her award.
I only wish I had the foresight to invite attendees of the prediction markets confab downstairs to see what was going on. With a basic framework, a few simple rules, and the wonderful platform known as the internet, the 60 million users of Answers had created an incredibly powerful, human-powered Oracle of Knowledge that anyone with a web browser could tap into.
This was the power of community. The emotion and support of those at the party downstairs showed me more than any presentation, metrics report, or banner ad the power that you can tap into if you let people, not algorithms, define your product.
“Connect people to their passions” yeah, that pretty much sums up what we do.
If beaming messages of Hope and Beauty are not your thing – through December 4th you can try your hand at creating the next advertisement for Doritos. Win prizes (cash and a trip to Miami for the Superbowl, having your video shown on TV during one of the coveted million dollar ad spots).
More info on the Crash the Superbowl site which gives you access to high quality graphics, music, and video clips that you can mix into your home movies using Jumpcut, the online video editing tool recently acquired by Yahoo.
Maybe we should beam this stuff into space as well.
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.
Yahoo! had one of its internal hack days [1] today and while work kept me from devoting enough time to work on an effort on the scale of last time, an email at 9am this morning did give me the chance to show at least something at today’s show-n-tell.
I’ve been thinking of picture-in-picture badges for a while now and like the concept of a blog’s sidebar acting as a portal to your editorial view of the world. Match this navigational concept to the fact that badges are becoming more and more like the online equivalent of wearing a branded t-shirt and colleague Cody Simms thought was there’s an opportunity for a badge which showed a collection of websites you liked.
So when I got an email from FavoriteThingz (no longer in service) that they have opened up their service to allow you to create multiple badges of just about anything you could think of, neurons fired off on a way to update the tired-looking plain text blogroll.
Faces of people you read like those you see on MyBlogLog (which is totally rad for its own reasons) don’t really work in the context of a blogroll when it’s faces of people you don’t really know. Japanese salarymen have a saying that your business card is your “face” and in much the same way, your blog is “your face” on the internet.
It’s not really a hack (more like a “hand-cranked mashup”) but it’s a cool concept just dying for a little scripting. So here it is, in five easy steps:
1. Go to the webpage thumbnail creation service, webshotspro.com, and enter the URL of a blog on your blogroll into the form on the page.
2. Right click on the 400×300 pixel image and save the image file locally.
3. Go to favoritethingz.com (no longer in service) and create a new badge. Click “add thingz” and “add items manually” on the next page.
4. Select “custom” from the dropdown and enter the blog’s title, URL, and “browse” to select the image file you just saved. Click “save & add another”
5. Repeat.
There you have it! Generate the code for the badge and copy it into your sidebar or anywhere else on your page for a cool looking interactive widget which is way more interesting than a long list of text links. For an example, check out how it looks on my blogroll page. (Favoritethingz, the service that hosted this hack is no longer in service.)
[1] Thank you Leonard & Chris Plasser for organizing a bang up Hack Day. I think I’m safe in saying that my hack was by far the least technically spectacular of the bunch. I had to leave early but did get the watch a few of the demos via the live feed and have to say that the hacks (over 100 by my count) this time around were even more impressive than before. The theme seemed to be, “simple yet revolutionary” – it’s amazing what you can do with a few lines of code these days.
Well everyone was so excited about the hidden Yahoo yodel on the home page that I just had to tell you about the discovery of sea monsters three miles due West of the Golden Gate bridge.
Thanks to Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day for this one. Your daily dose of straight talk from your friendly Yahoo engineers who love to write about all the cool stuff they’re doing behind the scenes to make your life better.
I was going to hold off on the Yay! Yay! Yahoo! posts for awhile after such a long string of them but then flickr took it’s wraps off it’s maps integration and I couldn’t resist. If you haven’t had a chance to play around with this, check it out. From your flickr account you can now Organize photos on a new Map tab. True to form, it’s all drag and drop and you can also set permissions because everything you drag onto the map will be thrown into the general collection of photos that everyone else drags onto the table. Look at the image above and to the right – this feature was launched only this afternoon and there are already over 15,000 (as of 11pm tonight) images polka-dotting the San Francisco peninsula!
Upcoming.org also adding flickr integration today with a handy-dandy tag generator for each upcoming event (they also pushed out a number of other changes which spiff up the site quite nicely). How many times have you been to one of those “well-documented” events where it seems like the people are more interested in moblogging each other than actually speaking (maybe this is just a Bay Area thing). At some point, someone gets the bright idea that it would be great to have everyone tag their collective photos so they can be pulled together under one URL. The recent TechCrunch/August Capital bash generated a ton of photos that were all looped under the techcrunch7 tag which was whispered from photographer to photographer as the evening went on. Now Upcoming resolves the doubt and debate and generates a tag for you right on the calendar entry for the event later crawling flickr to look for that tag to integrate thumbnails of your photos right onto the event page (see image above).
In one brilliant stroke we have a community of images in space (maps) and time (upcoming). I think it’s safe to say that we are living in one of the best documented ages ever. Archeologists of the future are going to have more than enough material to work with but I wonder what they’ll think about this sudden explosion of images in the early 2000’s – what caused this sudden impulse to re-interpret the world around us and categorize and share everything?
UPDATE: after only 24 hours Stewart writes that over 1.2 million photos have been geo-tagged. Never under-estimate the human desire to put things in their place!
There is another Yahoo Hack Day for Yahoo staff coming up next month. Last time was a blast and our hack continues to live on with a recent mention in BusinessWeek. I fully intend to participate and am already thinking about a few ideas but am even more psyched that we’re opening things up to the public for an open Hack Day on September 29th.
Rather than keep all the fun to ourselves, we decided to let the unwashed masses come in and try their hand at stitching something cool together at our first public Yahoo Hack Day. This is what it’s all about – why limit creativity to just a pool of 10,000?
If you think you have a better way of doing things, right on! Come over to the Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale on September 29th and show us the future as you would define it. Give something back, bank some karma and make them internets that much kinder & gentler.
Developer workshop on Friday followed by 24 hours of hacking capped with demos MC’d by Mike Arrington of TechCrunch and then a blowout, Yahoo-style pah-tey! For details and a sign up (hurry! space limited!) go to hackday.org. Should be a blast.
PS. If you can’t get past the “cyphertext” on hackday.org, let’s just say that’s our first intelligence test.