everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: Yahoo

  • 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!

  • I don’t know why but I just can’t stop

    Shhhhh! It’s a sekret!

    Go to www.yahoo.com (oooh & ahhh over the new design if you haven’t seen it), mouse over the "!" on the logo and click.

    Hours of fun. Really. 

    Cool

     

  • Dressing up your avatar for the show

    avatar.jpgIt’s Friday so why not dress up your avatar for the weekend? Yahoo & Wal-Mart are sponsoring a fashion contest. Submit your avatar and the community votes on their favorite. Over 17,000 people have submitted their avatars so far so they’re plenty of inspiration for the fashion-challenged (like yours truely).

    The Yahoo! Avatar Fashion Show

  • What’s in a name? Introducing Yodel Anecdotal

    an·ec·dot·al (adj) : of, relating to, or being the depiction of a scene suggesting a story

    Last night Yahoo! took the wraps off of a new corporate blog. Taking the place of Search blog which stood in for a long time as Yahoo’s central voice in the middle of a galaxy of Yahoo-specific product blogs (opml), Yodel Anecdotal is designed to be the place where we can post all those stories that we want to tell but don’t really fit next to stories about search engine weather reports.

    Props to Paul Stamatio for the design. I especially like what he did with the rotating headers with random shots from around Yahoo! I have a 360 blog that I use for snapshots of things I see around campus but these are way better.

    I first learned about the project when I was chatting with Paul in the burger line at the Yahoo cafeteria. He had one of the new Motorola Q devices which prompted me to strike up a conversation in which I later learned what he was up to. Nice work and what a great way to show what you did for your Summer internship.

    Be sure to check out the intro video which is a fun little tour through the main campus (I can now show my parents in Japan where I work!). They had fun making the video and it shows.

  • answers.yahoo.com is a first person shoot ’em up

    answwerholicsDanny Sullivan takes a look at the growth of answers.yahoo.com and compares it to other successful social media properties.  

    If it were a computer game, Wikipedia would be a strategy game in which you take a long view to win a campaign or goal. Yahoo Answers is a first-person shoot-’em-up. Questions appear, and as soon as one is shot down with an answer, it’s on to the next one.

    Some of the top players on the leaderboard spend up to 15 hours/day on the site, it’s definitely addictive. There’s even a Yahoo Group dedicated to kicking the habit.

  • flickr coloring contest

    flickr was down yesterday so they held a coloring contest.

  • Happy Friday – Good Reading

    I’ve been busy so have fallen behind on my reading. Scanning through some older posts in my reader I ran across these two excellent posts by some fellow Yahoo’s that make me proud to work here. Enjoy!

    Searching for what doesn’t exist – Bradley Horowitz talks about answers.yahoo.com. Existing search engines point you to the best match on pages that exist. Answers is the first service that coaxes knowledge from the collective smarts of Yahoo’s pool of half a billion monthly users.

    Beat to death with a Rosetta Stone – I’m not a coder but JR Conlin’s comparison of the different programming languages is so well written (an hilarious) that I can really appreciate what it’s like to be one.

    The fashion of business – Matt McAlister writes that compared to the British and Japanese, Californians actually do have a sense of style, just not in clothes. “Americans may not be dressed as smartly as Europeans, but their business sense is acutely tuned to fashion in the markets in a way that is still unmatched around the world.”

  • Yahoo Hack Day

    Yahoo Hack Day

    Nice write up over on TechCrunch on a hack that I worked on with a team of seven other Yahoo’s spread out across the US.

    Every couple of months groups of Yahoo’s band together to work on simple prototypes to work out a new concept or feature. Most are simple extensions of existing Yahoo products that extend them in new and original ways, some just use API’s in a way to poke fun and get a laugh, and others are full-blown software or hardware wizadry that blow your mind with their creativity and flash.

    The rules were simple. Teams have from noon on Thursday through to noon on Friday to take their project from a concept to a working prototype that can be demoed in front of a panel of judges in 90 seconds or less.

    Recruiting for the team took place in the weeks leading up to hack day and as we got closer we had a rough idea of what we wanted to do and emails were traded on how to break up the tasks at hand. We found out that having two members from NYC helped us out b/c the time difference meant that the West Coast team could hand off to them in the early morning and catch some sleep while they carried the torch and picked up where we left off.

    I learned many things at Hack Day and am really happy Yahoo gave me the chance to participate. I would argue that I learned almost as much about Product Management in those 24 hours than I did in two years when I was product manager at Factiva.com. 24 hours and a 90 second demo do wonders to focus your attention to the absolute core. What company would give their employees two half days of to scratch an itch and then give you a chance to get in front of folks like the CFO, co-founder, and Head of Product Strategy to let you state your case? What a cool company.

    There were lots of highlights, unfortunately I can’t write about most of the hacks themselves but there were some great flashes of personality too. Chad bought a sound level meter to measure the cheers & hoots which were many and supportive. We were all running on fumes so all was forgiven. My favorite demo was the poor man’s karaoke machine (lyrics on the screen set to associated flickr images) which croaked on the flickr image part and just ended up being 90 seconds of Jeffery Bennett singing while he waited for his demo to work.

    Jeff’s voice is not half bad either!

  • New email format for Yahoo! Groups

    Yahoo Groups just announced that they will embed new links in HTML emails from subscribed groups. From the notice:

    Get one click access to your favorite group features.

    If your group updated any content, you can find out from the email.

    • Message Archive Read and reply to group messages
    • Photos Share photos from your photo album
    • Calendar Coordinate group events
    • Polls Ask group members what they think
    • Links Store and share links to web sites
    • Transfer Files Share documents and files
    • Database Manage group information