20 Blog Bits for Today: Google, Yahoo, Starbucks, Greasemonkey, Syrup, and so on...

At the risk of posting far too many things today, there's a bunch of stuff that I wanted to write about but couldn't justify posting all of them individually. They fall somewhere between the blog and linkblog.

Anyway, here goes...

1. Yahoo plucks Amazon.com design guru (CNet). We've got a new VP of UED (User Experience and Design) who comes from Amazon, Apple, and Xerox PARC. Is is just me, or are we hiring a lot of big name talent recently?
2. Fred Wilson calls Google The Starbucks of the Internet in a long and interesting post. He makes a lot of good points and draws out some good discussion in the comments. My take is that Google has a very broad interpretation of what it means to "improve access to all the world's information." Very broad. There's nothing wrong with that, except that it continues to surprise people and that continues to surprise me.
3. Geek News Central asks the question Yahoo? Since When Do We Talk About Yahoo? It's good to see that people have managed to stop obsessing on The Starbucks of the Internet long enough to realize that we've got a ton of good stuff going on this year. I was starting to wonder if the blog world would ever catch on to what Wall Street figured out a few quarters ago. BTW, we're not just a search engine.
4. Nelson's blog has inspired a greasemonkey script.
5. Speaking of Nelson, he posted about the Yahoo! 360 login problem that I've been seeing too. Knowing that it's not just me anymore, I filed it in Bugzilla and shot him an email. He's updated his post to reflect that. Excellent! Thanks to Nelson for confirming what I thought was specific to something I was doing.
6. Speaking of Greasemonkey, Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Greasemonkey is rocking my world--just what I've been looking for. I want to see if I can use GM to add a feature to a product we'll be launching before the engineers do it in an official sort of way. If it works, I'll certainly write about what was involved. It should be a fun little exercise.
7. And speaking of things that impress the hell out of me, have you seen the Yahoo! News Tag Soup site? That guy's done some cool auto-tagging stuff using our news feeds and Yahoo! Search APIs. Wow.
8. Brad (of LiveJournal fame) has released his diskchecker.pl script. If you've ever heard him rant about how disks lie and disk vendors suck, you know why this matters.
9. You can run a whole PBX on a $80 wireless router. Damn, I really want to do this, even though I don't have time and it has no practical value to me. I happen to have a spare WRT54G in the closet.
10. It looks like the Linksys NSLU2 is the solution to my Dad's fileserver needs. Plus, you can slap Linux on itid and get RAID-1.
11. There's a plug-in blog for Yahoo! Music Engine (aka, yTunes). Kick ass! I forgot about this. If it smells like MovableType, there's a good reason.
12. Ben introduced backstage.bbc.co.uk by saying "The implications of this next sentence are, if taken with enough of a forward gaze, enough to make you shit" and that, of course, got my immediate attention. Luckily the BBC is really onto something. Read about it.
13. Is is just me or is del.icio.us pretty slow these days?
14. Joel writes about Making Wrong Code Look Wrong and rants a bit about variable prefixes. I dig that.
15. Mental Models For Search Are Getting Firmer according to Jakob Nielsen. Therein lie important lessons for anyone designing site search features.
16. Jason spread some Ajax on his blog and some syrup on his floor. Both amuse me in very different ways.
17. Glancing at Drag & Drop Sortable Lists with JavaScript and CSS reminds me that I have much to learn in the ways of CSS and JavaScript.
18. Hire Different reminds us that it's important to get some diversity once in a while.
19. Why good video search will change media forever brings up some very good points about video search and the ubiquity of digital video cameras. " When a disgruntled fast-food customer can in a few hours produce and widely distribute a professional-quality video that shows a fast-food worker using unsanitary methods, PR professionals will have to monitor a still larger world for threats to reputation."
20. Les Orchard, in The right place for data in your feed asks the question "is a feed the right place for your data" and then goes on to explain why he thinks the answer is "no, but it doesn't hurt if it's there, too"

Posted by jzawodn at May 11, 2005 07:48 PM