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

Reader Comments
# Justin Rudd said:

Looks like Amazon is having a pretty good sale on the NSLU2 - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0001FSCZO/

on May 11, 2005 09:16 PM
# Benjy said:

I've used greasemonkey for almost exactly the purpose you describe: I've prototyped several features with it to demonstrate their utility, and without requiring me to find and modify the actual backend code in question.

I've been meaning to write about that experience, but if you beat me to it, someone might actually read it. ;-)

on May 11, 2005 09:23 PM
# Jeramey Jannene said:

Delicious has been pretty slow for me too. I'm not sure quite what the story, nor am I sure what the business model is yet. All in all an amazing service that is unfortunately getting slower.

on May 11, 2005 10:02 PM
# Justin Lundy said:

Speaking of ajax. I just ajaxified my blog. If you goto subterrain.net these days, you'll notice the search box now spits results back via JavaScript and XmlHttpRequest. It's actually just the LiveSearch drupal module, put into practice. I like it. Nice quick way to search through blog entries and comments don't you think? :-)

on May 11, 2005 10:11 PM
# Jeremy Zawodny said:

Justin: that gives me an idea or two...

on May 11, 2005 10:15 PM
# Jack said:

Larry Tesler is a great hire for Yahoo! Ever see him in the PBS documentary "Triumph of the Nerds"? He had some interesting things to say about Steve Jobs.

on May 12, 2005 12:08 AM
# Kenneth said:

This is a really good selection of links, thanks. I'm really glad to see Mark is writing again.

Has anyone else tried Caribou Coffee? It's not like Starbucks, it has a smoother taste.

on May 12, 2005 05:03 AM
# Michael said:

With respect to AJAX - why is this suddenly a buzzword and the latest rave? People have been using that methodology for development for years - I first wrote an application utilizing js/XmlHttp/dhtml four years ago and I'm not a web expert.

One thing I'm interested in hearing about is if others have had problems with the events not firing properly while waiting for the return. We used arrays to build up many send events and occassionally it would just get "hung" and our app would have to take that into consideration.

Our driver was to deliver a "web based" applicatoin that could work online/offline. All requests to the server went via the msxmlhttp send. The application manipulated the results to update the ui and keep the user from waiting in a blocked call. This is especially useful for multiple file uploads to a server, particularly if the file sizes are large (in combination with ado objects that can encode the file into an xml document).

Is it because google implemented it in gmail? Or am I missing something?

Michael

on May 12, 2005 08:52 AM
# Miles said:

wonder if yahoo should have a greesemonkey contest -- what javascript/css/html hack can you insert into a page that makes x site better?

on May 12, 2005 03:06 PM
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