I’ve spent the last 24 hours at Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale, camped out in the Yahoo! cafeteria watching hundreds of non-Yahoo! hackers work franticly to put together a demo in 24 hours using Yahoo! technology.  I’ve participated (and written about, see here and here) Yahoo!’s quarterly internal hack days.  But this is the first time that Yahoo! has thrown open its door to allow anyone to come in  (and by anyone, yes, I suppose that would include last night’s "surprise" stage performance by Beck!).

Blogosphere echo chamber coverage has been pretty heavy (and deservedly so)…but here is some of my favorite media to come out of the event so far:

• Photos: Laughing Squid takes the cake so far
• Video: Yahoo!’s "official" coverage, complete with the hilarious video that Beck and team put together and played during the show (note: PG-13 haha)
• Yahoo! vs eBay Comparison: Phil Wolff
• Title of Article: Greg Cohn wins.  But you need to watch the "official coverage" video above to get it. 
• Basic Overview: Perhaps the best of all of these…Beck’s puppeteer speaks

Once again, thanks Chad and Bradley.  You guys have outdone yourselves.  The energy and excitement all weekend have been incredible.

I’m looking forward to seeing all the hackers demo their work, which will begin in T-minus 9 minutes…Michael Arrington (the MC for the demo presentations) is already in the house…

UPDATE: There’s another link worth checking out: Bradley’s.  Actually, I am sure that there are many more to check out, but Bradley, the executive sponsor for Hack Day and YDN, really sums up the overall impact of the event.  Unlike many posts (like mine) written on Friday night or Saturday morning as a post-Beck geek-out, Bradley waited until yesterday to post and was able to truly capture the full magnitude of Hack Day.  For a company like Yahoo! to literally open itself up, and for the obvious executive buy-in that is necessary for an event of this magnitude, it means that the dynamics of the internet and of media in general truly are changing even at the highest levels.  And that’s damn exciting!

Summer’s over…and it looks like I need to sign up for HBO again. Or rather, I at least need to do it in time for season 2 of Extras…

(Does anyone know when this starts?  HBO’s site is a bit vague about it).

Here’s the series 2 trailer from BBC.  Not sure why they didn’t just stick with Bowie.

Thanks to my friend Scott for IM’ing this to me.  It made my Tuesday morning.

I was messing around with my Technorati settings last night and in the process I ended up re-”claiming” my blog. Someone just pointed out to me that this somehow resulted in me ending up on the Technorati home page today as a “Featured Blogger”!

Thanks for the traffic, Technorati. I’ll take it!

Here are some screenshots, for posterity:

Technorati home: Logged out state

Technorati home: Logged in state

This news is a few weeks old, but I found it worth posting for its significance.

Image from Yahoo! News.

From the International Herald Tribune:

FC Barcelona’s fame as the only major European (football/soccer) team not to wear advertising on the front of its shirts is over.

Yet the European champion is delighted by the groundbreaking manner it
has broken with tradition — through an agreement to publicize UNICEF…

Under a deal bearing the slogan ‘Barcelona, more than a club, a new
global hope for vulnerable children,’ the Catalan team will annually
contribute €1.5 million (US$1.9 million) to UNICEF humanitarian
projects. 

This year’s donation will be employed for AIDS education programs in Swaziland, a country stricken by the disease…

‘On the one hand, Barcelona will incorporate on its shirt something it
hasn’t done in more than 106 years of history, the logotype of an
organization,’ (Barcelona president Joan Laporta) said. ‘On the other, this is an unprecedented
agreement because for the first time a soccer club has positioned
itself as more than a club, as a charitable club par excellence.’

It’s about time that a sports team — which by nature has more role model power than almost anything on the planet — took the right approach toward putting an external brand on themselves.

Bravo, Barca!

Technorati Tags: Barcelona, barca, UNICEF, charity
 

A friend sent a link to me today called Miniature Earth.  Though not directly related to the Banksy show I saw yesterday in LA, the meme is the same (and especially in line with this, this, and this).  Take the minute or so to watch it, it’s worth it.

Banksy, a British street artist and provocateur who no one has actually seen, held his first official art show on US soil this weekend in a downtown Los Angeles warehouse.  I’ve posted a number of the photos I took at the show.

I felt that the show, and Banksy’s work in general, do a lot to make us think — about our lifestyles, our desires, and our contributions to the world.  Specifically, Banksy focused his energies on forcing us to ponder the purpose of art; he made the argument that the aesthetic value of art (and, really, the aesthetics of anything) should be a big fat zero and that instead art (and the rest of life’s daily activities) should only be worth anything if it causes someone to take action on an issue.

I’ve added short comments or intepretations of each piece of art into the Flickr titles/comments on of each photo I took.  I’d love for you to take a look at them and add your interpretation as well.

Great controversy surrounded Banksy’s inclusion of a live elephant in the middle of the warehouse.  Knowing that the elephant would create a stir among animal rights activists, Banksy literally spelled out his metaphor in postcard form to the throngs of onlookers:

"There’s an elephant in the room.
There’s a problem that we never talk about.

The fact is that life isn’t getting any fairer.

1.7 Billion people have no access to clean drinking water.
20 Billion people live below the poverty line.
Every day hundreds of people are made to feel physically sick by morons
at art shows telling them how bad the world is but never actually doing
something about it.

Anybody want a free glass of wine?"

I personally feel that the animal rights controversy created exactly the type
of energy that Banksy is telling us we should redirect onto more severe
issues.   It also created quite a buzz, which had people lining up to get in.  Let’s just hope that it made them think, too…

I finished participating (remotely) in my second Yahoo! Hack Day. As with last time (and the other Hack Days that preceded my participation), the premise is that anyone in the company can drop what they are doing for 24 hours (noon Thursday to noon Friday) in order to work on a functioning prototype of anything built on Yahoo! technology. The participants then have 1 (to 2ish in some cases) minutes to present their Hack to a very large room full of peers and executive level judges. The entire event is webcast live across the world for anyone in the company to watch.

Last time, my team put together something that actually won an award! I’m not sure the outcome of yesterday’s events yet, but to me the awards don’t really matter that much. Instead, what is really thrilling is being able to take the podium (or play a recorded screencast with audio in the case of my Burbank-based team) and show off a “next big thing” idea to (a) some of the most influential and forward thinking people in the web space, and (b) some of the most powerful people in the company. Just for flavor on that latter point, the judges at yesterday’s events were: Jerry Yang (Yahoo! co-founder), Sue Decker (CFO), Chad Dickerson (head of Yahoo! Developer Network), Iain Lamb (co-founder of Oddpost), Larry Tesler (head of Yahoo! User Experience department), Marco Boerries (head of Yahoo!’s “Connected Life” division, including Yahoo! Go and other non-browser experiences), Phu Hoang (SVP of Platform Engineering), and Lucas Gonze (founder of WebJay).

In other companies the size of Yahoo!, having an opportunity to show off (or in my case, to fairly blatantly “pitch”) a new idea to a group of people at that level all at once would be an almost certain impossibility.

Thanks to Leonard for organizing such as great event and for the entire Yahoo! Tech Dev group for continuing to push the hacker agenda to a place of obvious executive buy-in.

Side note: I’m still amazed that my colleague and team member Ian Kennedy, who was up in Sunnyvale Thursday and Friday so couldn’t join the hack that our team worked on, was able to pull off his own hack in the way that he did. Read his post about it: 20 minutes! The rapid ideation and execution is awesome, Ian.

Photo from karraseen.

Tags: hackdayq306, yahoo, hackday

I have the distinction of not having an "official" generation.  By some accounts, I’m on the tail of Gen X.  By others, I’m just at the cusp of Gen Y.  But regardless of the original intentions and date demarcations set forth by Douglas Coupland,  when I look at my friends (who tend to all be anywhere from one to ten years older than me) compared to my sister and her friends (she is three years younger), I would say their tastes and worldviews could possibly be generationally different.

I registered for Facebook last night for the first time (here I am).  I’ve dabbled in social networking sites for some time, but hadn’t used Facebook specifically.  Where Facebook differs from other sites, of course, is that it is the next-gen Classmates.com in that it’s original focus was on helping college kids connect.  Much of that "connect with your classmates" infrastructure survives and it is fascinating to play around with. 

Here are the number of my ex-High School schoolmates presently on Facebook by high school graduation year.  Just for reference, the average class size at my high school is about 70.

• 1991 - 0
• 1992 - 0
• 1993 - 0
• 1994 - 0
• 1995 - 1 (it’s me)
• 1996 - 2
• 1997 - 2
• 1998 - 8 (my sister’s year, though she’s not on there)
• 1999 - 8
• 2000 - 21
• 2001 - 40
• 2002 - 47
• 2003 - 52
• 2004 - 54
• 2005 - 65
• 2006 - 68

Now, let’s compare this to Classmates.com:

• 1991 - 11
• 1992 - 15
• 1993 - 15
• 1994 - 11
• 1995 - 18
• 1996 - 32
• 1997 - 19
• 1998 - 20
• 1999 - 26
• 2000 - 19
• 2001 - 16
• 2002 - 26
• 2003 - 8
• 2004 - 12
• 2005 - 10
• 2006 - 2

Interesting to see how Classmates sort of peaks right during the initial college age years of internet bubble 1.0 (1995-1999), and right at the tip of Gen Y’s entry into college.  I wonder how those growth numbers on Facebook will look 5 years from now…

UPDATE: My good friend and 1995 classmate Matt, who is also a bit overly web literate (just like me) just pointed out that he too has a Facebook page.  So that updates the 1995 Facebook user count to 2.  I wonder why he didn’t show up in my search?

On Saturday morning, Molly and I woke up and looked around online for something interesting to do.  I had just given her a sweet new bike for her birthday, so we thought that maybe we should find some reason to ride bikes around town.

While scanning through my daily reads, I noticed that my friend Amy (founder of the fantastic "Cheapskatin’ LA") had written about what sounded like a super Saturday event — the "2nd Annual LA Tamale Festival".

Amy diligently linked out to info on the Tamale Festival at two sources: Upcoming.org and SocialDomain.  Both have extensive previews of the event and make it sound like the event is no small tamales, if you know what I’m saying </bad joke>.  The write-up on Upcoming even boldly claims that the organizers "anticipate 60,000 (attendees) due to the venue SALAZAR PARK which is centrally located in Los Angeles."

Ourselves anticipating an afternoon of sweet steamed masa, Molly and I mapped out the route from our house in Silverlake to Salazar Park, which worked out to being about 7.5 miles each way through central and East LA.

After over an hour of pedaling through urban Los Angeles, we hungrily arrived at an empty Salazar Park in East LA.  Well, the park wasn’t totally empty…there was a community center full of septuagenarians sitting in folding chairs against the wall as Latin dance music played — apparently, senior citizens revert back to middle school habits at co-ed dances — but there was certainly no tamale festival happening.

When I got home, I looked more closely at both the Upcoming and the SocialDomain promos for the event.  Both link to a site that curiously does not exist: latamalefestival.com.  If you go there, don’t click the links as they are just ads owned by the domain owner.

There is an actual 2nd Annual LA Tamale Festival, but it looks like it isn’t until November 10-12.  So I wonder, were the false posts on Upcoming and SocialDomain merely accidental, or was someone intentionally creating false marketing listings in order to drive traffic to the domain-parked latamalefestival.com site?

Hopefully the answer is the former.  I’m an idealist when it comes to social media, and I’m not yet ready to see fantastic sites like Upcoming become corrupted with spammy marketing and false lead generation ploys.  (And by all means, no disrespect to Amy and Cheapskatin’.  She simply reports the events from around town that she stumbles onto herself.  She certainly shouldn’t be expected to do any investigative reporting as to whether an event is actually legit).  And finally, if the festival did in fact happen and we somehow missed it, please kindly let me know.

On a lighter note, even though we didn’t get any tamales, at least our 14.5 mile round-trip ride through central LA allowed us to see what simply must be the best selling taco stand on the planet: