I’ll be giving the keynote talk at the Widget Summit tomorrow morning in San Francisco. I’ll cover what we’ve recently released as part of the Yahoo! Open Strategy. Please stop by if you will be there.

Cheers,
-c

Today (Friday, September 12) is Yahoo! Open Hack Day. The Yahoo! campus was buzzing yesterday. Volunteers were getting prepped with handout materials; developers were scrambling to get final bugs squashed; presenters (me included!) were (still are!) readying their presentations and demos; IT was tweaking a massive public wi-fi network; and facilities was running around getting rooms ready and a stage set up. It’s a massive effort that is really powerful for the effect it has on the company. An amazing spirit of collaboration really comes out around this event among the Yahoo! employees. A nice positive vibe is hanging in the air.

Some brief history is in order.

My former colleague and friend Chad Dickerson kicked off the Hack program at Yahoo! back in 2005 — the year we both started at Yahoo! — as an internal event that provided a way for Yahoo! developers to show their stuff and innovate. I’ve written about the Hack format on this blog a few times. It’s quite simple. You get 24 hours to take an idea from concept to working prototype, and then you get 90 seconds to demo your prototype to a panel of judges and a room full of peers. Chad envisioned a Yahoo! where everyone had a platform to show off their creativity and ingenuity, and he made it happen. Founding Hack @ Yahoo! has probably been one of the most lasting and positive individual contributions anyone has ever made at Yahoo!.

In 2006, Chad and some of the Hack crowd decided that Yahoo! engineers alone shouldn’t have all the fun. They registered http://hackday.org and put up a site that stated simply and plainly that “Open Hack was coming” with a date approximately six weeks in the future.

They set a goal, and then they went to town to define it with tactics and programs. What they ended up with six weeks later was pretty amazing. The first Yahoo! Open Hack Day was a two day event that anyone on the web could request access to attend. Day 1, a Friday, featured a day of talks about developer-facing Yahoo! technologies, capped with an evening performance of pretty serious note. On Day 2, hackers hacked and then there was judging. There’s plenty of great coverage on the web about it, but this video by one of the participants, Mo Kakwan, captures the spirit better than any press coverage ever could.

Since 2006, Yahoo! has held two other Open Hack events: one in London and one in Bangalore, India.

The event returns to Sunnyvale today, September 12, and tomorrow. The format is relatively unchanged, with talks by Yahoo! folks on Friday, some killer entertainment Friday night, and a day of hacking and demoing on Saturday by the participants. The difference between this year and 2006 is the amount of care and energy Yahoo! as an entire company is putting into our developer efforts. We have lots of new stuff to talk about and for you to hack on, including things like Searchmonkey, BOSS, GeoPlanet, FireEagle, MyBlogLog API and the Y! Music API that launched earlier this year to a number of new Y!OS components that we’ll be previewing for the first time. I’m very eager to hear feedback from folks on these things. And I’m eager to see how creative everyone can be with them.

If you are coming to Hack Day this weekend, please look me up. I’d love to meet you. I’ll be giving the first talk of the day at 10am today (Friday) — Yahoo! Open Strategy: An Overview — and I’ll be moderating an OpenSocial discussion in the afternoon. I’ll otherwise pretty much just be around during the event, talking to folks and helping people where I can. I hope to see you there.

If you can’t make it here, you can also follow the event on Twitter and Flickr.

Cheers!
-c

This weekend, one of the best outdoor music festivals in LA is happening a stone’s throw from my backyard: Sunset Junction.

I don’t think I’ll make it there.

I already missed my buddy Matt Kozlov’s band Radars to the Sky this morning. Congrats on the gig, Matt! I hope it was a blast! I’ll be missing Broken Social Scene tonight too. Tomorrow, it’s likely that I will experience no !!!, Beachwood Sparks, Germs or Black Keys. (I know The Germs are the subject of a new doc…but is it really possible for the The Germs to be The Germs without Darby Crash? And if you are reading this before tomorrow, you really should go see !!!. They are insane live.)

Why?

Today, Molly and I have made up for being out of town last weekend with a day of domesticity. We washed our cars. We got an oil change for her car. We did some yard work. We did laundry. Tonight, we’re going to Pasadena to go see Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the new Woody Allen movie that is “…a rueful comedy about two young American women…“. And it was a really nice day together, even if my description above makes it sound a bit like Will Ferrell in Old School:

Tomorrow, it is just work, work, work. I have to do two things, in particular:

1. Need to prepare syllabus and materials for the USC semester, which starts on Monday. I’ll do a longer post soon on the program that I’m teaching and what the semester entails. It’s great stuff, and really nice program for anyone interested in changing careers into consumer online product management and Internet entrepreneurialism.
2. I’m drafting a “manifesto” on “openness” for work. Yahoo! is really taking the “we’re opening up” thing seriously, to the point that I’ve been asked to work on a document which internal teams will be able to use as a guidepost when planning and making decisions. There will be plenty more from me on Yahoo! and openness on this blog.

That’s it for now. Off to the movies!

Cheers,
-c

Over the last eight months, while on a self-imposed-too-busy-to-blog-well-so-don’t-
blog-at-all-and-instead-just-lurk-and-occasionally-twitter hiatus, I followed this meme between two of the more innovative and online-community-minded (can I really get away with two hyphenated strings in one sentence?) entrepreneurs with whom I have had the pleasure of working: Todd Sampson and Eric Marcoullier, the co-founders of MyBlogLog. Todd accurately describes exactly why I felt I needed to hit the pause button on my blog.

I was just too busy.

I was teaching a course at USC on Thursdays and Saturdays, and I was traveling three days and two nights a week from LA up to Sunnyvale with Yahoo! while defining, pitching and securing funding for the Y!OS vision. As a result, my blog was just looking pretty lame.

Well, I recently passed the one year anniversary of traveling to Sunnyvale three days a week. It has been well worth it; we have had a whole bunch of exciting things going on and coming up on the Yahoo! front. (And at the very least my now hefty Southwest Rapid Rewards and Starwood Preferred Guest account balances will combine to allow me to spend some much needed quality vacation time with Molly at some point!) Outside of Yahoo! on the USC front, this coming Monday marks the start of my second year, with all new students and projects coming in with the new fall semester.

So in other words, I am going to continue to be overwhelmingly busy again this fall. But this time, I’m going to make every effort to open a dialogue about things here as they happen.

Oh, and while I’m busy reattaching the kidsallright mouthpiece, I think I’ll go ahead and use it right away to give a serious shoutout to Ian and Bob at Topspin. It’s not every day that you can say that your friends just put out the new David Byrne and Brian Eno record in a way that is redefining how the music industry works! Stream or buy the whole album below. You’ll be happy you did.

Brb!
-c

You may have noticed that I’m a terrible blogger. A terrible blogger shouldn’t keep a regular blog if it isn’t focused, and I bet this blog wouldn’t pass an eye test.

Over the past few months, I’ve been ridiculously busy. I’ve taken a new position at work that’s required me to travel up to 3 days a week, and I’ve been teaching a course at USC.

So on that note, I’m officially going on blogging hiatus. I’ll return in a bit, but this blog will have a completely different feel — and focus — to it. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, you can follow me on flickr or see the latest songs I’ve been learning on the guitar.

See ya around.

-c

As I mentioned a bit over a month ago, I recently bought a 1985 diesel Mercedes with the plan to convert it to run on vegetable oil.

Today, I made the final leap and took my new pet down the block to Lovecraft Biofuels. About 3 hours and $737 later, she was fully converted. They officially hacked my car! Here’s a peek under the hood:

After a quick trip to Smart & Final (Costco was closed for Memorial Day), I was in possession of seven 35 lb containers of corn oil. I couldn’t contain my excitement and filled up right at Smart & Final. I received a few strange looks in the parking lot as I screwed a bottomless gatorade bottle into the fuel tank, lifted up a giant vat of oil, and started pouring. I had let the gas get down to about 1/8 of a tank just so that I could start smelling that sweet, popcorn-y smell of a vegetable oil powered car as soon as possible, so I was able to put in two full 35 pound containers with room to spare.

I loaded the unused oil containers into the trunk and hit the road, noticing nothing different at all in terms of my car’s performance but feeling much better about my personal effect on the environment.

I’ll keep you posted as I get more used to the new routine of filling up and maintaining my new car. In the meantime, here are a few pictures of her with her Lovecraft stickers on (which they give to you after your conversion).

Consequently, my 2003 Mazda is now for sale. Leave a comment below or send an email to me at jcodysimms [swirly at symbol] yahoo [period] com if you are interested…

UPDATE: Lovecraft has added me and my car to their “Conversion Gallery“.

Photo by losermike.

“Run…to the hills!” shrieked Iron Maiden in their classic track of the same name [lyrics].

Well, last night I found myself running away from the hills.

In case you haven’t seen the news, Griffith Park — the largest municipal park in the country I believe — caught fire yesterday around 1pm. Since many of you have asked, here’s a quick update on the fire from my perspective.

The park itself is pretty darn close to my home. Here’s a map showing the distance between Griffith Observatory, to which the flames came dangerously close, and Spaceland, a small music venue which is very near my home.

I was at Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale yesterday during the day. As I was boarding the plane at 6:45 pm to return home, Molly told me that there was a fire in the park and that I might want to explore alternate routes home.

I landed in Burbank at ~8pm and after seeing the thick smoke billowing from the hills, I decided to take an alt route home. Instead of my normal journey down I-5 to Silverlake, I detoured up to the 210 and over to the 2 South. This route took me to through the La Canada hills which are north of Griffith Park. It gave me an elevated view of the profile of the fire, which was stunningly beautiful (and extremely terrifying). On my whole drive home along the 2 South, the entire sky to the southeast of me was bright orange (sadly, I did not have my camera but from now on will keep an old digital camera in my glovebox).

Photo by seraphimC

I made it home around 8:45. Molly was supposed to be watching the Gilmore Girls finale with her friend Laura (Molly & Laura, sorry to rat you out!). But Molly was by herself on the couch watching the local news. Laura had gone home to make sure that she had power and that her dog was ok. By this time, power was out in parts of neighboring Los Feliz and areas of town that are very close to us were being evacuated.

We had no food in the house and I needed dinner, so we left to go find something. We detoured through the Silverlake hills, first on Apex Street east of the Silverlake resevoir and then near Micheltorena to the west of the resevoir. It was dark by then, and we could literally see bursts of flames shooting up into the air (Mack Reed has video footage).

Photo by ericcastro.

We ended up going to Gelsons Market in Los Feliz — taking us closer to the park. The air there was pretty thick with smoke, and after we made it back to the car I noticed that sizeable pieces of ash had settled on the roof of my car.

With that, we went home to watch a bit more news, sent an update to Twitter, and finally turned in.

This morning on my way to work, I saw one of the tanker helicopters swoop down into Silverlake resevoir, suck up a few thousands of gallons of water through a big tube, and fly off to dump the water on the fire. It looked like a big mosquito. Mack got footage of this too.

I detoured to work back up through the 210.

Good luck to the fire crews and to anyone who had to evacuate last night. We were certainly thinking of you. It was a scary night but it seems that everyone will end up ok, except for Dante’s Peak…one of our favorite hiking spots.

Also, in case you hadn’t noticed from my references above, Blogging.la had wonderful coverage of the whole event. There are also a bunch of photos on Flickr, where I found all of the photos above too.