This very well might be one of those moments that defines tech news in 2008, especially if Yahoo! accepts Microsoft’s 44.6 billion dollar offer. For the past few years Yahoo! has been suffering. In 2006, this became more widely known when Continue Reading »

I was browsing through Jonathan Snook’s blog earlier this morning when I noticed something at the bottom of his posts; a link for users to bookmark his posts on del.icio.us with a count of saves. I love stats and rather than going to sleep I decided to investigate this and roll it out on my blog. Continue Reading »

One year ago today I was up very early in the morning in Sunnyvale, CA helping launch Yahoo!’s now 1 year old corporate blog, Yodel Anecdotal. Yodel Anecdotal is praised for being a real blog into the life and culture of Yahoo! and not just a press release outlet. In addition, Yodel Anecdotal is able to get vital feedback from real users with comments as opposed to Continue Reading »

Up until now there had been only a few tools to help web developers assess the speed and optimization status of their websites. Primarily, there is the Net tool of the ever-popular Firebug add-on for Firefox. The Net tool can tell you what a website is loading, how long it takes, if it’s cached, headers and similar items. Yesterday, Yahoo! released their own add-on to Firebug called YSlow. Continue Reading »

Back in 2005 I wrote an article detailing how to embed flickr slideshows within your blog or website. Since then, that post has received over 200 comments, a crazy amount of links and numerous mentions on popular blogs. I finally got the message that embeddable flickr slideshows were a hot item. Continue Reading »

San Jose Mercury News recently launched a new weekly podcast called Inside Silicon Valley. Their first podcast caught my attention with an interview of Bradley Horowitz about Yahoo’s idea incubator, Brickhouse, in San Francisco. Continue Reading »

One of the most common things web coders run into is the need to parse some type of XML file. Many web services return API calls in XML format, so it’s just handy to know how to parse these results quickly. With PHP4 you usually have to rely on some large parsing library to get the Continue Reading »

Over the next few months, Yahoo! Mail users will begin having unlimited storage at their disposal. From the news pieces I’ve come across, the attachment size limit of 10MB (20MB for Y! Mail Plus subscribers) per email hasn’t changed. So much for emailing large movies of your Continue Reading »

I love flickr and I’ve always yearned for a unique and interesting way of displaying my recent flickr photos on my site. Yeah, I could always just grab the standard flickr badge and style it up nicely with some CSS kung fu but in the end it will still be a bunch Continue Reading »

Yahoo!, in collaboration with AC Nielsen and a group of companies, government entities, etcetera, has launched a campaign to raise awareness about energy efficient light bulbs. 18Seconds.org is the location of the attractively-designed campaign, complete with a Yahoo! Maps mashup that lets you see how your city and state rank up in terms of CFL purchases. Continue Reading »

I love flickr. I really really do. No longer do I litter my hard drive with gigs and gigs of scattered photographs kept in folders all named some variation of 101MSDCF. I keep my 5,500+ photos easily accessible on flickr, organized with photo sets and abundant tags. So how can you add on to flickr’s greatness for a phenomenal gift for the flickrite in your social ring? You’re about to find out. Continue Reading »

Inc magazine has published an interesting conversation with Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield. They reminisce about the very beginning of Flickr, how they came up with the name and how they had originally planned on making a game. Flickr has grown into an amazing service and I feel lucky I got a chance to spend my days at Yahoo! working in the same bullpen as Caterina.

The Official Google Blog reported last night that they will stop accepting new questions for Google Answers later this week. Google Answers has been around for 4 years and has remained relatively primitive compared to the successful Yahoo! Answers. The Google blog also states that more than 800 people have used worked on getting the answers for Google Answers over the years. That’s it? I would be shutting it down too. But at least they’ve realized this and are cutting their losses.

Flickr recently rolled out three new features on the insanely popular photo sharing site. There’s the guest pass feature which lets you show private photosets to non-flickr users with unique URLs. Flickr has revamped their mobile site, accessible at m.flickr.com. Unfortunately, it only works for users with Yahoo! ID logins. The final feature is a pretty damn cool Camera Finder that lets you sort cameras used on Flickr by number of photos taken and such. Continue Reading »

Havi Hoffman, my hiring manager from Yahoo!, has written up a post on Yodel Anecdotal about this past Monday’s Time Capsule Camp. There were about 70 of us and the day began with a scavenger hunt in downtown Palo Alto. We were split up into 8 or so groups, each with a mobile phone and camera. We were given Continue Reading »

Thanks to all of those who voted for me and helped spread the word about the recent scholarship for student bloggers. I did not take first place but I received 2nd place and $1000 will be going to Georgia Tech. Thanks to Daniel Kovach for holding this scholarship. Congrats to Shelly Batts for also winning $1000 and of course to Stephen Yellin for taking home the big $5k. Continue Reading »

On Sunday I’ll be flying out to Sunnyvale (first class, courtesy of Yahoo!) to help out with Yahoo’s Time Capsule Camp which takes place on Monday November 6th. I blogged about this event a while back, looking for participants to join us. Basically it is a day long event at Yahoo’s HQ where roughly 100 people will be taking part in a series of activities to create various forms of media Continue Reading »

Yahoo! will be holding a day-long camp on November 6th at Sunnyvale HQ to benefit their newly created online Time Capsule. The massive Time Capsule will be filled with various forms of media - video, images, words, drawings and sound. It will be put on display at the Smithsonian for a while, then it will be sealed until 2020. Yahoo! will open the time capsule then, on their 25th anniversary. Continue Reading »

Congrats to everyone at Yahoo! for the successful acquisition of Jumpcut. Jumpcut is a a social media service.. in a sense. It is similar to Motionbox which I briefly looked at, but allows users to upload not only videos but music and pictures as well. After you’ve uploaded some media you can “remix” and mash it up as you please, or leave that up to the viewers. Continue Reading »

Kudos to the Flickr folks at Yahoo! as they will be rolling out geo tagging functionality later today as noted on TechCrunch. Utilizing Yahoo! Maps and Yahoo! Search technology, the new flickr feature will bring an updated Organizr which allows you to tag your photos and photosets by simply marking them Continue Reading »

With the news that Yahoo! fully supports microformats, there are undoubtedly a few questions from the not-so-techy web user. Having had the chance to briefly speak with Tantek about microformats at BarCamp SF this past summer, I can help to clear any misconceptions. If you remember or use vCards, dubbed the electronic business card, you might be familiar with the microformats concept. Continue Reading »

Before I left Yahoo! for the summer, some of the interns and I had recorded a podcast regarding the new age of social media - facebook, myspace, stuff like that. The post was published this morning so be sure to check it out at Yodel Anecdotal. For those of you that are reading me Continue Reading »

The day we launched Yodel Anecdotal, Podtech.net reporter Catherine Girardeau stopped by to ask us some questions on the new corporate blog. Enjoy.

Today is a great day. I get to open my mouth and let you in on the project I’ve been working on ever since I arrived at Yahoo! earlier this summer. I present to you Yodel Anecdotal, the corporate blog for Yahoo!. So I bet you’ve got flashes of Dell’s One2One corporate blog floating around and thoughts pondering whether Yahoo! already has a similar blog. Well I’m here to tell you that Yodel Anecdotal is completely different. Sure Yahoo! has over 10 blogs for just about Continue Reading »

Being surrounded by technical genius at work everyday, I was bound to pick up a few pieces of wisdom. Working on some top secret stuff for Yahoo!, I quickly learned that every website or blog that Yahoo! dishes out must comply with the graded browser support theory. The project I am working on must abide by “A-grade” browser support as do other Yahoo! sites. A-grade support unfortunately Continue Reading »