Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Ever get excited to go somewhere only to find out it's closed? Or knowing that there's a great restaurant a few blocks away that nobody seems to know about? Heck, I can attest to getting a yen for some good barbeque and accidentally walking into a coffee shop on one occasion.

We all make mistakes. What's worse is not having a way to get them fixed.

Well, now Yahoo! Local has a way for you to help keep things up-to-date.

As of yesterday, if you go to any listing on Y!Local, you'll see an "Edit this listing" link. That will bring up a little menu asking if you want to edit something or claim it if you own the business. Simply fix what's wrong on the form, send it on in, and we'll let other folks know.

Hopefully, it's pretty straight forward.

Just so you know, Y!Local gets data from lots and lots of sources, some good, some bad. Hopefully, you'll help us keep more of the good stuff and help us chuck out the bad.

So, thanks in advance!

On-line Maps have been making a great deal of news lately, and I've learned a few things about them. One of the ones that I've always wondered about was how catographers figured out where the streets were (and why some of the streets were a tad off when you looked at the Hybrid View in some remote area. ) Well, one of the reasons I learned was that many of these maps were outlined by hand. (Proving the magician's adage that just because something's really hard and beyond the scope of folks to think possible to do, doesn't mean it's impossible.) Maps, it turns out, are generally traced by folks paid very little to do that tracing. While the process does catch big flaws, it occasionally misses the little ones.

Well, turns out as well that there are a lot of folks very interested in doing that sort of tracing as volunteers and they do a remarkably good job of it. The problem with doing this before was that often the satellite source pictures were as restrictively controlled as the map information they were trying to duplicate.

I'm really sorry I missed out on this announcement earlier. This is fantastic news for folks interested in getting their roads back.

This Y! Cool Thing entry practically writes itself. Well, the name of the feature is already a pun, at least. And You-Witness News is all about citizen journalism, where anyone on the street who happens to arrive at the scene of something newsworthy can snap a picture or take a quick video and get it published onto one of the largest news sites on the web. So the entry doesn't quite write itself, but it seems like one of you guys should probably be doing it, not me. *grin*

Is your 360 page looking, well, a little bleh?

Ok, so maybe mine is festooned with garden gnomes, but there's no reason that yours has to be quite so... err.. gnomy.

The fine folks at Y!7 have published a helpful page letting you know how to Pimp you Blog. (Insert one of countless jokes that would put me in front of angry HR and PR people here.) As an added bonus, the post even includes good style tips so that your page doesn't look like it was put together by a kindergardener after one too many espressos.

(Insert link to popular web site known for eye-bleeding pages paired with snarky comment that would land me in front of the legal team here).

Have you ever wanted to explore the top Yahoo! searches of 2006 in a gratuitously animated fashion? Now's your chance!

Of course, at Yahoo!, we're always thinking of the people. For those who suffer from motion sickness, a non-orbital view is also available. And irrespective of your rotational preferences, you must agree that the site automatically gets a thumbs-up because it's endorsed by Maria. *heart*

Ok, so I'm once again stealing stuff that Sean should probably talk about, but hey, he had his chance yesterday when Sports Rumors launched.

Sadly, no articles about Bat Boy signing up with the Mets (I think he'd make an awesome shortstop, provided he didn't viciously attack the second baseman). but you'll be able to get your fill of the sort of head's up info that just might make your fantasy sports picks a hair easier.

One of the complaints that I've heard leveled against Flickr is that people need to sign up for a Flickr account in order to see private photos. To me, that actually makes a lot of sense, because if they don't have an account, how is Flickr supposed to know what they're permitted to do? But I clearly am not the target user in this case, and of course, Flickr's put together a solution anyway. Using the new Guest Pass feature, you can generate a URL that will give visitors specific permissions to see a particular set and optionally all of your photos private to friends/family. You also have the power to revoke guest passes, or track usage of particular ones, so you'll know if a guest pass URL leaks out and be able to stop random copying-and-pasting strangers from using it.

Click the "Share this set" button at the top of any of your private sets to start playing around, or wander over to this guest pass that I created on one of my sets. Kick off your shoes and make yourself at home! It's the guestly thing to do.

Sure, we're fairly good at finding nifty Yahoo stuff, but I'm sure there's stuff we miss. Well, since del.icio.us has that handy network feature, you can help us solve that problem. (I mean, there are tons of cool apps out there using Y!stuff that we may not know about.)

Just tag whatever nifty bit you find with "for:ycoolthing" and we'll see it. In fact, I'll probably add a delicious badge somewhere that will show you the stuff that we agree is right cool.

Thanks!

We're all about new and shiny here at Yahoo!, but sometimes you just want to curl up with the tried and true classics. Especially when we keep adding neat features to the classics and don't also put them in the new and shiny. Here are two fun things that you can try in Classic Mail that haven't yet made their Beta debut:

Yahoo! Mail Shortcuts: An attractive, interested female sends you her phone number and you need to save it before you wake up from what obviously is a dream. You want to get right into forwarding your resume to this email address that your friend suggested. You have extensive plans to get out and explore new places today, but copying/pasting the addresses into a new window just takes too much effort. Baby, Classic Yahoo! Mail has got you covered. Just sit back, click on the entities that we've recognized and underlined --- things of interest, places, email addresses, URLs, and phone numbers --- and enjoy the relevant options that we present. The Maps one is especially fun. (thanks to Google Operating System for the heads-up)

Refine Results: Yahoo! employees are the height of culture and refinement, so it stands to reason that we'd lend similar traits to our Mail Search Results. With the Cultured Results featur...wait, no. With the Refine Results feature, your search results are automatically categorized by things like who sent the email, which folder it's in, when it was sent, and all that good stuff, so you can narrow down your search without needing to come up with better search terms on your own. A search for "love" quickly reduces to emails from a particular person ... last year ... around February ... and now you've found the heartwarming note that your girlfriend sent you last Valentine's Day. Sweet. (heh, thanks to Google Operating System for this one, too)

Or you can just search for Fantasy Sports like me.

So, these are pretty awesome features. Hopefully they'll make their way into the Yahoo! Mail Beta soon so we can do away with all this darn nostalgia.

Apparently, crowds are fairly smart.

No, I'm not talking about the hordes of folks waiting outside of Wal*Mart at 2AM to pick up a $29 combination DVD player and Foreman Grill (Mom? Dad? Forget you read that.), i'm talking about the fact that given a general topic, the estimation produced from the average of the crowd tends to be more accurate than that of the individual person. Or something. I'm not really sure.

So I'm joining the crowd.

In this case, said crowd will be at the first Open TechDev mini-conference we're holding on the main campus. We're launching the series with a talk by New York Times columnist and originator of "The Wisdom of Crowds", James Surowiecki who will be talking about Prediction Markets.

Ok, so no, Beck won't be performing at this one, but if you're interested in finding out the surprising way that groups tend to think, it's worth attending. And it's free, and the place it's being held in has free soda fountains on the first floor and a weird video sculpture, and you might learn a thing or two.

Hope to see you there!