Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Yep, you bet! My lack of calendar skills means YOU GET TWO COOL THINGS today!

What a bargain!

One of the nicer things about doing a blog like this is that you get a few "HOLY CRAP! THAT'S COOL!" moments. Yesterday (the day I was supposed to post something, stupid JR, stupid JR), I had one of those HCTC! moments when I found out about the musiclibre blog. What makes that so cool? Well, aside from the fact that it's a webjay player that pulls from various music blogs, you can put it on faceook, your blog, or nearly anywhere else. It's also pretty darn easy to customize.

Seriously, check it out, and check out the screencast too!

This is hardly an official Yahoo! product, but it was created by a Yahoo, which is close enough for me (especially when three hours late :P).

Yesterday, we talked about how the Pipes team was making URLs shorter, simpler, and more descriptive. That's all well and good, but sometimes, it just doesn't feel like you're getting your money's worth out of a diminutive URL.  Why address in 21 characters when you could instead command a spacious, say, 2048? That's where GiganticURL steps in.

Yeah. That's pretty much it. It takes your URL and makes it gigantic. Be sure to bookmark http://www.giganticurl.com/url/aHR0cDovL3ljb29sdGhpbmcuY29taHR0cDovL3ljb29sdGhpbmcuY29tYUhSMGNEb3ZMM2xqYjI5c2RHaHBibWN1WTI5dA==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 today!

Hi! My name is Sean, but you can call me I_m2V2cgpWzYei2qolbcGw--. That's my unique Yahoo! Pipes identifier from my old Pipes URL of http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/person.info?eyuid=I_m2V2cgpWzYei2qolbcGw--. I mean, there's an address that really gives you a sense of ownership over your page. :D

So, for those rare people out there who have trouble committing random 24-character strings to memory, Pipes has introduced simplified, personalized URLs for your user page and for your particular pipes. You can stake your claim to just about any URL name for yourself that hasn't been taken already (so hurry up!) to define your top level directory, giving you an entirely new namespace in which to go crazy with informative and memorable URLs for your pipes. For instance, now you can find me at http://pipes.yahoo.com/smock514 and you can try out one of my very few pipes (I'm a passive user) at http://pipes.yahoo.com/smock514/blog_search_aggregator. It's that easy!

Shortly after graduating college (I believe it was late in the Van Buren administration), one of the first things I did was send a bunch of documents off to my Computer Science profs. These were the sorts of things I thought would help out those that would follow, and for the most part they did. I managed to help a few alum even find a job or two.

Of course, this was long before the web, when mighty gophers ruled the earth. Now, it's a lot easier to help out. There are lots of social networks one can use for this, but more often than not, they're not really tied to helping out fellow classmates. They're about more casual social things that you probably don't want on your resume or have to explain in the interview with the Record Industry why you chose "Pirate" rather than "Ninja". That's where Kickstart steps up to the plate.

You can hook up with old college friends, or folks that belonged in associations, and focus on getting the kind of job you deserve. What's more, it's something we're working on and VERY interested in getting feedback on. Things aren't done (far from it) but the folks there don't want to build something without making sure it's something you'd like to use. Feel free to check back and see what changes they make.

So, give someone a kickstart in the career.

Okay, pretty sure this one is actually a new feature in Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta, unlike that last one I wrote about. Basically, when you paste in a link for a video, photo, or map (from some of the more well-known sites, at least, particularly the Yahoo! flavors), a little inline viewer will show up right in your Messenger window, saving you the trouble of having to click on the link and open up a browser.

Seems to work with YouTube, Yahoo! Video, and Flickr, as well as for single point locations for both Yahoo! and Google Maps, as far as I tested. It's also hard to test out in a single user situation, but it looks like we're suggesting to users that they watch the video together using our Zync plugin, and it would be awesome if we did the same sort of thing for the shared maps (but I'm betting that we don't...yet?).

Ok, so you've listed your various social sites, now what?

Well, for one thing, you can tell folks about it.

The MyBlogLog folks are at it again, this time creating an auto-signature link for your email so that way you just can't run and hide from your adoring fanclub.

Mash Pets are great. Simply having the option to snorgle anything on a web page makes it immediately worthwhile. But one of the first thoughts I had when someone first installed it on my page (which, by the way, someone has been messing around with... :P) was that, well, it's pretty fugly. And even clicking the "this is fugly" link to remove all of the stylings from the page didn't help.

Turns out, I had the power to fix it on my own all along. Following these simple instructions, my Mash Pet is now a dinosaur playing Guitar Hero, who may turn into a picture of me with chiclets on my face when very happy, or a photoshopped image of raining rose petals when sad. C'mon, it's around 2:40am, I'll make a more coherent range of emotions when I have less pressing sleep to attend to.

A quick tip before the kids start pounding on my door for candy and lightsticks...

Amit provides a lot of hidden search gems in a post, but two are very interesting indeed:

wrapping a search term in [ ] will make sure that words appear in that order, (for instance [JR Conlin] produces links about just me and not from Bill Conlin Jr.)

The other fun (and hidden) one is linkdomain: which allow you to limit outlink searches to a given domain. Kinda useful if you want to find out who's linking to what.

Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta recently launched with all sorts of upgraded bells and whistles. One of the more drastic visual departures is your contacts are presented by default with larger avatars and fancy rollover options. While this is pretty and emphasizes the fact that the focus is on your friends in this release (or it's friend-happy, whatever that means), it does make it a bit harder to quickly scan for contacts because you have so many fewer visible at one time. But why scan for contacts when you can just search? The whole issue is sidestepped by the handy new EDIT: old but new-to-me Contact Search Bar (which you can show/hide from the Show/Hide menu option), which does exactly what you might expect in a straightforward autocomplete fashion. For my tastes, I still revert back to the compact view, but either way, the search bar means I don't have to worry about losing my contacts again.

Whilst wandering various blogs over the weekend, i came across a post from Marco talking about how the term extractor is fairly useful.

Well, yeah, actually, it is.

What that does is analyze a block of content looking for words that might be important. It does that by doing all sorts of context related things in order to find the items that most likely match the terms that are interesting to you (thereby preventing you from getting words about jungle cats and English sports cars when talking about the latest OSX version from Apple). It was originally used to do content analysis for what sorts of ads to display, but obviously it can be used for far more than that.

For instance, you could use it to automatically generate tags for articles, or indexable terms for documents, or boil down things like the Magna Carta into easy, bite-sized buzzwords. (for the curious, they are:

• king of england
• ireland
• all england
• bishops
• illustrious men
• cardinal
• archbishop of canterbury
• william marshall
• god king
• grace of god
• archbishop of dublin
• knights of the temple
• duke of normandy
• bailiffs
• abbots
• foresters
• anjou
• earls
• holy roman church

which I encourage you to add to your next Major Historical Document Recitation Drinking Game.)

What? Hey, I just came off of serving jury duty. Having a Major Historical Document Recitation Drinking Game would have been a more than welcome diversion.)