Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Have you checked out MyBlogLog lately?

Well, turns out that if you or your friends added the various networks you use, you can now get a feed of what they're doing and what they find interesting.

It's just like being in their virtual bushes peeking in their cyber windows.

Only without the creepy bits and the compu-restraining orders.

Any UFC fans out there? Yeah, I'm not quite sure if that exactly fits with the demographics of this blog, but in case any of you outliers are wondering what to do at your computers on Saturday, check out UFC 82: Pride of a Champion being offered up on Yahoo! Sports. It's the first of several UFC pay-per-view live streaming events that we're covering (the price is the same as the TV PPV package, I think), and having watched the dress rehearsal earlier this week, I've gotta say that the team did a great job. I mean, I don't even really like mixed martial arts, and I was cringing right along to every high quality moment. You can also watch the archived event for 24 hours afterwards so you can relive that time that guy punched that other guy. Yeah. Good times!

Here's a quick hack that you may not be aware of:

So there are various tools out there which let you run web pages outside of browsers including Adobe Air, webkit, and a few others.

And you're probably aware of the web version of Y!Messenger that features a bunch of latest and greatest features. While nifty, it's kind of annoying to tie up a browser page for that, huh? And it can be kind of annoying when you close down the browser and forgot you were running Y!Messenger, or your browser hangs for stupid reasons, or...

Well, in about 5 minutes, I was able to grab a copy of Mozilla Prism, enter a few quick values into the dialog box, and whaddya-know?

Just like having a normal Y!Messenger app running and no worries about losing focus.

We've long had a buzz index to keep track of the happenin' stories on the web, largely based on search volume and discussed in a blog hosted at buzz.yahoo.com.

buzz.yahoo.com is dead not dead yet*; long live buzz.yahoo.com!

The newest incarnation of Yahoo! Buzz keeps the general principle of surfacing content based on general "buzz" about the Internet (including search volume, number of times recommended via email, etc), but then layers over top of that a social voting system and pretty rounded buttons. It draws from limited sources versus letting users submit stories, so it'll be interesting to see whether the content pool is deep enough to keep people coming back. The buzziest stories may end up on the top page of Yahoo!, though, which is certainly a huge reward for folks seeking traffic, so hopefully that'll be the spark needed to keep a steady supply of stuff to buzz up.

* Whoops, the Buzz Log is still available. Yay!

Sometimes when you build something, you have no idea how it's going to be used. I'll admit that when Y!Live got launched, I got a cold shiver as a future spotted by unsolicited anatomy lessons seemed to daunt me.

I'm glad that I wasn't the one who made the decision to green light this.

Why do I say that? Partly because of reading things like this.. A group of deaf folks were able to use it in order to put a face to their voices, which is really, really cool. Had I been the guy on the switch, I probably wouldn't have let it go and these folks wouldn't have had the opportunity to get together like this.

And frankly, that's the sort of surprising thing that makes doing stuff like Y!Live really interesting.

I haven't gotten around to upgrading to Windows Vista, but if I ever do, hopefully it'll be around the end of March to make it holiday appropriate when I try out the Matrix Mode Easter Egg in Yahoo! Messenger. It's always a shame when you have to tell people about an easter egg instead of them just stumbling across it, but it would be an equal shame to not let people play around with this grid-based Messenger view that lets you see the contents of all your tabs all at once. I don't know if it's anything that I'd ever use on a regular basis (because...you know, it's really not too different from having multiple windows and just being really anal about where you put them), but it's rare that you see variations on the standard instant messaging window layouts (aside from separate windows or tabs) and it definitely seems fun to play with.

Personally? I'm lucky I can speak one language. Talk to me sometime when I'm particularly tired and you'll get a weird mixed southern / West Virginia drawl out of me that is probably only decipherable by people who may or may not have a personal fermentation device.

That doesn't mean I can't appreciate a good translator.

That's why I'm very happy shining a brighter light on r3, the phrase based auto translation service based on the same service we've been running internally to provide translations for sites in Europe, Asia and other locations. Granted, fans of SourceForge might already be familiar with the project.

If not, y'all jus' awtta be.

(Oh man, I have GOT to get some sleep.)

While writing some code tonight, I found myself trying to come up with an appropriate variable name for a relative representation of a URL that I was constructing, compared to the absolute URL that I eventually wanted to reference on the page. The acronym URI came to mind, which I was cool with until I realized that I didn't exactly know what URI stood for and would feel kind of silly if I got called on it by someone who did. But, hey, that's what search engines are for! Entering URI into my Firefox 2.0 search field, I got:

Which I thought was really handy, until I also realized that the string "URI" isn't at all present in "uniform resource identifier". I knew that we did internal string matching versus only prefixing for our suggestions, but expanding acronyms was something else altogether that blew my mind. I have no idea about the mechanics of how this works and we sadly don't have it as part of any of our web offerings any more, but it's really neat to be able to type acronyms like AJAX, IIRC, WYSIWYG, LOL, et cetera into the browser search box and have them be automatically demystified.

A while ago, I was asked to help the Hadoop folks put together a demo to show folks how amazing their tool really was. While I'll admit that it really was amazing, the demo they wanted to put together, wasn't.

To be honest, it kinda put them into a bad light with folks who just wouldn't understand exactly what they were doing or could offer. Well, looks like my procrastination paid off.

Today, on various sites, the fine folks at Hadoop pointed out that they're now powering the index builder for Yahoo! Search. That's pretty impressive, right? Well, remember that Hadoop is open source and there's nothing stopping you from doing something equally impressive.

Cool enough for you?

Well, other than the new javascript widget:

Go check out what the fine folks at Raven SEO Tools have put together with the new MyBlogLog API to extend PHP and Wordpress. Next even features a quick interview with said fine folks.