net culture
15 web sites that changed the world: Salon
It seems fitting that I was just thinking about Salon since I noticed the Guardian picked it as one of the 15 “Websites that changed the world.” It’s right there at #11, in the same list with eBay, Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Craigslist, and many others you know well. Very cool.
Silicon Valley: for those too ugly for DC
If Tivo-ing the new season of American Idol wasn’t enough of a guilty pleasure (didn’t those Austin auditions suck?), now I’ve got Valleywag from Gawker Media. Wow, a gossip blog about the world I inhabit! But it doesn’t take long to puncture any feelings of Silicon Valley self-importance in this post:
If D.C. is [...]
Irony and digital music
So I’m sitting at home trying to organize various things (mostly computer-related) and I’ve been sitting at the computer for hours using Yahoo! Music Engine and dutifully rating various artists/songs and seeing what it spits back at me as recommended music. It’s doing a pretty good job, I have to say. When you’re [...]
John Battelle, the Yahoo! TechDev Speaker Series, and the “Flickrization” of Yahoo!
John Battelle visited Yahoo! yesterday and wrote about it on his blog (see perspectives on the talk from Jeremy, Matt, and Nate. I took the blurry photo you see on your right). I invited John to speak for somewhat obvious reasons (he just wrote a book about search) but it was [...]
The Salon redesign
When I walked over to the Argent Hotel today to peek in at Web 2.0, I couldn’t help but feel a bit nostalgic when I passed the old Salon.com offices at 706 Mission Street, right next door to the Argent. It was in that building where we migrated Salon to Linux and built our [...]
Web 2.0 and Punk Rock
longbets.com: “the betting site for big thinkers”
Steven D. Levitt over at the Freakanomics blog (the companion blog to the book by the same name that is on my reading list) pointed me to the utterly fascinating longbets.org, which he described as “the betting site for big thinkers.”
In a nutshell, bettors publicly put real money on one side or the other of [...]
Fun with robots and fire at Yahoo!
This week has been a VERY cool work week. Closing out my first week, I attended an amazing lunch-time presentation by Mark Pauline, founder and director of Survival Research Labs, a talk put together by my boss Bradley Horowitz as part of a regular series here at Yahoo!
How to describe SRL? [...]
Memories of the WELL and its geek-infamous server
When I saw that Salon had put the WELL up for sale, it brought back some interesting memories. I was CTO at Salon when the WELL was acquired, so I was ultimately responsible in an org chart sense for integrating the WELL hardware and software into our environment, although the “real” work was done [...]