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While that video conference last week wasn’t that productive, I did get a chance to meet an interesting entrepreneur who shared a great story with me (and hopefully he doesn’t mind me sharing it here).

He runs Diet.com, a great URL and a community site targeted at–you guessed it–dieters. The site has lots of features, from diet blogs, to reviews of diet products, recipes and diet tracking tools.

The most interesting thing he shared however was how he approached his new video feature on his site. His staff produces little videos (like this week’s “Kitchen Raiders” which helps you cut bad foods out of your house). They then take these videos and post them on YouTube. THEN, they embed them on their own video page and their own homepage.

So what? Well, first they don’t have to deal with the mess of hosting their own videos. Second, by posting it on their homepage for their millions of users, all of their videos end up in the youtube “most watched” list for that day. It’s a great free marketing tool for them – they produce high quality content that people want, they show it to their own very interested audience, and their audience makes it popular on YouTube, which introduces them to lots more interested people. It’s creative and really simple. I like it.

Oh, and here’s that video. Remember no costco size bags of transfatty foods.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWAWbCsdPys]

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As I mentioned, I’m trying to get out more and hit a few more confereces. I see it as a good chance to meet people and maybe learn a thing or two.

However, I always find it hard to decide which ones to go to (I’m not one of those perennial conference-goers). So far, I’m heading to:

  • Web 2.0 (in April in SF)
  • EconSM (in April in LA)

And I’ve been thinking about Gel in NYC. Any others? later in the year? Which are you going to?

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I’ve been wanting to get out and attend more conferences lately. I’m not usually a big fan of conferences, but I’ve been feeling like I want to meet more/new people and hear different perspectives on things.

So, my coworker Mike and I attended Clickz’s Video Advertising conference today. This is clearly a field that isn’t figured out yet, so I thought it might be one of those “get to hear early insights” kinda days. Boy was I wrong.

I had low expectations for the morning sessions (the interesting sessions were set for the afternoon) but even those expectations were missed. On both morning panels, there was only one clueful guy who actually seemed to be aware of what was going on on the web (there’s this thing called myspace, and another thing called YouTube people). I sat through excruciating demos of million-dollar budget “interactive websites” that looked like they were an artifact of 1999. And what was worse, these people were giving advice to people in the audience. “People want slick, professionally produced, immersive interactive experiences”. (never mind the lack of authenticity, the slow download time, etc). Someone later in the day even demoed a downloadable app that played a custom video. How smart.

Anyway, I stuck it out in the hopes that the Yahoo speaker and the Google speaker would rescue the day. Usually google’s speakers run rings around everyone. Didn’t happen.

Then, my absolute favorite moment of any conference EVER happened. There was a panel of people demoing “new technology” in the space. Nothing was really new, each panelist more boring than the last. Then a presenter said that he wouldn’t be demoing anything. And then, it happened, the conference organizer and moderator sarcastically said:

[I paraphrase:]
Well, this panel couldn’t get less entertaining if it tried.

Wow. I guess she knew this wasn’t going well. I left shortly after that. I hope my next conference is better…

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You may have seen the notes from Daniel, Chad, Bradley or Jeremy, but our part of Yahoo is hiring (like crazy) and we’re looking for the best and brightest to come join our team.

As you may remember, I run a group called Advanced Products at Yahoo!, and I’m lucky enough to be in the position to hire a lot of people. We’re looking for passionate, execution-oriented people who love to build great products (at the version 1.0-level) and who have the experience, skills and smarts to make our team even better than it already is. We’re looking for all types:

  • Engineers – you have great experience launching products, love working on bright team and have the technical chops to go with it. We code in all sorts of ways (depends on the project), but we do a lot in AJAX/HTML/PHP/MySql.
  • Designers – you’ve designed and launched products from idea generation and prototyping to understanding users, designing wireframes and creating visual design comps. You should have a strong understanding of user-centered design principles, excellent visual design skills and an entrepreneurial approach to designing, building, and launching products.
  • Product Managers – you’ve launched products big and small and now you are ready to roll your sleeves up and be part of an entrepreneurial team. You get excited about products and how to market them and can’t wait to launch your next big success. We need someone to guide the product from end to end – idea to launch to eventual handoff to our business units.

And it’s not just my own team looking, its all of the Advanced Development Division (Bradley’s team) so you can work alongside the people that brought you Mixd, Yahoo! Pipes, Yahoo! Podcasts, Hack Day, Flickr, and many more kickass products.

Drop us a line using this address: add-jobs [at] yahoo-inc [dot] com

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So ever since I started this new job, I’ve been very bad at posting to my blog. It’s partially because what I’ve been working on isn’t always ready to share with you all and its partially because I’ve been busier than normal lately. I’ve been to India three times in the last few months, travelled a lot here at home and work’s been crazy.

Anyway, I’m trying (once again) to dust off the blog and start writing more. I constantly get ideas and say “I should blog about that”, so… maybe I should. 😉

To get me in the spirit, I changed WordPress themes to Subtle by Glued Ideas. I debated between this one and Glossy Blue by N. Design, i think I might just randomly switch back and forth from time to time. I like Subtle because it is based on WordPress Sidebar Widgets and incorporates FeedFlare right into it. For the first time ever, I didn’t have to crack the php code in my text editor. While WordPress still isn’t what I’d call “easy” it is getting much better.

I kept the header photo with this theme, although Subtle makes it less bright (losing a little of the luster). I took that photo on my walk to the beach in Provincetown on Cape Cod. I love the green wild grass and the lighthouse in the distance.

Anyway, I look forward to giving this a whirl again.

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It’s all the buzz around the blogosphere, but we acquired MyBlogLog.

I’ve known about this for months and I’m excited that it is finally done and announced. Bradley has a great post about it as did many, many people.

As a blogger, I love this concept. It’s a great way to see who’s come by and is a great conversation starter. (for example, I saw that Scott Rafer, CEO of MyBlogLog came by to visit my site – I know him and I was able to drop a note and say hi).

There was an internal hack at one hack day here at Yahoo that played with the same idea. I was able to see who came by to look at our internal Wiki pages. It was a great way to find people who were interested in my projects (and talk to them about it).

As much as we say that blogs are “social media”, they aren’t really “live” unless people comment. MyBlogLog solves that. Obviously, we have a lot to do to hook this into the greater Yahoo community, but I’m optimistic about this. Over the last year, Yahoo has launched many little widgets for people’s blogs, I’d hope we figure out how to combine MyBlogLog with all of those as an option (kinda like how feedburner combined FeedFlare into their blog stats package).

Anyway, I added MyBlogLog over there to the right, so be sure to join my community and let me see that you came by.

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Today I stumbled across the announcement of the new Palm Treo 750.

Back in October, I asked our mobile team here for a Windows Mobile phone to do some testing. Their response “oh, here’s one take it”. It was a Treo 750. While I love gadgets, I hadn’t read about the 750, so I didn’t even know it was an unreleased demo phone I was using. I thought it was just a new phone that I didn’t know about yet. Kinda cool that I got a three month advance on everyone. Thanks Yahoo!

Well, anyway, I have to say I instantly fell in love with the Treo 750. I own a 650 and the 750 seemed to fix all the things that annoy me about my 650. It is lighter, it has a rubberized case, so I don’t have to get an extra “skin”, and it is slightly thinner. All of these things accompish my number one goal: make it fit in my pocket more easy. The phone I used had Windows Mobile on it, and while it was fast and reliable, I really do not like Windows Mobile. Microsoft continues to misunderstand the market completely. The start menu is a horrible way to change apps. Palm does it much better and I’ve seen others do it much better (Blackberry’s scroll wheel comes to mind). Using this phone made me realize that I will never use Windows Mobile.

Now, I’ll just have to wait for the 750p with Palm OS, and then I’ll be lining up at the store…

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Ok, so I’ve fallen off the blogging bandwagon. One of my New Year’s Resolutions (apart from losing weight, visiting my mom & dad more, spending more quality time at home) is to blog again.

Since I took my new job, I’ve really stopped writing and I want to fix that. I’ve got a lot of saved up blog posts in my head, I just need to get them out.

What gave me the kick in the pants today, was that Don Loeb blogged that Feedburner’s Site Stats are now live. It didn’t take me but a minute to get it set up on this blog. I had been using Measure Map and had been pretty pleased, but I kinda stopped looking at the stats. It was kinda cool to know them, but not earth shattering (unless Dave Winer linked to me).

So I’ll give Feedburner a try now. At first blush, it looks really clean & straightforward (like everything those guys do)…

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Originally uploaded by bitmapr.

So hack day is on and I definately felt that spirit in the air. After a day of amazing sessions about our APIs and UI framework, everyone gathered in URLs (our cafe) to have pizza, meet each other and start hacking. I met lots of interesting people and the place was swarming with press and media (I didn’t expect that much press). Then the “surprise” entertainment was on. Beck performed an amazing one hour set on Yahoo’s lawn. He was backed by his full band and marionette versions of each band member. It was an awesome show – beyond just a simple concert. To cap it off, Beck’s puppets made a little video on our campus to celebrate hack day – very funny.

This afternoon we’ll have the hack presentations, and I don’t think anyone knows what we’ll get, but I hope that spirit continues.

P.S. I took tons of pictures, but there were so many people with much better pictures, I picked this one as one of my favorites.

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Two weeks ago, Yahoo held its quarterly internal hack day. Today Yahoo! holds its first Open Hack Day.

The first I ever heard about a hack day was from Ken and the Jotspot guys. They had a hack day to have some fun and work on something that wasn’t on their normal “to-do list”. It was a great idea to innovate and give the team a breather from the day-to-day. As most people know by now, Yahoo took up the idea and now we’re sharing it with the world.

I sat in the audience for this last internal hack day. Of course I was impressed with all the amazing ideas and hacks I saw. Of course I saw tons of hacks that I thought could be integrated into real products. Of course some of these ideas showed real promise and could translate into real business value. But, I was much more amazed at the feeling in the air.

One of the best things that Chad, Caterina and Leonard have created is a feeling that everyone’s ideas have a place and everyone’s work deserves to be shared. Hack Day is a forum to share your ideas with a large audience and in front of Yahoo execs (this hack day was judged by Jerry Yang, a few SVPs, Sue Decker our CFO and a few other rockstar Yahoos). You could tell that all the people in the room were stoked to be sharing their ideas. But people in the room were also stoked to be seeing other Yahoos work. Everyone was supportive of their peers and I think everyone went back to their day jobs better off for it. The HAck Day team is making every Yahoo more innovative.

Now, in just a few hours, we’re starting Open Hack Day. Hundreds of developers from all over are coming to camp out on Yahoo’s campus and to hack using Yahoo APIs from YDN. Just like our internal hack days, I expect to see lots of great hacks. But I’m most excited to see that feeling in the air. The day starts with sessions about how to use our APIs, then people get settled in, then awesome entertainment and the hacking begins. The presentations take place on Saturday afternoon and I look forward to seeing people from different companies (sometimes competitors of each other) creating that supportive space – that feeling in the air.

If you’ll be here, please come up to me and say hi, and happy hacking. Let’s make it a place where everyone gets to shine.