The Yahoo! Developer Network team has been busily preparing to host our first international Hack Day in London with the BBC this weekend — Open Hack Day Europe, with 500 hackers joining the festivities on the palatial (literally!) grounds of Alexandra Palace. We’ve got confirmed attendees from 18 countries, from Portugal to Liechtenstein (population: 33,987) to Romania.

For those unfamiliar with Yahoo! Hack Day, the “rules” are simple: Gather a bunch of developers in one place, build something in 24 hours, and demo your work in 2 minutes or less. Our first open Hack Day last September was a stunning success, capturing the hacker spirit I saw best expressed many months before, halfway around the world at Yahoo! Bangalore, at our first internal Hack Day there. Their posters were incredibly simple, but communicated the hacker ethic as purely as I’ve seen it — a Venn diagram with two interlocking circles labeled “dreamer” and “coder,” and at the intersection of the two, “hacker.”

I recently got an email from Mo Kakwan, one of the participants from our September event, with the subject “How Yahoo! Hack Day changed my life.” Anyone who was there will remember that Mo delivered what was probably the hit presentation of Hack Day, a demo that turned into a brilliant comic descent into the frenetic madness of trying to build something amazing in 24 hours. (You have to watch his presentation to get a sense of the magic of that moment — fortunately, someone shot video!) For Mo, Hack Day was a spark that made him start dreaming of bigger things. He wrote to me:

I was lucky enough to be part of Yahoo! Hack Day in Sunnyvale back in September. I did the presentation with Patrick Stewart talking. That was an amazing weekend for me. I had never stood before such a crowd and held a microphone. The idea behind my presentation at Hack Day was to be able to make a picture talk and then be able to send the talking picture to a friend as an e-card. When I realized my team was gone and all I had was a puppet picture I had no choice but to distract everyone with laughter.

I thought the idea was going to end there when I left that night and drove back home. Instead it kept me up late at night figuring out streaming audio. Pouring over PHP books and Flash. I found myself venturing off to web meetups after work in the city trying to understand web startup culture. I began reading blogs like Techcrunch feverishly. At the end of January I took the leap and left my job in pursuit of making the idea real. I enlisted the help of a friend and together we put the pieces together. Two months later we had the site up in closed testing with a few friends. Fast-forward to now and the site is live but no one knows about it yet as we have not announced anywhere public.

All this because of Hack Day! I wanted to tell you Thank you! Thank you so much for putting such an event together. When I was driving down to Yahoo! I had no idea that I’d end up doing a 2-minute presentation that would change my life. I don’t know how things are going to end up. I might be searching for a job again in 3 months if we don’t get funding *laugh*. All I know is that this is a wonderful adventure. I just wanted to thank you for setting up the catalyst. Yahoo! Hack Day changed my life!

Mo put together a short video (also below) about his Hack Day experience and how it led to his new venture, Blabberize. Be sure to check out the cameo appearances by our cofounders.

Mo’s email underscored for me the key element of Hack Day: Yahoo! may put the event together and provide the APIs, but it’s not about us. It’s about you, the dreamers/coders who get up on stage to put yourselves and your ideas out there in front of your peers. I’m sure we will repeat Mo’s inspiring story this weekend. Different country, different continent, and different people, but the hacker spirit lives on.

See you in London! Maybe it’s your life that will be changed this time.

Chad Dickerson
Head of Yahoo! Developer Network

There once was a time when bloggers basically lived in silos of independent existence. Hunched over your keyboard, you checked your ego feeds every day, looked for inbound links, followed the various meme-tracking sites, and read who you thought was interesting. But aside from comments on a site, there wasn’t a real way to create a community from the faceless masses of blog readers. If your blog was a microphone, sometimes you wondered: “Is this thing on?”

All that has changed with MyBlogLog, the Orlando-based company that has quickly built a thriving social network of blog publishers and readers. You’ve probably heard the rumors and I’m here to confirm that Yahoo! has agreed to acquire the assets of MyBlogLog, and aside from loving the product and the team, we think this move complements Yahoo’s social media and community initiatives perfectly.

I know many of you are already avid fans of MyBlogLog (just do a search for “love mybloglog”), but for those of you who are new to the site, it gives readers the ability to create communities around the blogs they visit and connect with their favorite publishers more directly. Once you create a profile on MyBlogLog, you can associate your blogs to your profile, and other MyBlogLog users can join communities around your blogs. A cool widget lets you see the faces of your recent readers in real-time. To see MyBlogLog in action, just look at the “recent readers” widget on our sidebar.

At Yahoo!, we have a global community of over a half a billion users, and we’re always looking for ways to better connect the people in that community to each other and to the communities (large and small) that they care about. MyBlogLog helps us do this like never before. If blogging was originally about building a community and having a conversation with people in that community, then MyBlogLog provides the missing link that makes those connections more real.

When I first saw MyBlogLog, I experienced one of those “Aha! This is really cool!” moments. When I put the widget code on my own blog and saw the first visitor stop by, I felt the same rush of connectedness that I felt when I got my first comment on Flickr. It makes sense then that MyBlogLog follows in a line of key acquisitions that includes Flickr and other leading social media sites like del.icio.us and Upcoming. Taken together, these vibrant web communities continue to provide Yahoo! with a deeper understanding of communities and user activity that reach beyond the Yahoo! network.

MyBlogLog is providing connections for me already — in the unexpected ways that make social environments on the Web so uniquely compelling. I was recently reading TechCrunch (a publisher with a vibrant MyBlogLog community) when I saw the face of a friend in their “recent readers” widget (small world!). I added him as a friend on my MyBlogLog member page and I got a nice “Hey, how have you been?” email from him in minutes. You might come across a friend (or make a new one) on the “recent readers” rolls on sites like ReadWriteWeb, Fred Wilson’s A VC, or any of the thousands of blogs out there that have already plugged into the MyBlogLog community.

The community-building features of MyBlogLog demonstrate just one set of capabilities of the platform. Stats junkies like me will appreciate that MyBlogLog also offers analytics that give deeper insight about what pages are being visited. You can then choose to expose some of those analytics to your readers, like the Top 5 most-clicked links. Add in the community elements and what more do you need?

For you die hard fans wondering what will change to your beloved MyBlogLog — not to worry. We aren’t planning on making any immediate changes to the MyBlogLog website, distribution or branding. We want to encourage the continued growth of the community and foster the innovation that has already made MyBlogLog an indispensable part of your life. In short, we want to make what you already love even better.

Since the company was founded in 2005, MyBlogLog has accomplished an incredible amount with its lean-and-mean team of five, led by CEO Scott Rafer and founders Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson. We’re proud to welcome them to the Yahoo! team, and more specifically, to the Yahoo! Developer Network group. We’re looking forward to building even better social media opportunities. I’ll see you around the Web.

Chad Dickerson
Sr. Director, Yahoo! Developer Network