Ride the Fire Eagle, grab some afternoon delight…

March is a great month to get your geek on. Tech conferences flourish: O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference, now in its seventh year, heralds springtime in San Diego. South by Southwest (SXSW), Austin’s annual music, multimedia, and film extravaganza tests the stamina, sociability, and interaction skills of thousands web developers and designers from all over the world, with more than a week of panels, presentations, and parties.

Last Wednesday at ETech, Tom Coates from Yahoo!’s Brickhouse invited participants to “ride the Fire Eagle.” His keynote announced the developer’s beta launch of Fire Eagle, “a secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy.” Fire Eagle invitation cards flew out of the booth and into the hands of hundreds of developers attending the event.

O’Reilly Media also hosted Graphing Social Patterns (GSP), a new conference held in conjunction with ETech, focused on the business and technology of social platforms. Yahoo! Developer Network participated in ETech and GSP as a gold sponsor. Following Charlene Li’s Monday morning keynote on the Future of Social Networks (you can view her presentation deck here), MyBlogLog product guy Ian Kennedy announced the opening of MyBlogLog’s APIs.

MyBlogLog is a Yahoo! service that powers the “Recent Readers” badge, which you’ll find on our sidebar and all across the blogosphere. MyBlogLog is a tool that lets people learn about their community of readers, and gather and display pointers to all the online social services they use. By opening its APIs, MyBlogLog gives developers tools to create interesting new social mashups and news ways to visualize online communities and social activity data.

Speaking of social activity streams: dozens of Yahoos participated as speakers, panelists, booth staffers, and attendees at ETech, GSP, and South by Southwest. Take a peek at some highlights of our ETech presence, captured by Ricky Montalvo for the Yahoo! Developer Network theater:

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Developer Network

Photo from James Duncan Davidson

Yahoo! Women in Tech, an internal stakeholder group for women across Yahoo!’s technology organization, recently partnered with the Society of Women Engineers to host this year’s GetSET Industry Tour Day. Seventy-two teenage girls from high schools all over Santa Clara County (Calif.) spent the day at Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale campus for a taste of life and work at Yahoo! HQ.

“Engineering is the way to go!”

GetSET (the SET is for Science, Engineering, and Technology) is an outreach program sponsored by the Santa Clara Valley section of the Society of Women Engineers. This four-year mentoring program serves high-school girls from communities and groups typically under-represented in engineering and computer science — encouraging participants to finish high school, apply for college, and explore careers in math, science, and technology, where there is a growing demand for skilled employees, and a declining trend in numbers of women and minorities who are entering these fields.

“It’s hard work but fun at the same time.”

The day was packed with activities, beginning with a welcome from Mercedes DeLuca, Yahoo! VP of Global IT, and a panel discussion about what it’s like to work at Yahoo!. The girls divided into smaller groups for a campus tour that included a variety of Yahoo! landmarks. Our guests checked email at the purple cow, played foosball, posed at the fountain, window-shopped the Yahoo! Company Store, got in front of the blue screen at Yahoo! Studios, and video-conferenced with our Burbank office.

“I want to work here now!”

After a lunch break, the teams participated in a web design workshop. Yahoo! volunteers (guys, too) stood by as small teams, many of whom had never met before, shared laptops and built web pages inspired by their visit. Quite a few of the girls knew how to create and personalize their MySpace pages, while some were familiar with HTML, and others knew a bit of JavaScript. Some of us non-engineers learned that Ctrl-C (copy) and Ctrl-V (paste) go a long way towards implementing a mashup and adding it to a web page, while other teams were fortunate to have Yahoo! hackers, coders and designers standing by to assist.

“In all jobs, you have to work as a group.”

At the close of the day, several teams stepped up to the front of the classroom to present their pages — Hack Day-style. Their energy, enthusiasm, and sense of fun were contagious. We sent the GetSET girls home with gift bags of purple schwag and plenty of good memories.

Havi Hoffman
Influencer Marketing

On August 7, February Flowers, a lyrical first novel set in southern China was published in the United States, where its author, Fan Wu, makes her home. I know Fan as Cindy, the name she took 10 years ago when she arrived in California for graduate school. After earning a masters from Stanford in Mass Media Studies, Cindy took a job at Yahoo!, and that’s how we met.

In 2000, I was writing and editing Yahoo! Picks and Ask Yahoo!. Cindy wanted to know more about my work. We talked about writing — and reading — in English. Her appetite for literature was wide-ranging and eclectic. I remember a conversation about Raymond Carver’s short stories. At that time, she was attracted to Carver’s lean American prose. We also spoke about Joseph Conrad, the Polish-born storyteller who lived in Britain and wrote brilliant and prolific fiction in English, and Ha Jin, the award-winning contemporary Chinese-American writer.

By 2002, Cindy had begun to write fiction in English. She attended writers’ workshops and found mentors and peers. She read, she wrote — and she kept working. Work at Yahoo! paid the bills, and gave her the freedom to find her own way as a writer.

Fast forward to September 2006. February Flowers by Fan Wu debuts in Asia and Australia, where it receives exultant reviews. The story of two young women students in China in the early nineteen nineties, it explores a friendship that blossoms within the confines of a “restrained” traditional culture during a time of social change. China was beginning to prosper and open up to the west. In the self-reliant, independent-minded characters of the two friends, traditional China is remixed with the new. The girls grow up and drift apart. Years later, Ming, the narrator, recovers memories of their friendship in a new century, on her way to a new continent.

So, where’s Cindy now? Recently Fan Wu left her job at Yahoo! to focus on her second novel. This week, I emailed to ask her about life after Yahoo!. Cindy replied:

“Writing is a lonely pursuit. In my post-Yahoo! life, I, of course, miss getting paid every two weeks, but what I miss the most is not being able to see my Yahoo! friends often, to chat over lunch or coffee…”

In the coming months, you can find her around the Bay Area at a variety of book readings, signings and events. And catch her at Kepler’s bookstore in Menlo Park on Thursday, August 23 at 7:30 pm.

Tell her Yodel Anecdotal sent you!

Havi Hoffman
Influencer Marketing

It’s always tech conference season in Bay Area, so even now, at the height of midsummer, we’re busy participating in lots of interesting events.

This Saturday, July 14, Yahoo! will be a sponsor of the Community Next Viral conference at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale. This sold-out event is all about growing your idea or online venture virally from “zero to ten million members.” It’s a sequel to February’s “The Present and Future of Online Communities,” the inaugural Community Next event, which was well-attended, highly regarded, and delightfully captured on Flickr.

Organized by twenty-something entrepreneurs Noah “OkDork” Kagan and Adam Kalamchi, Community Next Viral will present a “personal and interactive” day of panels, with meaty Q&A follow-ups, and small group breakout sessions that give people a chance to get to know each other and swap stories and ideas.

Participants include blazing hot influentials like Tim Ferriss, author of the “4-Hour Workweek,” and Justin “.tv” Kan, along with serial entrepreneurs like Jonathan Abrams (Friendster, Socializr), Gina Bianchini (Ning), and Dave “500 Hats” McClure, not to mention Yahoo!’s own Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson, founders of MyBlogLog. In true summer spirit, the event kicks off Friday evening with a Yahoo!-hosted party and closes with a BBQ for attendees.

On Monday, Yahoo!’s influencer marketing team heads from Silicon Valley to downtown San Francisco’s landmark Hotel Nikko for Ypulse Mashup 2007, a first-time, and nearly sold-out, conference focused on “reaching today’s totally wired generation with technology.”

Mashup 2007 is produced by Anastasia Goodstein, author of “Totally Wired” and publisher of Ypulse, an independent, award-winning blog for youth and teen media and marketing professionals, with Modern Media, a builder and producer of business conferences and media brands. Yahoo! is a founding sponsor and an active participant in the two-day conference. Did you know that Yahoo! is a leading destination for the 18-24 years old demographic with 15.5 million unique visitors in the U.S., more than Facebook and YouTube combined (comScore March 2007 data)?!

The speaker roster at Mashup includes researchers and academic thought-leaders like danah boyd and Henry Jenkins, as well as founders, CEOs, inventors, and entrepreneurs from magazines, record labels, web start-ups, and consumer companies.

On Tuesday, July 17, at the close of the conference, Ypulse, Yahoo!, and The George Lucas Educational Foundation/Edutopia will present the Totally Wired Teacher award, in recognition of a teacher “who is pushing the envelope and actually using social media in the classroom as an educational tool.”

If you’re a marketer, educator, parent, publisher, policy-maker, or anyone who cares about teens, tweens, and their future, do yourself a favor and grab one of the few remaining tickets. And while you’re there, stop by our booth and say hello — we’d love to meet you and answer your questions.

Havi Hoffman
Influencer Marketing

The second annual (San Francisco) Bay Area Maker Faire opens at the San Mateo Fairgrounds this weekend and Yahoo! will be there. Maker Faire is a family-friendly, hands-on celebration of the DIY spirit, created by O’Reilly Media, publishers of Make and Craft magazines. A two-day festival at the intersection of science, art, technology and fun, Maker Faire is a one-of-a-kind place for passionate hobbyists, backyard tinkerers, grassroots inventors, their friends, fans, and favorite robot companions.

This is Yahoo!’s second year participating as a sponsor and we’ve got all kinds of cool stuff happening at our booth. Jump into the Flickr photo frame and get your Polaroid portrait taken by friendly Flickristas. Or get your hack on with the two winning teams from last fall’s open Hack Day:

• Fashion hackers Diana Eng and Emily Albinski, winners of Hack Day 2006, will be back at the Faire (where we first met them last year) with a ruggedized and redesigned blogging wearable, which you can take for a spin (Saturday and Sunday, every 30 minutes; first come, first served). The Blogging in Motion device will automatically upload photos to a live Flickr photostream as you stroll with it around the Faire. This wearable uses Yahoo! Research Berkeley’s ZoneTag prototype to automatically annotate your photos with a geographic location.
• Uncommon Projects’ Tarikh Korula and Josh Rooke-Ley, the creators of YBox and 2nd place winners at Hack Day, will present four 2-hour workshops over the course of the weekend (Saturday and Sunday, 10:30-12:30 and 2:30-4:30. Sign-ups first come, first served). They’ve designed a custom hardware and software kit for building your own always-on, Internet appliance. The YBox fits in an Altoids tin that attaches to a standard TV set — “like Konfabulator for TV, turning TV into a platform for helpful, easy-to-read, live internet channels.” Eighty Maker Faire attendees will be able to assemble and take home their own YBox at the Faire, while others can watch the action via live video.

Stop by our comfy Internet lounge and discover how Yahoo! can help you be a better builder, crafter, hacker, player, maker. And if you can’t get there, you can armchair-travel with Flickr to relive the weekend afterwards.

More here: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/146064/

Havi Hoffman
Influencer Marketing

Photo from gwen

ETech, O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference, took place last week in San Diego. Hundreds of engineers, entrepreneurs, hackers, innovators, disruptors, makers, magicians, marketers, journalists, and tech professionals gathered in the ballrooms, lobbies, hallways, and towers of the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel. The conference theme was articulated by a notable quote from science fiction writer (and prescient futurist) Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Conference attendees were treated to a mind-expanding menu of tutorials, keynotes, sessions, and special events that included participation by dozens of Yahoos from all corners of the company, which was a gold sponsor.

• Yahoo! Music engineer and Flickr Hacks author Jim Bumgardner presented an advanced Flash tutorial. You may have seen some of Jim’s metamagical fun and games at KrazyDad and CoverPop, including his recent Yahoo! Local hack, Wheel of Food.
• Chad Dickerson, head of the Yahoo! Developer Network spoke to a packed house about the magic of hacking Yahoo!’s corporate culture. Hacking at a big company like Yahoo! is about opening APIs and platforms on the Yahoo! network. It’s about hack days. But it’s also about bringing on the rock and roll, reminding a public company how to laugh at itself, and turning off the automated campus sprinkler system before a crew of hackers (not crackers!) pitch their tents on your campus green.
• Pasha Sadri and Jonathan Trevor, from Yahoo’s Advanced Development Division, presented “Pipes, A Tool for Remixing the Web.” Pipes launched nearly two months ago to accolades from Tim O’Reilly and the Web 2.0 community. At ETech, Yahoo! Developer Network evangelists and members of the Pipes team demoed Pipes to hundreds of visitors. We watched a stack of Pipes t-shirts vanish from the Yahoo! booth on Tuesday and reappear in the wild as the week wore on.
• Yahoo!’s Joshua Schachter, founder of social bookmarking service del.icio.us, shared pragmatic product wisdom with a standing-room-only crowd. In “Lessons Learned in Scaling and Building Social Systems,” he talked about paying close attention to the details of how people interact with del.icio.us. Some lessons from Joshua: Design registration so it’s lightweight. Make people’s data portable. Choose interaction language thoughtfully to encourage sharing behavior. Make RSS easy. And never stop listening to your users — to what they say and what they do. Respond. Tune. And keep listening. Presto, del.icio.us.

ETech’s evening entertainment opened with math professor and mental-math magician Arthur Benjamin performing lightning-fast calculations. His mathemagical prowess elicited oohs and ahs from the audience. At a mini-Make Fest, crafters and inventors showed their wares. Other special events included the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Awards fundraiser dinner; “Half-Baked Dot Com,” a weirdly wonderful exercise in entrepreneurial improv; “Powerpoint Karaoke,” a carnival of spellbinding presentation arts; and “Werewolf,” a game of group behavior played after dark.

As in the world of Harry Potter, sometimes when powerful wizards gather, unforeseen dark forces are set loose alongside good spells and benevolent insights. News of Kathy Sierra’s unexpected absence from ETech resonated throughout the conference week and rippled across the blogosphere. The disturbing circumstance of cyber threat triggered a standing wave of passionate conversation about issues that weren’t on the schedule: hate speech vs. free speech, anonymity vs. accountability in blog comments, cyber bullying, and censorship. As ETech attendees, we were forced to look deeper and became a bit wiser about ourselves.

Here’s a question I’m holding in my mind from this year’s ETech: As we navigate new frontiers of identity, privacy, and individual freedom in this ubiquitous digital habitat we’re creating, how can we continue to cultivate civility and advance knowledge for the common good? Do we need spells and talismans to ward off the trolls or an honorable-yet-flexible blogger’s code of conduct? What do you think?

Havi Hoffman
Influencer Marketing | Social Media

Photo from Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

James Surowiecki, a staff writer and business columnist for the New Yorker and the best-selling author of “The Wisdom of Crowds,” finds it hard to introduce the topic of prediction markets without talking about jellybeans.

Prediction markets are a growing phenomenon that use a stock market model to predict the future popularity of everything from new movies to news issues to high-tech topics. Based on the “wisdom of crowds,” these markets tend to do better than pollsters and pundits at forecasting all kinds of outcomes — political elections, sporting events, sales trends within companies.

Surowiecki describes an experiment he’s done many times: Ask a roomful of people to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar, add up everyone’s guesses, and take the average. You’ll get a better result almost every time than you would if you asked any single person. (Surowiecki qualifies this slightly — he’s heard about a physicist in Michigan who’s a jellybean-counting genius.)

Something about the folksy American candy maps well to the populist idea that the wisdom of a diverse group of people is more accurate and rigorous than the forecasts of experts. Surowiecki, who speaks to his subject with a “gee whiz” kind of enthusiasm, describes the physical “thrill of fear and doubt” he experiences each time he does the jellybean experiment.

Surowiecki explains: It’s the thrill of disruption. Prediction markets challenge our notions of authority. In the process, they make it easier for companies to access the knowledge that lies untapped within the organization as a whole. Sometimes, what is revealed runs counter to deeply held assumptions about decision making and existing hierarchies of command and control.

These were some of the opening ideas presented by guest moderator James Surowiecki on Wednesday night at confab.yahoo, the first installment of a free conference series organized by Yahoo!’s Technology Development Group. The series aims to share ideas openly across companies, move the Web to the next level, and “talk about important nerd topics.”

Over 250 attendees came to Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale campus for the first TechDev confab. Journalists, developers, designers, entrepreneurs, hackers, students, venture capitalists, economists, and executives listened to leading thinkers in the field. Robin Hanson, economics professor and conceptual father of prediction markets, urged companies to deploy prediction markets internally to tap valuable employee insights for solving the organization’s deepest and most important challenges. Stanford economist Eric Zitzewitz described some strategic uses of betting markets for financial forecasting and modeling within corporations.

Bo Cowgill from Google, Leslie Fine from HP, and Todd Proebsting from Microsoft spoke about their experiences with different types of prediction markets within their organizations and in collaboration with clients. David Pennock of Yahoo! Research spoke about the Tech Buzz Game and the recent evolution of yootles, an experimental currency system.

The evening concluded with presentations from Chris Hibbert, open source developer of Zocalo, a software toolkit for building prediction markets, and Adam Siegel, a co-founder of Inkling, which offers an online service for individuals or organizations who want to run their own markets.

Watch a webcast of the confab and view photos.

Read some of the other coverage:
* Prediction: Predictive markets will be a next big thing
* Yahoo’s Confab on Prediction Markets
* Tech lessons learned from the wisdom of crowds
* Prediction Markets at confab.yahoo
* Prediction Markets at Yahoo! ConFab

We haven’t cooked up our next confab yet, but check back at confab.yahoo.com for our next installment. Hope to see you there.

Havi Hoffman
Influencer Marketing | Social Media

Ever since we introduced Hack Days at Yahoo! almost a year ago, and especially since our monumental Beck-alicious Open Hack Day just a few weeks ago, I’d been thinking about how to organize a Hack Day-like experience for people who aren’t engineers and don’t write code. I was inspired by the friendly balance of collaboration and competition, the playful departure from daily routine, the feeling of creative mischief afoot, the useful toys and shiny new things that were born overnight, and not least by the smiling faces of the Hack Day audience and participants.

Frankly, I was envious. I wanted to share some of that Hack Day high with people like me, who love sharing photos on Flickr, writing blog posts now and then, dabbling in video, and spending way too much time looking at other people’s del.icio.us links.

So, when the Yahoo! Time Capsule electronic anthropology project launched, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to design an event that would let participants create content to contribute to the Time Capsule. During this day-long experience, strangers recruited by word of mouth (with help from our fabulous event-listing service Upcoming.org) could interact with folks from Yahoo! and invited guests from the community of digital media makers and mavens. Together, we’d explore social media and discover new ways to edit, share, and distribute our creations using services like Yahoo! Video, Jumpcut, Flickr, and Zonetag as well as a state-of-the-art multifunction printer contributed by our friends at Sharp Electronics.

The Time Capsule Camp experiment took place on Monday. It was a blast! Seventy-some vloggers, videographers, photographers, students, artists, tinkerers, teachers, Yahoos, and friends participated in a scavenger hunt facilitated by the Go Game. The game was played by teams armed with cameras and custom WAP-enabled mobile phones. The scavenger hunt missions and clues were built around some of the Time Capsule’s universal human themes: love, anger, sorrow, beauty, past, and now. The results were brilliant, poignant, and surprisingly hilarious. Or maybe, you just had to be there. (See all the videos here or watch Jumpcut’s Steve Weibel video recap below.)

A video crew from BAYCAT joined us to document the events of the day, including afternoon workshops at our Sunnyvale campus, an interlude of balloon aerial photography, and a closing celebration. The Go Game guys (in amazing orange jumpsuits) showcased the creative results of the scavenger hunt missions, and we all voted by cell phone for our favorites. We were all in stitches.

The nature of social media is that links beget links; Flickr photos beget comments; internet video is intrinsically viral; and del.icio.us brings it all together. Couch potatoes become active participants, participants become creators, and creators blow up balloons when there’s not enough wind for a kite. Everyone’s a storyteller.

The Time Capsule closed last night, but at Yahoo! the spirit of creative fun is open 24/7. If you’d like to participate in future exercises in self-expression or join us for digital salons and intriguing product previews, you’re welcome to drop us a line. We’d love to meet you next time!

Havi Hoffman
Influencer Marketing | Social Media