Nate Koechley

Blogging and Culture at Yahoo!

Mark Jen was fired from Google for blogging. The is old news. What’s interesting now is that he reports on his conversations with two prominent bloggers (and yahoo employees) about blogging at work, yahoo’s policy/stance on worker-blogging, at last week’s 106 Miles community meeting. It’s nice to see that Yahoo gets blogs and blogging.

after dave’s talk, i met russ. he apparently had been doing contract work at yahoo and just recently joined there full time. i took the opportunity to chat with him a little bit; mostly, i wanted to know why he chose to join yahoo out of all the other companies in the area. immediately, russ focused in on the culture and working environment. i thought, wow, a place that’s working on bringing revolutionary web technologies to the masses and a great atmosphere? sounds like a dream come true.

then, i met jeremy zawodny. since my story had started making rounds with the press, i had been compared to jeremy and scoble, but i had never expected to meet them in person. we got to talking and he shared with me his experience at yahoo, which also sounded great. jeremy told me that yahoo is extremely blog friendly and that posting their personal work experiences was perfectly acceptable – given, of course, that confidential information and NDAs aren’t breached. i left with his contact info and an invite to tour the yahoo campus.

Evolution vs Revolution in Web Standards

CNet’s Paul Festa filed a story today, Fight over ‘forms’ clouds future of Net applications, with a subhead of “As Net heavyweights vie to define the next generation of Web applications, the Web’s main standards body is facing a revolt within its own ranks over electronic forms, a cornerstone of interactive documents.”

The article sheds some light on the WHAT-WG, as well as some of the players in this general saga. The most interesting section to me:

WHAT-WG members say the forms dispute illustrates a larger conflict over whether the W3C should proceed in a “revolutionary” mode, tackling problems from square one and coming up with technically elegant solutions–even if that results in the loss of backward-compatibility with older browsers–or an “evolutionary” mode, maintaining older technologies like HTML 4 and extending the usefulness of current browsing software.

I also enjoyed Steven Pemberton’s comments:

“The WHAT approach works OK for small examples,” Pemberton said. “But actors like the Department of Defense say ‘no scripting.’”

And:

“I understand where WHAT is coming from, but they are browser makers, not forms experts,” Pemberton said. “It is important to build something that is future-proof and not a Band-Aid solution. Forms (technology) is the basis of the e-commerce revolution and so it is important to do it right.”

[All emphasis mine.]

Casual Gaming

At last week’s Mobile Monday, which I attended, Anita Wilhelm (aka MobileGirl) presented a mobile-based game her startup is working on:

Caterpillar Mobile’s current product is a cameraphone game called Zooke. Zooke allows its members to create challenges for all members or only members of an immediate social circle. You might be on a mission to find the best George Bush bumper sticker in Berkeley and have other game players rate your findings. It is a community-driven reality play experience that makes everyone’s day a little more exciting with minimal effort.

I liked the idea of casual gaming, the idea that you can have an experience in short segments while you’re going about your normal routine. I’m also interested that this represents a shift from highly time-intensive games. Well, she follows up that with a new post last week discussing Casual Gaming and thinking about an article of the same title by Tom Hume.

He captures the essence of an important shift from hard core gaming experiences to engaging play experiences perfectly! Allowing players to engage lightly in the experience throughout their daily lives is essential to creating something compelling and addictive to be used on a mobile device. Allowing players light weight games or frameworks that they can think about while on the move, but not have to interact with continually in the virtual world is essential. Giving them tools which allow them to explore and play at their will fits the affordances of the mobile device.

I remember the days of having hours and hours to play video games, but to be honest, it’s a pretty distant memory. It’s cool to see people working to bring games and playing back into the lives of otherwise distracted and busy peeps like me. It’s also fun to watch a new medium like Mobile develop.

Send driving direction to your phone on Yahoo

Send driving direction to your phone on Yahoo
Originally uploaded by natekoechley.

Following quickly on the SMS Clipping feature, Yahoo! Maps this week quietly launched a new feature that lets you quickly send driving directions to your mobile phone via SMS text message.

Brilliant. Give it a test drive.

Best FTP Client for Mac

Dan at Simplebits points to the just-released Transmit 3. I haven’t used v3 yet, but v2 was such a great program that I’m sure this one rocks too. If you’re on a Mac and looking for a friendly, powerful FTP client, this is for you.

FeedBurner Stats, Podcasts, Specialized RSS Clients

podcast_growth
Originally uploaded by natekoechley.

Feedburner, an RSS feed tracking company (that I use to understand my RSS statistics and readership), has been releasing some very interesting statistics recently. This batch provides some insight into the Podcasting space:

• Since the beginning of 2005, the number of podcast feeds managed by Feedburner has more than doubled from 871 to 1746.
• Four different rss aggregators specialized for podcasts are in the Top 50 RSS Aggregators list. This illustrates a trend that’s sure to continue… There are already clients specializing in aggregating video — how long until photo-specific show up?

Thanks for sharing, Feedburner, it’s a great post. Thanks also for the interesting and valuable service you provide.