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What am I talking about? About nine hours ago we publicly released and open-sourced two cool previously-internal libraries, a companion blog, and an article on Graded Browser Support that I authored:

Yahoo! User Interface Library – Industrial-grade JavaScript for DHTML and Ajax. The same libraries that power Yahoo! today.

Yahoo! Design Patterns Library – Our thinking and solutions on common interface design issues.

Yahoo! User Interface Blog – News and Articles about Designing and Developing with Yahoo! Libraries (rss)

Graded Browser Support (article) – An inclusive definition of support and a framework for taming the ever-expanding world of browsers and frontend technologies.

If you have any questions, let me know. I’ll be posting more details on the blog throughout the week (and ongoing), but wanted to get the links up now before bed.

For a more thorough introduction and more links, check out the first three posts on http://yuiblog.com.

But I think one of the coolest and most underrated APIs is the Term Extractor API from Yahoo!:

In other words, you point it at a piece of content — a news article, blog post, movie review or whatever — and it returns a list of terms, or keywords (or “tags” for those of you keeping score at home).

What do you do next with a list of keywords from a piece of content? Well, lots of things. Jeremy Keith wrote yesterday about a few ideas (that seem up for grabs, if you’re in a hacking mood!).

What if you treated each returned term as a tag? You could then pass those tags to any number of tag-based services, like Flickr, Del.icio.us, or Technorati.

So, instead of the simple “here’s my Technorati profile” or “here are my Flickr pics” on a blog, you could have links that were specific to each individual blog post. If I sent the text of this post to the term extractor, it would return a list of terms like “api”, “yahoo”, etc. By passing those terms as tags to a service like Technorati or Del.icio.us, readers could be pointed to other blog posts and articles that are (probably) related.

Like he suggests, it gets interesting when you let the output from this web service be the input for another service. I was lucky enough a few months ago to lend a small bit of help to the team that brought you the Yahoo! Events Browser mashup. One challenge of that product was to get images associated with each event. If you’ve ever worked with unstructured data — event listings are super unstructured — then you know that they don’t provide many high-quality hooks for understanding their content. The team tried doing image searches on venue or artist name, but the results weren’t very relevant or interesting, even when the parsed venue or artist was accurate. So, being the put-lots-of-pieces-together types there are, they decided to use the Term Extractor to discover more accurate, meaningful, and specific query terms to then find images for. Here’s how they summed it up:

To display appropriate images for events, local event output was sent into the Term Extraction API, then the term vector was given to the Image Search API. The results are often incredibly accurate.

I’ve only seen a handful of implementations of the Term Extractor API so far. If you’ve got a cool one to point me to, or a cool idea for a future implementation, please leave ‘em in the comments below.

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The Tech Buzz Game is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends. As a player, your goal is to predict how popular various technologies will be in the future. Popularity or buzz is measured by Yahoo! Search frequency over time. Predictions are made by buying virtual stock in the products or technologies you believe will succeed, and selling stock in the technologies you think will flop. In other words, you “put your play money where your mouth is.

At the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference today, Yahoo’s principal scientist Dr Gary Flake announced, among other things, the Tech Buzz Game, which “leverages search query volume and frequency on Yahoo! Search” and puts that “buzz” in play in a stock market model. Using the 10,000 in play money that you get with a free game username, you can buy and sell shares of technology concepts like “bittorrent”, “podcasting”, “Macintosh Tiger”, “yahoo photos” and other things. Things terms are broken down into markets, which as each zero-sum-game distinct markets “Browser Wars”, “Mobile Development Environments “, and “Rumor Mill”.

Check out this and more at the new Yahoo Research Labs site that launched in conjunction with the ETech conference. You can also read up on this year’s ETech Conference, or read the Tech Buzz Game’s press release.

(By the way, as of this writing I’m in 9th place on the game’s leaderboard – out of 697 currently. We’ll see if my beginner’s luck holds out.)

“There is a speed war on the web. Browsers compete on many fronts; security, standards support, features and speed. Most people are aware of which major browser fails on three of these, but one of them is still open for grabs. Speed.”

Google Launches a Desktop Search Application
About thirty minutes ago, Google launched a desktop search application. I’ve been using Google Desktop Search for the past 48hrs and I’m VERY impressed. Danny Sullivan has just posted (I contributed to the story) a review on Search Engine Watch. Random comments about GDS:

• I love the fact that every web page viewed in your browser is automatically cached on your computer and immediately made full text searchable. Seruku, a product I wrote about in June, offers a similar type of service for a fee. Additionally, every time you make a change to a Word document or other local file a new cached copy is made. Now, you can easily review revisions to your work by taking a look at the various cached copies of the material.
  + One negative is that it DOESN’t index the full text of pdf files. Google says it’s coming soon.
• The Copernic Desktop Search tool remains a very useful product and offers several features not found with the GDS.
• Privacy issues? Of course. Understand what you’re making searchable and how easy it could be for someone to quickly search and find something on your computer. Be careful!
• Most of my other comments have are merged into Danny’s review.

Direct LINK to This ResourceShelf Post

It’s so much easier sometimes to the let the pros do the writing <wink>.