It seems like the cool thing for all my friends to do these days is to announce that they’re now working for Yahoo! I think you know where this is heading:
I’m enormously proud and happy to announce that Yahoo! has acquired Upcoming.org.

I have to admit that this seemed a bit unlikely to me when this possibility first came up, after all, we were just getting started. But after our initial talks, it was obvious that Yahoo! had the same passion we did, and most importantly, that they both got, and shared our vision. Moving forward, we now have the freedom, resources, and support to pursue the event space on a whole different level, working with some of the brightest and most motivated people in the world. I’m not sure you can beat that combination.

Suffice to say, the past few weeks have been a whirlwind: amazingly exciting, and more than a bit stressful–a far cry from what I had envisioned when we quit our 9-5s to strike out on our own.

Part of the Yahoo! spiel is that they see themselves as having one of the world’s best kitchens for chefs to come in and do their thing. All I have to say is, there are mouths to feed. Let’s get cooking.

Addendum: as Levar Burton might say, don’t take my word for it. Check out what my partners in crime, Andy and Gordon have to say.

And for the record:

• Upcoming.org Announcment – bona fide!
• Yahoo! Search blog Announcement
• Yahoo Inc. Acquires Upcoming.org

With Resfest, I can’t say I haven’t been in the movie theater since quitting work, but I still haven’t caught a traditional feature-length. There are some great flicks coming out, so hopefully I can squeeze a couple in over the next few weeks.

Rel	Title
8/31	The Constant Gardner
9/16	Lord of War
9/16	Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride
9/23	A History of Violence
9/30	Serenity
9/30	Capote
9/30	MirrorMask
10/7	Wallace & Gromit: Tale of the Were-Rabbit
10/7	Good Night and Good Luck
10/14	Elizabethtown

I sprung for a Resfest RESPASS this year (~$80) since they added some panel sessions that looked quite interesting (also, Prefuse 73 on Saturday night). Once I committed, however, I decided I might as well take advantage of the festival, and I’ve been quite pleased so far.

Yesterday, I caught most of Mark Romanek’s keynote, where he spoke about his artistic process intercut with screening of selected videos (seeing Devil’s Haircut, Hurt and 99 Problems on the big screen would have made the session worthwhile by itself). This was followed by the first set of shorts, which included some great ones, including La Vie D’un Chien (my favorite of the night), The Raftman’s Razor (also outstanding) and a number of other great shorts. I unfortunately couldn’t make the second set tonight (which won’t be repeated either…), but I did manage to catch Just for Kicks (movie site), a great little doc on the fascinating story of sneaker culture (preceded by the Quasimoto Rappcats montage and another great little motion graphics story on shoe culture)
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I’m really looking forward to the “A Scanner Darkly” preview and the premiere of Doug Pray’s new doc, Infamy. Based on what I’m reading through in the Program Guide, it looks like I’m going to be vegging out for the whole weekend in the Egyptian.

Last week, Ben, Mena, and her Mom demoed 6A’s next generation blogging platform, Project Comet. I haven’t seen much about it beyond those two links, but I love what I see so far.

Jason apparently thinks it won’t be a big step forward, but I have to disagree. From what’s been posted, it’s obvious that 6A is tackling many of the core next-generation blogging issues head-on. Here’s my response to the three points touched upon on the project page:

• Community Aggregation (Reading): despite the years of sucky RSS aggregator development, convenient aggregation/slicing is something that needs to be fundamentally integrated into a community blogging system. I’m glad 6A agrees. This is what will power the positive feedback loop. Hopefully, Comet will also make some conceptual advances in follow-up comments/posts.
• Multiple Streams (Single Stream/Structured Blogging): it’ll yet to be seen whether there will be an ingestion framework for external data (integrating Flickr, Upcoming, 43*, Del input seems obvious – Web 2.0 magic!), or whether there’ll be actual work done on creating extensible structured blogging capabilities, but this seems to be on the right track
• Privacy (Semi-permeability): being able to control what you share to whom. So basic. Yet, so not been done well yet. Hopefully they’ll take the functional lessons learned from LJ and also, um, create a humane UI for both representing and controlling privacy (uhh, also, passworded entries are lame, I hope that’s secondary to a social trust system)

I’ve hacked on bits of several of these aspects over the years, and also crystalized a lot of my thinking while developing campus-wide blogging @ USC (I co-organized a panel earlier this year where we touched on some of these issues [TODO: post presentation notes, which has much more detail than the slides/log]), so it’s immensely satisfying to see that 6A has been thinking along the same lines (I’m not crazy!) and it’s great to see them implementing these advances on a larger scale, and totally getting it.

I’m super excited and have the highest hopes, especially if it gets rolled out as a platform that can work with others doing cool stuff (lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about data slicing/dimensionality and about digital-physical bridging in online community (duh)).

Lately, I’ve been feeling a bit worn down by del.icio.us. Some of it is from the limitations of the service itself (ability for longer notes, page caching, etc) which is something where I could conceivably switch to a more fully featured competitor (furl, de.lirio.us) but which would mitigate my existing “social” functionality, but I think that fundamentally, my main two gripes wouldn’t be solved:

• Instantaneous/automatic logging – sure Mark Pilgrim’s GM script is cute, but how about something that actually effectively tracks my browsing history (by tab, session) across multiple browsers/machines, and allows easy review/visualization, privacy/routing control that can replace the ineffectual bookmarking system entirely.
• Aggregation and correlation – The social perspective is nice, but I what I would value even more is self correlation. I’ve generated 4K+ blog entries, and tens of thousands of links. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say that I’ve probably clicked on several hundred thousand links, and I probably average several hundred KB of daily text consumption. (And that’s not touching on the many bookmark files, todo/project txts, and wikis which I keep as personal reference) It’s a big ball of twine

The first would be easier to solve than the second I think.

I mentioned the Mini-Microsoft anonymous employee blog a little while back in my sidebar, but it’s worth mentioning again because it works on so many levels.

• The very organizational issues that it complains forces the greivances publicly because the corporate culture is built in a way that makes it actually harder/riskier to complain internally!
• The blog seems to actually be effecting change!
• The pure gossip factor is better than reading the tabloids!
• Oh, and learning things like that messenger has 42 program managers? Priceless!
• And either way, you know this is going to end in people being fired!

To browse in future:

• Distributed Information Management: Information Representation, Presentation, and Interoperation
• SIMS 247: Information Visualization and Presentation
• IS290 > The Quality of Information
• 296A-2 : Open Source Development and Distribution of Digital Information: Economic, Legal, and Social Perspectives
• INFOSYS 290: Special Topics in Information Management and Systems
• INFOSYS 296A: Seminar

I’ve become more and more convinced, that whatever the question, drop-down select boxes is never the answer. If it’s a large list it should be an combobox/livesearch box (select box alternate OK for accessibility), and, for what is more often the case, if it’s a small number of options, it should just be listed, or otherwise expandoed. No muss, no fuss, no crazy key selection, z-index and styling problems, and a more humane user experience overall.