next*

I'm Chris Kalaboukis, a director in the Intellectual Property Innovation group here at Yahoo!. I run a number of internal innovation programs, one of which solicits, evaluates, and acts upon ideas from any and all Yahoo! employees; yet another asks Yahoos to look far into the future and envision products and services for that future. Often, I hear people complain about how Yahoo!, in comparison to our perceived competitors, is not doing so well.

People, both internally and externally, compare us to Google and other companies in that space, and complain that we can't compete and aren't innovative. That’s pure BS. The fact that we aren't doing as well as Google is based on false premises. Yahoo! isn't Google. We are much, much more than a search provider. If you look at all the areas we play in, and actually excel in, then we crush our competition. In News, Finance, Sports, Mail and other web offerings, we kick everyone’s butt on a regular basis. Despite that, we seem to be stuck in a funk because of our perceived follower status.

How do we combat this? I have a simple suggestion. Let's look at another industry that was once pronounced moribund. Consider gaming: the gaming industry was recently in such bad shape that the entire space was declared to be in decline, and one specific player was practically pronounced dead. Who am I talking about? Nintendo. Not much more than a year ago, prior to the announcement of the Wii, pundits were saying that gaming industry innovation was dead. Budgets for games were exploding; smaller developers were out of the running. Then innovation won. The Wii smashed all records. Any company in a similar position can closely observe what Nintendo did, and do something just as game-changing, but for the Web.

After hearing about the Wii I waited in line at 5a.m. a month prior to release to pre-order a console -- so that I could be assured of one for my kids. As one of the first owners of a Wii, I had no idea it would become a runaway smash hit. In fact, the Wii blew past Sony, re-established Nintendo as the leader in their space, and created a whole new market and playing field for games and gaming.

How did Nintendo do it? Simple – they stopped trying to beat the other guys at increased processing speed, better graphics etc., and looked at the core appeal of gaming. For most people, gaming is for FUN. Nintendo looked at the decline of the hardcore game market, looked around at people who weren't playing games, and asked – how do we get everyone else to pick up the controller and play?

We might ask a similar question and take a similar approach. Look at the core appeal of the Internet. There are still huge untapped markets out there. Yahoo! has more than 500 million users, but there are billions of people on the Internet. We already innovate. We are building and launching incredibly interesting new products. We should challenge our assumptions about the “search engine” field. We need to play in a new field, where WE are stronger. Let’s keep innovating, let people know about all the fantastic innovation that is going on within Yahoo!, and build our own field to play in. Like Nintendo and the Wii – we can and we will change the game.

wii-family photo by dcodez. Used with permission.

Popularity: 13% [?]

The last 30 days have been a revelation. After spending the past year working on web music applications in Yahoo!'s Media Innovation Group, I'm starting to believe that this digital music thing is finally coming together. I can almost taste how it's going to work.

Today we're releasing a piece of very early, very experimental (possibly dodgy) alpha software -- a desktop application called Blog Remix written using Adobe AIR. Blog Remix immerses you in an active music blog experience. It merges blog posts and MP3s and lets you mix together different tracks or blog entries from your favorite MP3 blogs. Save the mix for yourself, or share it with the rest of us as an XSPF playlist, podcast, or feed (using Atom, my personal favorite syndication format, or RSS).

Until recently I was never much of a music blog reader. Don't get me wrong, I've been a big MP3 blog fan for a while. The whole independent, organic nature of the music blog space appealed to me. But really, I was in it for the music. In my mind, music blogs were like radio stations. Last year, Joseph Magnani and I built the Easylistener player, so we could easily turn any webpage into a radio station or mixtape.

The original mixtapes, those magnetic cassettes we used to know and love, had context - usually something along the lines of "Songs for Amy", "Cottage Mix" or "My Badass Supermix." In the worst-case scenario the mix would involve some Don McLean or James Taylor tunes, while you curled up in the fetal position lamenting love lost or betrayed. But a mixtape can be enjoyed on many levels even when removed from its original context.

This is what the Music Blogs application aims to do. It's like a virtual crashpad where you can pick out all kinds of great mixtapes. Every music blog has its own personality, and you get a sense of what each blog is about simply by listening to the music that's posted.

This was my line of reasoning when I developed these apps last year. But music blogs are not just mixtapes. They are so much more. As one prominent music blogger wrote to me,

"Said the Gramophone - and numerous other blogs - put so much emphasis, commitment and spirit into the writing on the site. They are not just vehicles for the transmission of MP3s… Our focus is equal parts curation (selection of songs) and writing (thinking about the songs)."

Within Yahoo!, we've been having the same conversation, with Ian Rogers, our Media 2.0 visionary leading the charge. The problem, from a developer's perspective, is that in order to empower publishers to marry content with context, music bloggers (and all publishers) must share their work in a way that a computer can understand.

As much as we'd like it to, our Facebook Music Blogs app doesn't seamlessly merge MP3 tracks with the associated blog posts because we can't get it to work consistently, in a way we can automate and scale. This is because of the variations in how music blogs syndicate (or share) their content. Some music blogs don't even provide an RSS or Atom feed!

This has become a bit of an obsession for me, and I've even set out to classify the different ways that blogs currently share content. In the process of developing the Blog Remix app, I've realized that many blogs already do this correctly.

The application comes preloaded with a set of "Popular Music Blogs." You may notice that many popular music blogs aren't on this list. By necessity, the app is populated by blogs that share their content well. This is a prerequisite for creating rich experiences that meld audio content with original context.

Check out Saidthegramophone using Blog Remix and you can almost taste the red wine they're drinking as they write. Music blogs are like the new album art and liner notes, open for anyone to interpret, reinvent, and share with the rest of us.

But it works only if music bloggers share content in a way that applications like Blog Remix can understand. We need an RSS or ATOM feed that includes media content and the entire post written within the feed. If you're feeling particularly progressive, go the extra mile and incorporate the hAudio microformat into your HTML markup.

These small steps make it possible for developers like me to create powerful new distribution channels for your blog and the artists you write about. Together, we can build the open media web. You can start right now by trying out Blog Remix for yourself and letting me know what you think.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Hey everyone, Ernie here - among other duties, I'm one of the good folks who help set up Next*.

This is just a quick post to let you know that we currently have a small bug in our system where if your blog comment has an apostrophe, your comment goes straight into our spam folders. As apostrophes are used commonly - especially in blog comments - we'll get this fixed as soon as we're able to.

Unless you're the commenter writing about home loans and viagra. In which case, we are actively censoring your content. You know who you are. (As a footnote, this might be the first time ever that the word "viagra" has ever been mentioned on a Yahoo! blog, albeit ironically.)

Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your patience!

Good News, Everyone!
Looks like I've got the comment bug fixed. I'm not particularly happy about what was happening or the fix that had to be made, but things should be working fine now. As an added bonus, looks like your quote bearing comments weren't lost, they were merely buried behind the shed, so I've recovered them. (Well, most. There were a few spammer comments in there.)

Needless to say, if you still have problems, leave a (obviously quote free) comment and I'll try to fix it without swearing as much as I did this time.

jr conlin
(back-end monkey)

Popularity: 8% [?]