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by Jesper Rønn-Jensen

by jason_coates

A quick note to let you know about last night’s launch of Yahoo! Shortcuts for WordPress, a useful plugin for WordPress bloggers that harnesses contextual relevance technology from Y! Search to find and recommend images and infographics for your blog post while you’re blogging.

As I type, the plugin suggests appropriate shortcuts — maps, finance charts, Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos , and more — associated with the words I’m typing. At any point, I can review and select the shortcuts I want to use within my post. I can decide where and how to position the automagically generated visual content. The shortcut can then be embedded within the body of the post, or it can be displayed on hover over the shortcut link.

You can read more about it around Yahoo! and out on the web or watch a screencast tutorial.

Get this!

Over on Yodel Anecdotal, Jeremy Zawodny notes how it locates Zanzibar .

by Esthr

On the Y! Search Blog, Ariel Seidman and Luke Wroblewski use the Austin City Limits festival for their example.

John Battelle gives it a nod (as noted by Bradley Horowitz), even though he uses Six Apart’s blogging platform. Wired’s compiler blog likes the Flickr photo functionality.

A special shout-out to Alex King and the web development crew at Crowd Favorite, who built the plugin in collaboration with the Yahoo! Shortcuts team. The plugin is free and the source code is available under the BSD license. Details here.

Plus, if you’re among If you’re one of the first 500 bloggers to take Yahoo! Shortcuts for a spin on your own blog, you’re eligible for a cool free “Pimp my blog” t-shirt.

Popularity: 10% [?]

This Thursday evening we're hosting an all-night hackathon for memcached developers at Yahoo!'s Sunnyvale campus. You can come and code all night long (that's what makes it a hackathon), or stop by in the evening to meet developers from the community and developers at Yahoo! who use memcached on sites like MyBlogLog to improve speed and scalability.

We're hoping to ship some new features and release the binary protocol. We'll be hacking from 8:00 PM Thursday till 7:00 AM Friday morning. Food and drink will be served.

Memcached is a distributed memory caching system that lets you store information of any type across multiple servers (clusters). It improves performance by letting you cache specific, frequently used information directly in memory. Instead of constantly reading from your database, the data you need is more readily accessible. The memcached layer sits in the middle between the front-end of your site and the database servers.

Memcached was developed by Danga Interactive for Live Journal, but is now widely used. It's available via a permissive free software license.

You can find more detailed info about this event on Upcoming (let us know if you're planning to come so we can order plenty of food). There's also a wiki, and even a listing on Facebook. Hope to see you there.

Photo from kentbrew.

Popularity: 9% [?]

In the summer of 2006, I was fortunate enough to watch the World Cup final in Dolores Park right here in San Francisco. For those of you not familiar with the park, it's nestled in the heights of the Mission district; a gentle slope gives you a spanning view of downtown. At the foot of the park, a giant crane held a big TV screen. I was struck by the thousands of people who showed up to watch the game together with their friends. Check it out to the right here. It was packed.

I thought it a shame that you couldn't do this online. There was no way to get a far away friend and watch a video together online. And so myself and some others at the Berkeley lab built a little research prototype called Zync which allows you to share videos in sync with a friend through Yahoo! Messenger (if you're running Windows).

On our blog, we posted about Zync and we pushed it to the Yahoo! Messenger Plugin Gallery. We smiled when we had 50 users. And cheered at 100. And then at 250 you could hear us roaring. It kept growing and growing.

After six months, we had over 3000 users who opted-in for our research study. This was a great success. And so we began examining how people share videos in sync. In our studies, we found people liked synchronized sharing because it made them feel closer and more connected with their friends and family. You can read some of the studies that were published at ACM Multimedia and DUX.

As proud parents of our little prototype, we're happy to announce that Zync has grown up and is now a featured plug-in in the new beta of Yahoo Messenger 9.0. If you're running the Messenger beta, just send a video URL to your friend. If Zync knows how to play it, you'll see a button that says "Watch With Me" (pictured here to the right). Click it and Zync will load up in your (and in your friend's) conversation window and the video will start playing automatically.

We couldn't be happier. I'd personally like to give a good shout to everyone on the Zync Team and John D. at Yahoo! Messenger for all their hard work in helping Zync graduate.

Oh, and if you're not ready to try out the beta just yet (read: you're still running Yahoo! Messenger 8.1), you can still install Zync from the Plugin Gallery. :)

Popularity: 7% [?]

Since 2000, Joel Spolsky has been writing intelligently about how to do software development. That was also the year he founded Fog Creek Software in a Brooklyn brownstone (the NYC equivalent of a Silicon Valley garage) with his co-founder and partner, Michael Pryor.

Fog Creek Software is an interesting anomaly -- a New York City-based artisan software shop in a world of global technology players and collaborative networks of open source development. By all accounts, Fog Creek builds elegant products that are useful and responsive to the needs of software development teams.

Spolsky is highly regarded in the software industry, and his posts are circulated among developers I know, not just because his insights are valuable, and delivered in a palatable, entertaining style, but also because he walks his talk.

Fog Creek makes a strong commitment to quality of service. Shunning buzzwords, they opt for straightforwardness and humor. Lacking the mega-perks of a large corporate environment, Fog Creek treats programmers like rock stars, providing Aeron chairs and free lunches.

You could say that Joel is a poster child for software marketing 2.0: his style is quintessentially conversational, personal, and distributed. He shares his wisdom and experience widely. He stays focused, without cultishness or clutter. One is confident he still remembers how to write quality code. And he values good writing and clear documentation – he says as much.

The philosophy of customer service at Fog Creek is exemplary. Personally, I love Joel's post about the origins of his loyalty to Land's End – an archetypal customer satisfaction teaching story, in which Land's End exceeds expectations by fixing a time-sensitive problem that wasn't even their fault. At their own expense. As Joel says:

"When customers have a problem and you fix it, they’re actually going to be even more satisfied than if they never had a problem in the first place."

Seriously.

If you can't buy attention, sometimes you can earn attention by sharing what you know, and meeting people's need for knowledge. Which is why I signed up to attend the FogBugz World Tour presentation when it passed through town a month or so ago – in an unexceptional corporate hotel meeting room, on a sunny fall morning in Silicon Valley. Spolsky's online work engaged my attention. That's why I wanted to see his demo.

There's much that big companies can learn from the little guys about building and maintaining relationships. Sharing knowledge openly. Giving good stuff away.

Stay tuned.

Popularity: 6% [?]

In general, it's hard for me to come up with a destination that appeals to me less than a corporate-sponsored conference. Come to [ insert conference name ]! Nibble on treats we got surplus from an airline caterer, while our stooges try to sell you on our products! No thanks.

But this year, I am spending most of my time writing ActionScript and figuring out the best ways to stream and secure video. I've been coming up with too many questions that I can't find useful or definite answers for. It seemed reasonable to think that Adobe MAX would be the best chance I'd get to be in a room with people who actually know the real deal, and ask them while they're inclined to be helpful. Besides, I have to admit that I think AS3 is pretty great -- Flash finally feels more like coding than black art-- and there are people doing some pretty amazing work with Flash and Flex right now.

Having come to the conclusion a few years ago that Chicago is the coolest city in the US, I figured it couldn't be a total wash. (Note to NYC, my place of birth: Sorry. To SF, my adopted home: Don't be sad. I like you for other reasons, but as a pure city, it's not even close.)

Getting back to MAX--this conference is big! There are about 4,000 people in attendance and there's a wide range of good sessions. As you'd expect, the themes center on Adobe products, but there are technical deep dives, project case studies, all manner of design workshops, plus technology boot-camps and overviews. We've also seen and met a lot of Yahoos (and a few former Yahoos).

In particular, there's a lot of energy around ActionScript 3 and the new H.264 video streaming capabilities of the Flash Player (the keynote features an H.264 demo with Mike Folgner and Ryan Cunningham that was shot at the Brickhouse space).

This is the first MAX where almost the entire Flash community is working in AS3, and there's a palpable (and sincere, I think) sense of satisfaction among the Adobe folks that they've gotten over the hump of the AS1/2 - AS3 transition to release a solid, well-designed language and API that has shed the cruft of prior versions of AS. People really like it, it performs really well, and it'll be a solid foundation for Flash Player for the next few years.

From the community side, you can also feel that there are lots of new developers (many with much more traditional programming backgrounds than would have typically been the case pre-AS3 and Flex) making all sorts of data- and media- intensive applications using Flex and Flash, that wouldn't have been possible (or sane) just a year or two ago. The recent betas of Flex 3, AIR, and FMS 3 are also adding to the momentum.

As far as the actual sessions went, Flash Player Internals was my personal favorite. It was what I came for -- a chance to meet with the people who write the Flash Player and hear undocumented details about what happens under the hood, and the roadmap for the future. I chased down the guys in the hall afterwards and got a short mano-a-mano session on some low-level screen rendering tidbits from the horse's mouth, as it were.

My co-worker, Matt Fukuda, really enjoyed The New Creatives session, particularly the work from Chopping Block (who also did Kuler.)

Popularity: 7% [?]