Jeff Boulter’s Weblog » Blog Archive » How not to Get Hired at Yahoo!
This is by far one of the funniest blog entries I've read recently. I wholeheartedly agree with Jeff on these points. I've spoken with many candidates who do several of these things, but I don't think I've had quite the number of disappointments that Jeff has.
I suspect these anti-suggestions apply to any company, not just Yahoo. But it is well worth a quick read and a hearty laugh.
VentureBlog: Of Searches and Psychics: The Costs of Long Tail Businesses is a facinating entry. I think it nicely captures one of the biggest challenges when trying to do the "long tail" thing... namely search. If Amazon only offered browsing for books, but no searching, I would rarely use it. Search is the key to finding the right nugget in the giant haystack of the long tail.
I would extend the argument to say that, beyond simple searching, "related" data is the next most important thing. If a long tail service provider can find a particular piece of data or item, I think the next value to be added is the relationship of that thing to other similar things.
And relationships extend along a couple of axes: raw similarity of item (bolle sunglasses are like rayban sunglasses), affinity groups from user behaviors (other people who bought bolle sunglasses also bought columbia ski jackets and panama jack suntan lotion), and finally user-implied similarity (you normally take these kinds of actions which means you are probably interested in these sorts of things)...
cool stuff.
Congrats to the folks from Flickr. I must admit that I haven't used the service extensively, but seeing it at Etech was really amazing. There was a plasma in the front of the conference that had a constantly updating stream of photos posted onto Flickr by conference attendees. I was really amazed at how cool it was.
Anyways, congrats again to the Flickr folks and welcome to the family. If you make it down to LA, gimme a ring.
I bought Diana an Ipod Shuffle, the 1 gb size, for her big 3-0. I haven't yet experienced the problems that Geoff mentioned. But, it is brand new, literally hooked up only today.
I'll have more to report later.
If you could ask yahoo to build or incorporate any personalized web related things, what would it be? You don't need to limit it to just one thing. I'm just curious to see what people want from a personalized web experience.