Flickr as “Eyes of the World”

The Elephant’s guides
Originally uploaded by Phil Gyford.

Stewart has referred to Flickr as the “Eyes of the World”… This is a totally apropos vision, but also a not so veiled reference to Stewart’s hippie roots.
While I was a grad student, colleagues Ted Adelson and John Wang […]

Searching for what doesn’t exist…

As an industry, we’ve made a ton of progress in search over the last several years. Yet there is a subtle but profound limitation to “web search” as currently realized: search engines can only return results that… well… you know… exist.
At a glance this doesn’t seem to be much of […]

CNBC Asia Squawkbox

Just got back from Singapore for this, and did a 4m piece on CNBC Asia’s Squawkbox. I don’t believe there’s a public copy, but Yahoo’s can find the clip on backyard.

Took everything I had to pull myself together past the jetlag and mental fogginess for the 4m piece.
Hope to post more about the trip, […]

My New Job!

I’ve been very eager to publicly announce this. There were some pretty good excuses as to why this has taken me more than a month. I’ve been wicked busy, and moreover there were some org changes I wanted to implement before announcing. Drumroll…
I’ve got a new job at Yahoo!: VP of Product […]

Remix this!

The YRB posse has released yet another great product:  the San Francisco International Film Festival Remixer.
 
A non-linear editor in a browser, the SFIFF remixer rocks.  Kudos to Ellen, Marc, Jeannie, Brian, Peter, Ryan, Patrick, etc.
 

danah and OReilly

Which of these pictures does not make sense:

danah’s mention
 

The Love Machine

Last week Prabhakar and I presented some of Yahoo’s past and future strategies to a bunch of Benchmark Capital portfolio companies at their recent shindig in Half Moon Bay.  Prabhakar presented his compelling vision for Yahoo Research (which I’ve seen umpteen times before but excites me anew each time.)  He also touted some excellent recent hires (including an […]

Capture v. Derive

Universal Law:  It is easier, cheaper and more accurate to capture metadata upstream, than to reverse engineer it downstream.
Back at Virage, we worked on the problem of indexing rich media - deriving metadata from video.  We would apply all kinds of fancy (and fuzzy) technology like speech recognition, automatic scene change detection, face recognition, etc. to commercial broadcast […]

Lowering Barriers to Participation

In a previous post, I mentioned our efforts around lowering barriers to entry for participation, i.e. empowering consumers with tools that transform them into creators.  Tagging is perhaps the simplest and most direct example of how lowering a barrier to entry can drive and spur participation.
Tagging works, in part, because it’s so simple.  Rather than […]

Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers

As Yahoo! has been gobbling up many social media sites over the past year (Flickr, upcoming, del.icio.us) I often get asked about how (or whether) we believe these communities will scale.
The question led me to draw the following pyramid on a nearby whiteboard:

The levels in the pyramid represent phases of value creation.  As an example […]

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