onfocus

Now that etech has come and gone, I can finally talk about my latest project: Yahoo! Hacks. I'm writing furiously now, and the book will be edited by Brian Sawyer at O'Reilly. (Here's a shot Brian took of me signing the contract at etech. And vice versa.) If you've been watching tech news at all lately, you know this is an exciting time to be focusing on Yahoo! Somewhere between the Flickr deal, their new weblog tool, web services, the buzz game, Yahoo! Music, their publisher network, My Yahoo! RSS, (and the list goes on) it seems that Yahoo! is morphing into something new. I'm looking forward to writing about what they're up to, and how you can use the rest of their domain in unique ways.

As with all of the books in the Hacks series, Yahoo! Hacks will be a group effort. You can think of me as a hacks curator, bringing together the best tips, tricks, and code I can find. That means I need help from you—the hack artisan—in bringing novel Yahoo! uses to a wider audience. Do you use Yahoo! in a way that Yahoo! may not have envisioned? I'd love to hear about it. (And if you'd like to share a hack publicly, feel free to post it at the Hacks site.) I contributed Google Smackdown to Google Hacks way back when, and as you can tell that led to more and more hacks-related writing for me. There's something satisfying about showing others you can do more with technology than what you'll find in the help docs. Plus it's fun to see your work in (what feels like) a more permanent and tactile medium like a book—I hope you'll consider contributing.

The schedule for the book is pretty fast, so I'd like to apologize to my friends and family up front—see ya in a few months! ;) In the meantime, I'll be one with Yahoo!