onfocus

And we have a winner! Congrats, Ryan. Your copy of Yahoo! Hacks will be on its way later today. Thanks to everyone who played!

The answer I was looking for: February 2005. You can read more about this moment in history here, here, here (my post), or here. And if you already have Yahoo! Hacks you'll find the answer on page xiv in the Preface. This launch was a turning-point in my perception of Yahoo!, and of course that release kicked off an entire year of suprising announcements from Yahoo! including acquiring Flickr, launching Yahoo! 360, launching My Web, and acquiring upcoming and del.icio.us among many others.

Just for fun on a Sunday—I'll send a copy of Yahoo! Hacks to the first person who sends me the correct answer to the following question.

In what month/year did Yahoo! publicly launch their Search Web Services?

Be sure to include your name, mailing address, and site URL (if you have one)—and you'll need to be ok with me publishing your name/URL on this site. Employees of Onfocus Holdings, Ltd. are not eligible, this is for entertainment purposes only, void where prohibited.

Update: oops, I didn't realize this question would be so confusing. Here's a hint: try searching for the phrase yahoo search web services launch at Yahoo! Search, and check out the date on any of the announcements from Yahoo! sources in the results.

If you like photos of statues and water check out 10 more photos from my trip to the Mexico Coast.

Happy New Year! I spent the last week or so on a ship with sk's family and 2,000 of my closest friends—cruising around the Mexican Riviera. Here are a few photos I took along the way.



The cruise left from San Francisco, and it was a bit of an adventure getting there. We missed a couple of flights sitting on Highway 84 with traffic stopped all around us. Portland was a sheet of ice as we flew away, and we finally got to SF at 3 am. Luckily we built in an extra day in SF so we didn't have to worry about missing the ship.



The first stop was Catalina Island off the coast of California where I snapped this pic of P&A:



Puerto Vallarta was my favorite stop. I enjoyed the surreal sculptures along the waterfront.



Here's a picture of P looking at some colorful, intricate Huichol Indian art in Vallarta.



On Christmas day, sk and I hiked to the top of the tallest working lighthouse in the world, El Faro. This dog was carefully guarding the lighthouse.



It definitely didn't feel like Christmas day while hiking straight up in 90 degree weather. We had a great view of Mazatlan from up there.

The last Mexican stop was Cabo San Lucas, here's a panoramic of Cabo I took from the ship. sk and I kayaked around the bay, and we saw some of the best scenery of the trip. I was kicking myself for not taking a camera along.



It was nice to see the sun and spend some time away from the world, but it's also good to be home. I have a bunch of bold items to unbold in my inbox and newsreader, so I'll be digging out for a few days. I also have a bunch of photos from the trip, and I'm hoping to put together a gallery with larger photos in the next couple of days.

I had an early Christmas with my folks this year, and waiting for me under the tree was a Lensbaby 2.0. I've been having fun figuring out how to use it. Here's one of the first pictures I took with it:



One thing that's frustrating about the lens is that you can only change the aperture by physically adding small metal discs to the lens which are held in place with magnets. It's a bit cumbersome when you're out and about trying to take blurry pictures of trees. But I guess that's a limitation that comes with a flexible, bendy lens.



Also, I have no idea which aperture was in for a given picture. I'm so used to being able to check the exif data on a digital picture, that it's frustrating to loose that. I can't just load the picture and see what the aperture was set at. I might have to resort to carrying a notebook and jotting down aperture disk switches.



What I like about the Lensbaby is that you loose some control. While I usually try to have everything in focus, avoid motion blurs, lens flares, and all of the annoying accidents that can ruin a photo, they're all a part of the grammer of photography. That's why Holgas and Lomos are so popular—not because they take spectacularly clear photographs, but because so many happy accidents happen while you're using them. The Lensbaby is also an accident enabler.



I took these photos on a walk just outside of Lincoln, Nebraska last week.

I went to the dentist today for the first time in over ten years. I had some bad dentist experiences as a kid, so I've always been nervous about going. sk has been hounding me to get an exam, so I finally caved and let her make an appointment for me. She kept the date secret so I wouldn't worry about it, and sprung it on me a week or so ago.

I relived many of the nightmarish visions from my childhood today: the cramped rooms, the lead vests, the adjustable machines hovering above, below, and beside. Not to mention the gag-reflex, saliva, latex gloves in the mouth, and all of the metal pointy things with their scraping and poking. I'm sure technology has improved in the past decade, but the experience was very much the same.



The people there were all very nice, I'm not blaming them for my bad experiences. They probably aren't even aware of the environment around them, and the feeling of powerlessness it instills. I think some user experience design is in order for the offices—and probably a movement toward patient-centered design across the industry. It's all too industrial now. Don't they focus-group this stuff? Where's the market research? The psychological studies? They must know their office environment affects their patients.

Luckily I can report that my teeth are in great shape and I don't have any problems. And as an adult the experience isn't nearly as bad as my (probably) exaggerated memory. I'd like to keep my teeth healthy and I suppose that means more trips to the dreaded reclining chair.

If you want to subscribe to an Engadget/Gizmodo style weblog about consumer electronics that doesn't have advertising in its RSS feed, check out Gear Factor by Wired (RSS). Since these types of blogs are essentially a type of advertising anyway, I don't understand the need for extra ads in the feed.

I'm really enjoying Peter Morville's Ambient Findability, and I feel like it's a must-read for Web literacy. The title refers to the intersection of search and ubiquitous computing, and the book is sort of a quick history of information management and a look at where information is headed. Morville mentioned an insightful quote by Calvin Mooers that I hadn't heard before:

An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a consumer to have information than for him not to have it.

I often think of more information and access to more information as inherently good. But Mooers has a great point that information has to be processed and can often lead to more questions than answers. I've found a personal information wall in my own use of RSS readers. And I think this quote is a more useful way of stating the information overload problem than the saying ignorance is bliss. If I think about information as painful as well as useful, I have to change the way I design and interact with applications. And Morville argues that the change should be toward collaborative filtering and information as something social. I think the book explains some important Web trends like folksonomies, user-contributed data, and long tail power laws without going into the land of business hype. I'd like to give this book to some of my less web-centric friends because I think it's a good guide to understanding how moving from atoms to bits affects our relationship with information.

I read nonfiction almost exclusively. If you look at my reading list right now you'll see a history of Google, a history of New Zealand, and a history of Western religious thought. And I've been thinking about my one-track approach to reading lately, and started viewing it like hiking. Reading nonfiction is like walking along a flat, wide sidewalk. Each sentence is a cement square that lines up perfectly with the one before—leading me comfortably down a path. There's nothing wrong with this, I can walk for miles on sidewalks and get where I want to go.

A couple nights ago I sat down with a small book of surrealist poetry and had a completely different experience. I could feel muscles in my brain working that hadn't been used for a long time. Instead of walking along my comfortable sidewalk I was suddenly trekking through the backwoods. The path was twisted, rough, and filled with gaps I had to navigate. Sometimes the path was barely visible, but the extra work of joining jarring associations was fun. This space for interpretation is one of the reasons I like to read Zen koans. Surreal poetry and koans have a certain spark I haven't found in other writing and I think it's because the path through the text to meaning isn't clearly marked.

So this post is a reminder to myself that I should vary my literary treks. I'm not going to find soluble fish in a history of Google, and I need to remember that words can be magical as well as useful.

Yesterday I secured a copy of True Crime: New York City for the xbox and was just getting settled in a for an evening of shooting and car crashes in the back alleys of New York when sk asked if I wanted to go to the new Pride and Prejudice film. I started weighing 1800's England dialog and manners vs. modern New York explosions and gunfire. I knew this film was going to be the ultimate chick flick, probably like watching an entire marathon of Hugh Grant movies. I couldn't think of anything more tedious, and there was virtual killin' to be done. Some intense negotiations followed, and long story short I found myself in line at the theater behind hordes of "girls night out" crowds fighting for tickets.

The theater was packed, and I have to reluctantly admit that the film was entertaining. I haven't read Pride and Prejudice—or any Jane Austen—but it's one of sk's favorite books. I didn't know the characters or the story, but Pride and Prejudice is so archetypal that it was all very familiar. I'm not a big fan of period films, but this one had a grit of reality to the settings and costumes that was fun to watch. (It was no Barry Lyndon, but seemed a bit better than those films where everything is shiny & new.) It was also interesting watching the way class distinctions were portrayed in the film, and seemed a bit more authentic than similar films. But the ending had a very Sixteen Candles sort of feel, and sk assured me this was a Hollywood invention and not part of the novel. So I enjoyed the film even though I was dragged to it, and now I'll have a better sense of what it means when sk drops "Mr. Darcy" and other Pride and Prejudice references into casual conversation. Now if I can just get sk to go on a few missions in True Crime, we'll really be sharing.

As you probably know, I put together a book called Amazon Hacks a couple years ago, and there are a couple of other books I've worked on, so I have a few reasons to watch Amazon very closely. One way that I watch Amazon is by subscribing to an Amazon RSS feed that lets me know when new books in the Hacks Series are available. On August 9th I noticed that another Hacks book I put together—Yahoo! Hacks—was available for pre-order and I posted about it. At the same time, I set up a script to take a screenshot of the Amazon detail page for Yahoo! Hacks every day at 4:10pm. I wanted to watch the page evolve, and have a record of how the page looked at various stages of development. I often think of Amazon detail pages as static, but they change quite a bit over time. Because there's no way to go back in time for individual books (unless you can go wayback on a title), there's no record of this change.

So with that in mind, here's a rough timeline of the evolution of the Yahoo! Hacks detail page I found by watching the screenshots.

August 9th [view]

• Page added
• Price is at list price of $24.95

August 16th [view]

• The Editorial Review gets better formatting
• Page count jumps from 352 to 452

August 23rd [view]

• Cover image added
• First Sales Rank ranking

August 31st [view]

• Related Listmania! and Guides added

September 6th [view]

• Amazon drops price to $16.47 (standard Amazon discount)
• Page count at 488 pages

September 10th [view]

• Editorial review has even better formatting with bullets

September 28th [view]

• Page count at 489 pages

October 19th [view]

• Buy button changed from "Pre-order" to "Add to Shopping Cart" (I posted about it)

October 24th [view]

• Product dimensions added

October 30th [view]

• "Better Together" offer added
• I added my own image of Yahoo! Hacks to the page with the "customer images" feature

November 23rd [view]

• First customer review is added (it's good! shew.)

So yeah, probably of no interest to anyone but me. But I thought I'd share what I found. By the way, Flickr Hacks is available for pre-order at Amazon now. You too can watch that page evolve.

I'm not sure how I got suckered into public speaking the first time. I know I spoke about Amazon Hacks at the Emerging Technology Conference in 2003 (my post about speaking), I spoke on two panels at South by Southwest in March 2004 (my pre-trip post), and I was on a panel about weblogs (my announcement) in May of 2004. Those initial forays into the world of public speaking were all very painful, but they were great lessons. The old cliche is that most people are more afraid of public speaking than dying, and I wouldn't go that far. But public speaking is a close second for me.

I've read many books in the past few years trying to overcome my fear of public speaking. Most of the books have been embarrassingly bad—I'm looking at you Dale Carnegie. But I thought I'd share one book that was useful. Act Natural by Ken Howard helped me view public speaking as telling personal stories rather than relating information. It's a subtle shift in thinking, but it's helped me organize my thoughts into something I can share.

In addition to the public speaking side of things, I've read quite a few marketingspeak-laden books about putting together PowerPoint presentations. The $7 I invested in Edward Tufte's The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint has payed off more than all of the marketing books combined because it completely destroyed everything I knew about PowerPoint. Then I picked up Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson and sort of re-built a PowerPoint grammar that I feel works better than reading slides. Like Howard, Atkinson stresses telling stories over relating information, and using PowerPoint as a visual backup rather than an information delivery device.

Oh, and watching great speakers has been helpful to me. Whenever I see a great presentation at a conference, I try to note what I liked about it. I saw Jeff Veen speak at Webvisions 2003 and he's a natural on stage. Definitely check out his Seven Steps to Better Presentations—I refer to these quite a bit whenever I'm going to speak.

I've been asked to speak a few times this year, and I see more public speaking in my future. I don't do it very often, but I am going to be speaking at a one day conference called Online Northwest here in Corvallis in February. I always ask myself how I get suckered into public speaking as the date approaches, but once a talk is over I find that I enjoyed putting the talk together and that I learned a little bit more about speaking for the next time.