yahoo

The Verge
"Yahoo Answers, one of the longest-running and most storied web Q&A platforms in the history of the internet, is shutting down on May 4th. That’s the day the Yahoo Answers website will start redirecting to the Yahoo homepage, and all of the platform’s archives will apparently cease to exist. The platform has been operating since 2005."
Corporations continue to be bad at hosting our conversations and managing our data.
  • A jQuery port of Prototype's PerodicalUpdater method that includes a polling interval decay if updates aren't happening.
  • "...if after a few Ajax polls there’s no data, there probably won’t be for a while. Maybe the site is overloaded or the queue is backed up. In those circumstances the continued polling adds additional unwanted strain to the site." Another polling approach: increase the interval every time.
  • "And the greater risk is not of Flickr’s deletion of customers, but of the market’s deletion of Flickr. Because, after all, Flickr is a business and no business lasts forever. Least of all in the tech world." Valid concerns about Flickr, advertising, and how we fund the Web.
  • Devastating critique of the damage Yahoo! has done to Web culture. "All I can say, looking back, is that when history takes a look at the lives of Jerry Yang and David Filo, this is what it will probably say: 'Two graduate students, intrigued by a growing wealth of material on the Internet, built a huge fucking lobster trap, absorbed as much of human history and creativity as they could, and destroyed all of it.' Great work, guys."
  • Bloglines is shutting down and people are leaving Google Reader in droves. [via pkedrosky on Twitter via my social netw...OH, I see what's happening.]
  • Turn any Flickr RSS feed into The Big Picture by resizing the photos from Small to Large. I have my issues with Yahoo Pipes and their agressive scraping, but I have to admit this does make viewing Flickr photos with Google Reader fun.
  • YSlow has a nice new design, and a new option for "Small Site or Blog" that doesn't grade based on clustered server settings.
  • Brian Eno put together a generative music app for the iPhone called Bloom.
  • "Our results showed that just the very basic metric of reply length, along with the number of competing answers, and the track record of the user, was most predictive of whether the answer would be selected. The number of other best answers by a user, a potential indicator of expertise, was predictive of an answer being selected as best, but most significantly so for the technically focused Programming category." [via waxy]
  • Jay Rosen: "At what point does an extreme attempt to de-legitimate the press actually de-legitimate the candidate as an extremist in the eyes of the press?"

Quick Update

I'm still alive! And if I had time to blog, I might post stuff like this: Until next month (probably), have fun without me.
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