Chad Dickerson's blog

In the absence of new content on this blog (need to rectify that!), below are some miscellaneous notes in no particular order of importance.

Life is intense both outside of work and at work. It’s all good.

In the past several weeks, I’ve seen shows of all kinds:

• Ryan Adams (here’s one review, and Ian explains why Ryan matters)
• Moiseyev Dance Company (everyone needs a little Russian folk dance sometimes)
• Carrie Fisher’s solo show Wishful Drinking (SFGate review)

In the next few days, I’ve got tickets to see Magnetic Fields and Mountain Goats in SF. Both produce monumentally depressing songs that go down like sugary sweet pop confections — songs that leave me walking down the street happily humming catchy songs that happen to be about death and various forms of dysfunction. They are damn good songs, though.

I also finished Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation this week. It’s awesome. Aside from the book, I love his blog post “Stop saying innovation — here’s why.” The tenor is along the lines of something I’ve said in the past: “If you’re in a meeting talking about innovation, you are not innovating.” I plan to write more about this in the coming weeks.

Check out the new template for this blog that I put in place over the weekend, WP-Premium. I think I’m going to stick with this one for a while (I saw WP-Premium on Rick Klau’s blog and it was template love at first sight).

I also installed the beautiful new MyBlogLog widget (nice job, MyBlogLog team!) and added Twitter updates to my sidebar using Alex King’s Twitter Tools (follow me on Twitter if you’d like). WordPress has made sidebar management incredibly easy with WordPress Widgets.

That’s all for now.

Check it out: Yahoo! Live is live, complete with API. This is experiment out of the Advanced Products group (my relatively new gig). See Yahoo! Next post for all the details!

Congratulations to Tony Scott, who was just named as the new CIO at Microsoft. Several years ago when I was at InfoWorld and Tony served on our CTO Advisory Council, I had the pleasure of spending time with him shooting pool, drinking beer, and talking about automotive technologies (he was CTO of General Motors at the time). One of my favorite bits of feedback for my InfoWorld column was from Tony, who wrote to me to say he was sending one of my columns to his entire staff.

Good luck, Tony!

Yahoo! announced plans to be OpenID provider at the end of this month — see the Yahoo! Developer Network blog post for more details.

A special shout-out to Shreyas Doshi and Allen Tom (among many others) for pushing to make this happen!

I guess the headline tips my hand. I’m taking on a new role at Yahoo: running the Advanced Products group, a position just vacated by Scott Gatz. Scott has built a great team and I have big shoes to fill, but the groundwork that Scott and his team have laid only increases my excitement about taking on the new challenge.

Obviously, that means that I’m moving on from the Yahoo! Developer Network (aka YDN) team. I’m really proud of the work the YDN team has done over the past 18 months and I’m honored that we were able to help surface and represent the incredible work of so many teams inside Yahoo! Working closely with product teams all over Yahoo, we rolled out APIs that opened up large chunks of Yahoo’s infrastructure: Yahoo! Mail, Browser-based Authentication and Yahoo! Answers, just to name a few. Aside from the APIs, the YUI team continued their impressive work, incredibly useful performance tools like YSlow were released, and Yahoo’s work with Hadoop emerged. We pulled off a couple of Open Hack Days that were simply mind-blowing (Beck playing on the grass outside our fitness center in Sunnyvale?! Rain indoors in London?!). Through it all, I was constantly humbled by the talent and capability of the individuals and teams within the company. Best of all, I was inspired by lots of developers with big dreams and ideas. If I take just a small fraction of that inspiration with me into the new role, I will be truly blessed.

The YDN experience was over-the-top fun by any reasonable standard. I met Beck, played an impromptu game of Faceball on stage at London Hack Day (and lost), and interviewed the kind citizens of Dublin on the streets during Mashup Camp. While there are literally hundreds of people who deserve thanks around Yahoo, I want to thank the core YDN team for making it such a great experience: Matt McAlister, Jeremy Zawodny, Dan Theurer, Micah Laaker, JR Conlin, Kent Brewster, Ricky Montalvo, and Jason Levitt. (And I demand a sushi lunch!)

I’m really happy about where YDN is headed and I’m really looking forward to seeing some of the things in the pipeline emerge. Chris Yeh (cyeh -at- yahoo-inc.com) is taking over YDN from here, and I’ll be helping the team any way I can as part of the extended Yahoo! team. Good luck to Chris, and stay tuned for some interesting things coming from my new sphere at Yahoo!

I went to Dublin recently to give a talk at Mashup Camp and had an incredible time on my first visit there. The talk (slides here) got good reviews and I really enjoyed spending time with the Irish developer community. David Berlind puts it nicely when he wrote: “There in Ireland, the same patriotic glue that binds the locals together can also be found binding the local developers together for a family-like comaradarie — one into which technologists from Europe, the US and anywhere else are very warmly welcomed — one that I’m not sure I’ve observed elsewhere.”

The warmth and good humor of the people I met in Dublin (along with the puzzled looks at Irish immigration when I said I was in Dublin for “Mashup Camp”) inspired a simple idea for a video: what would random people on the streets of Dublin say if we asked them “what is a mashup?” Tom Hughes-Croucher and I shot the video you see below (if you can’t see the video in your feedreader, click here). It’s silly and has essentially zero tech content, but it provides a clear reminder to us techies that whether you’re in Dublin, London, San Francisco, or anyplace else, the average person on the street is puzzled by our strange language.

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/fop/embedflv/swf/fop_wrapper.swf?sv=0&id=5247652&autoStart=0&infoEnable=1&shareEnable=1&prepanelEnable=1&carouselEnable=0&postpanelEnable=1

A shout-out to Yahoo! Developer Network video editor/producer Ricky Montalvo for the most memorable slow-mo sequence in the burgeoning developer relations video genre, and thanks to John Musser at ProgrammableWeb for linking to the video.

Over the past several months, I gradually butchered my last WordPress template, so I’m starting fresh today with Cutline 3-column split.

RSS-only readers, move along, there’s nothing here to see. . . .

update: I just realized that I unwittingly chose the same template as Cameron Marlow, which means it must be good. Cameron is a man of taste (note that he chose the more elegant two column theme, versus my three).

I’m going to be at Mashup Camp Dublin this weekend (see the post over at the Yahoo! Developer Network blog).

Aside from the tech festivities, I am looking forward to spending a little time getting to know Dublin. Besides being a home brewing nerd, I spent a lot of time in college studying James Joyce and I count Dubliners as one of my favorite books of short stories. I’m a digital packrat, so I have digital copies of all of my college papers, including a couple I wrote about Dubliners:

• “A Prisoner for Life”: Joyce’s Portrayal of the Hopelessly Bourgeois Artist in “A Little Cloud”
• Outcast From Life’s Feast: Joyce’s Characterizations of Self-Absorption in “A Little Cloud” and “A Painful Case”

Perhaps someone out there will draw some inspiration from my own hopelessly bourgeois self-absorbed college writings.

In any case, if you’re in Dublin and want to get together for a pint to chat about tech, beer, or James Joyce, drop me a line (chad -AT- chaddickerson.com) or just come to Mashup Camp and say hello. I’m really looking forward to the trip!

I couldn’t sleep this morning, so I got up at about 4:30am and twittered one of those meaningless messages that was really just a “hey, is anyone up?” sort of thing. Shortly thereafter, I got a direct message via Twitter from a friend in Vietnam who I had been trying to hook up with recently saying, “still up?” I IM’ed him immediately to say I was, then he called me on his VoIP line from Saigon. It was 8pm there and the Halloween festivities were just winding down — you could hear the sounds of his sugar-amped kids in the background. We had a nice chat.

Wow, this Internet thing is just huge.

Bangalore Open Hack Day is going on right now — wish I was there! My trip to Bangalore last year for our internal Hack Day and BarCamp Bangalore the next day was amazing (I never did get around to writing something longer on that experience, as I intimated in this blog post).

Good luck to everyone involved (and may the weather be with you — looks likes the wind has already entered the picture).

Can’t wait to see what emerges. With hackers like Premshree involved, it’s guaranteed to be good.