Over on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog, I wrote about something I’ve been helping out with and supporting in recent months, the NetSquared Mashup Challenge:

I wanted to draw your attention to an organization that I and Yahoo! have been supporting that you might want to support, too — NetSquared. The goal of NetSquared is simple: to help hundreds of thousands of non-profit organizations (NPOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) successfully utilize the empowering capabilities of the Internet to increase their impact and achieve social change.

N2Y3 Mashup ChallengeFor the first time, NetSquared is running a really cool program called the Mashup Challenge in which they are matching up ideas from non-profits and NGOs involved in all sorts of social change to people like you (i.e. developers, product managers, and designers) who have the skills to implement them. I have been helping NetSquared promote the Mashup Challenge (see their recent YDN Theater video) because I think it’s a very practical roll-up-your-sleeves way of getting people to work together across many boundaries (company, international, etc) to produce something exciting and useful that benefits the world at large. It’s very much in the spirit of our own Yahoo! Hack Day.

To really boil it down, if you are a web builder/developer/designer, you can use these rare skills to make the world a better place. Read the rest if you would like to pitch in as a project leader! For more about NetSquared, check out the YDN Theater video below.

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/fop/embedflv/swf/fop_wrapper.swf?sv=0&id=6926549&autoStart=0&infoEnable=1&shareEnable=1&prepanelEnable=1&carouselEnable=0&postpanelEnable=1

. . . . I was living in Atlanta before the 1996 Olympics (and during, too). This is one of my all-time favorite photos of myself because it is ridiculous on so many levels. The Harley shirt was sort of the trucker hat of the mid-90s (at least for me).

The torch is going by near the office today, but I guess I won’t have time to grab a big Bud and lean on the hood of a police car this time. I have to work. Ah, youth.

Update: it’s not a real infection unless it can follow you on Twitter. Check out SouthByScurvy’s first tweet: “collecting souls.”

This has got to be one of the sickest winters in my recent memory. It seems like everyone I know is battling something. The latest strain seems to be related to going to SXSW. Is this divine punishment for twittering too much about the event?

This latest wave made me think of the original conference-goers disease, the O.G. of conference-based bacterial infections, the only new disease spawned from gathering in a hotel for a conference: Legionnaires’ disease. Wikipedia tells the story:

The first recognized outbreak occurred on July 27, 1976 at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where members of the American Legion, a United States military veterans association, had gathered for the American Bicentennial. Within two days of the event’s start, veterans began falling ill with a then-unidentified pneumonia. They had high breathing rates and chest pains. Numbers differ, but perhaps as many as 221 people were given medical treatment and 34 deaths occurred. At the time, the U.S. was debating the risk of a possible swine flu epidemic, and this incident prompted the passage of a national swine flu vaccination program. That cause was ruled out, and research continued for months, with various theories discussed in scientific and mass media that ranged from toxic chemicals to terrorism (domestic or foreign) aimed at the veterans. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mounted an unprecedented investigation and by September, the focus had shifted from outside causes, such as a disease carrier, to the hotel environment itself. In January 1977, the Legionellosis bacterium was finally identified and isolated, and found to be breeding in the cooling tower of the hotel’s air conditioning system, which then spread it through the entire building. This finding prompted new regulations worldwide for climate control systems.

Once the experts figured it out, the family of bacteria was assigned to the genus Legionellosis.

I hereby create the genus Shinerbockellosis (close runnerup to Lasmanitas-ellosis and Ironworks-ellosis). If only it could be cured with more Shiner Bock. . . . .

Get well, folks (I’m suffering along with you!)

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).