Today Yahoo! released a standard set of guidelines which are mostly common-sense, keep-out-of-trouble recommendations. The top rule I follow is to not discuss anything that isn’t already public, so it’s clearly common-sense sort of stuff. I was surprised there was no mention of asking employees to clearly identify on their blog that they work at Yahoo, but maybe that’s not such a big deal. (Disclaimer: I do work at Yahoo!) Jeremy Zawodny was one of several internal bloggers who provided input and feedback; see his blog for more details and a copy of the policy itself if you’re interested.
Yesterday was the start of “public beta” for Yahoo! 360° — it’s kind of like a social-networking service, but I know it goes much beyond that. Now that it’s about to launch, I really need to take a closer look. If anyone wants an invite, just let me know. Update: My 360° Blog is at: http://360.yahoo.com/cantonib. Also, to view anything on 360 (including public blogs like mine), you need to be signed in with a Yahoo ID.
I was following Santa Clara’s game tonight in the WCC tournament and discovered Gametracker from Collegesports.com. Gametracker is a great web application, providing all the details you’d want from basketball games in progress. (Plus, it’s written in Flash and doesn’t require Internet Explorer.) One feature in particular is something I’ve thought of before: a graph of each team’s total points over time. The call it Gameflow and you can see it in the sample below (click for a full-size view of Gametracker). I did notice one problem, however: the x-axis scale always runs from 0 to 40 minutes, regardless of…
After thoroughly enjoying last weekend’s season-opening Daytona 500 (go Jeff!), I poked around Yahoo Sports to see what’s new this year. It looks like the Sports team has been busy with several site improvements, including live leaderboard coverage and a new features page. The leaderboard shows up to three drivers’ progress throughout the race. I’m glad to see this data being presented graphically — it makes it much more compelling that another table full of numbers. The driver stats page also has some improvements, including this interesting “Nextel Key Stats” diagram (note the extra credit Jeff Gordon gets for running…
Like a lot of other sites, I started receiving a ton of trackback and comment spam a couple weeks ago. I was set up for all new comments to be moderated, but even that step became a burden. Plus, the trackbacks are not moderated which the spammers have just realized I suppose. After reading up on the various solutions people have created for MovableType, I installed MT-Blacklist. I was at first reluctant to rely on a blacklist approach, but this plugin is quite powerful, automatically updating its blacklist from the master at Jay’s site. You can also add your own…