Last night I attended the first “confab.yahoo” at Yahoo HQ. The topic was Prediction Markets moderated by James Surowiecki, author of the popular book “The Wisdom of Crowds”. Overall this was a great learning event and I’m glad Yahoo! is starting this series of micro-conferences and making them open to the public like this. For a great summary of the event, check out ReadWriteWeb’s post: Prediction Markets at confab.yahoo.
Yesterday we caught the nighttime launch of shuttle Discovery on mission STS-116. Check the NASA site for more images from the launch and ongoing updates from the shuttle. In addition to delivering another truss for the International Space Stations, this mission is also going to rewire the entire electrical system!
Several people have asked me about this strange-looking message and wondering if it’s spam. It’s not — this is just us giving some advance warning about a brief scheduled downtime tomorrow night for maintenance. We’re trying to be proactive in communicating this downtime, but hopefully we don’t make too big a deal about it.
Scanning my logs to see what search terms are bringing people here, I noticed a slightly disturbing search for “d-i-r-t-y christmas pictures”. Sure enough, an old entry about Christmas pictures had me explaining how I’d posted the pictures http://www.ciprobuyonline.org quickly. I subsequently took the pictures down, so web searchers are probably quite disappointed. I’ve edited the page, so hopefully Google will pick up on this and stops sending me traffic from that particular search.
The offseason for NASCAR has been pretty busy, as usual. When your season runs from February through November, there isn’t a lot of down time, especially since the first race of the year — the Daytona 500 — is also the most important. Some items of note: Satellite radio coverage is moving from XM to Sirius who is already running full page color ads in USA Today Tony Stewart joins Howard Stern and others with his own radio show on Sirius For TV coverage, NBC and FX are out while Fox, Speed Channel, ABC, ESPN and TNT will split the…