Endopolis

Today (at 3am PT!) we launched Good Morning Yahoo!, a project that I've been working on since drawing it on a white board last Fall. The site is pretty simple by design -- the goal was to create a morning news "show" centered around video, and provide users the ability to gather around the water cooler to discuss the topics of the day.

The project has been a fun one to work on for a couple of reasons. I've done a number of original and special projects for Yahoo! News, but this is the first that has gone from concept to reality so quickly, and in conjunction with a major sponsorship. I'm happy about that. Unfortunately, it didn't move the YHOO stock price up this morning. Oh well.

The concept was born from brainstorming in Santa Monica, and with the engineering team here in Sunnyvale. The crew built a working prototype from scratch for a Yahoo Hack Day last year. It placed among the top few hacks at the company, which proved we were on to something. We took that back to Santa Monica and shopped it around a bit, and almost immediately were in contact with an advertising team on the East Coast that was working on a deal with Dunkin Donuts. We presented the concept, brainstormed the idea further, agreed on a spec, secured the sponsorship, and voila, we have our site.

The site is also fairly challenging from a production and editorial standpoint. I won't get into details, but let's just say there's a lot of thought and work going into the content mix and keeping the site fresh every day.

Hope you like it. 

Posted by senders at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I have a lot of thoughts about the day's big news, but I thought I'd better not say too much yet. I'd rather just post this oldie but goodie:

Posted by senders at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

These certainly are not a big deal, but I managed to finally create a couple of handy RSS feed aggregators using Yahoo! Pipes. I had dabbled with Pipes before, but never spent the time to figure out how to actually create anything. Now that I know how, it's super easy and only takes a few minutes to do.

First, I threw together a bunch of feeds produced by folks who used to work at TechTV. It's a kind of where-are-they-now thing (many are doing quite well). I need to add a few others from blogs and sites that I know of, but this is a start.

Finally, for a side-project I'm kicking around, this is an aggregation of multiple extreme sports news feeds.

Some additional filtering would make these more useful, but it was fun to toy around and finally create something with this cool service. 

Posted by senders at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm really proud to have been a part of this: http://debates.news.yahoo.com

Here's a clip from the event. I'll write more about it this weekend after I've had some sleep.

Posted by senders at 08:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We recently got a great write-up from the Columbia Journalism Review on People of the Web.

Posted by senders at 08:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)