Still more mobile news. Yahoo! Go is shipping. No alpha, beta, gamma, etc.–the real deal. Give it a whirl. If your phone, like mine, can’t handle the awesomeness, you can visit the slick web-only version at m.yahoo.com. -m

Once again, I am a judge for this year’s First-Chapter-of-a-Novel Contest hosted by The Writing Show. We’re looking for unpublished, less-than 4000 word entries.
Final deadline for submissions is June 15, so there’s just enough time left to put together your masterpiece and get it in. This year, there’s some serious prizes, and the top award will be chosen by popular crime fiction author C.J. Box. Go have a look at the rules for all the details.

There is a small entry fee, but every valid submission will get a 750+ word critique. For aspiring authors, you win either way. Now get to work! -m

The approximately seven readers of this blog have probably already heard this, but just in case: I have a new role at Yahoo!–working on next generation search.

Lots of details are still falling into place. For now I describe it: “Imagining, specifying, prototyping, developing, and evangelizing next-generation web search experiences leveraging the full and unique capabilities available within Yahoo!”

In many ways, this is a logical stepping stone after oneSearch, and I’ll be dealing with lowercase semantic web issues more now. Expect the focus of this blog to shift accordingly (though I’m still interested in mobile and will make note of important happenings.)

Search On! -m

Maybe it’s a coincidence, but just after installing Thunderbird 2, deleting emails started taking 5 seconds, then 15, then 30, then a full minute. Then it quit working alltogether. Also 14,000 old mailing list messages materialized in my Junk folder. My inbox has hundreds of unread, and drastic measures might be needed to get things working again… -m

I don’t remember ever spelling this out, so:

• Any posting that adds to the discussion shall be accepted
• Any posting by a spammer/robot/pay-per-post flunkie shall be rejected
• Any posting that would offend my grandma shall be rejected
• Any posting that takes too long for me to categorize per above MAY be rejected

These aren’t hard-and-fast rules. It’s getting increasingly difficult to discern postings that come from actual personalities. As a general rule, you should include a link back to your personal site, which should present itself in a way that makes it obvious that it’s not put together by some toxic SEO-gaming, advert-farming, internet-poisoning aggregation program.

But that’s just good advice no matter which blogs you comment on. -m

Today Yahoo! launched oneSearch on their other front page, m.yahoo.com. OneSearch has been available for a while, but only from within Yahoo! Go. Now it’s available to millions of mobile devices equipped with a data connection and XHTML browser.

The basic premise behind oneSearch is to replace the tri-modal search box, where you have to say whether you are searching the web, local, or images, with a single all-knowing search box. Available context information, such as your zip code, is used to guide the search. Internally, the application is smart about figuring out what kind of things you might be looking for. For example, someone searching for “pizza” in a mobile context is probably more interested in a list of restaurants (with reviews) than in a list of hyperlinks. Behind the simplicity of a single search box, there is a great deal of work going on to make your life easier.
Ever since Yahoo! Go betas (and gammas) started coming out, folks have been asking me how else they could get access to this application. Now it’s easy.

Not too long ago, the front page relaunched simultaneously in 19 countries. The new design was simple, and based on a new platform called Sushi, as mentioned in published sources. OneSearch shows off the power of this approach, even though this launch didn’t cover 19 countries…yet. (Getting access to local data for movies, restaurants, sporting events, and so on is no small feat.)

As I said before, this is only a small part of an overall strategy that has been years in the making. Much more to come. Watch this space. -m

(Press release) Starting today, Y! is the exclusive search partner for Opera Mini across more than 100 countries. The release also names “oneSearch”, going live later in Q1–definitely something to keep an eye on. -m

Here’s a great new project on Sourceforge: XForms for UBL. In my book, I started in on something like this. Here is a more complete, more up-to-date, fleshed out solution. -m

For the last several years, I’ve taken some time off around the end of the year to work on a special project. In 2004 I ported some of Rick Jelliffe’s code from Java to Python. In 2005, I made an editing pass over a novel I wrote the previous November during NaNoWriMo. This year was a little different. I:

• Worked. Enough stuff is going on with the day job that I couldn’t take a full week off.
• Got sick.
• Caught up on some homebrewing. Reorganized my brewery.
• Wrote. More stuff coming soon on xml.com.
• Pimped a babyswing. (photoset)
• Started reviewing WWW2007 and XTech papers.
• Started taking a video MIT class on differential equations. (If you have OS X 10.4+, fire up Grapher and try y’=cos xy, y(0)={-5,-4.5…5})

-m

Watch xml.com this week: the XML Annoyances column is returning, and not a moment too soon it seems. -m

Born at 5:38pm on August 29th. 8 pounds, 8.3 ounces. (3864 g) 20 inches (51 cm). Mother and baby doing great. Photos. Name pronounced with a “sh”. The first birth announcement I know of done initially over an IM presence indicator. :)
-m