At least at the Burlingame Apple Store. Lines wrapped all the way around the corner and to the back. They were turning folks away within 20 minutes of opening Friday. Some had been there since 7 am.

No iPhone for me. Yet. -m

Looks like a reasonably-sized revision. The first public working draft seems downright thin, in fact, relative to all the SHOULDs and MAYs in the requirements document. In particular, I’d like to see progress on 2.3.16 Higher order functions. (Then do we get a book XQuery: The Good Parts? …kidding..)

-m

Someone overseas, whom I consider trustworthy but haven’t actually met, wants to buy one of my domains. Great!

There’s not huge sums involved, though it’s a hassle to move the money and coordinate the transfer. Readers: Any advice on how to complete the transaction? Escrow service? Anything lighter-weight? Comment below. -m

That’s my game idea. Unfortunately I won’t have time to develop the idea, so somebody else go for it–just mention my name in the credits ;)

My 7-year-old has just discovered Oregon Trail, or more accurately Westward Trail, a respectable online clone.

-m

Today Google announced Protocol Buffers, described as “think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler“. Language bindings for C++, Java, and Python. Oddly not even a whisper about JSON, which is a much more apt comparison. And along with that, no JavaScript implementation. So why the omission?

My guess is that it wouldn’t compare that favorably with JSON. The extra needed compile step is a hassle, and doesn’t give enough of a relative benefit for Ajax applications. But perhaps this will unleash a torrent of people asking for ‘binary JSON’. OK, maybe not… -m

Nope, not spam. You can now order electronic components from Amazon, advertised right on the front page for me. What can’t you get on Amazon? -m

I haven’t seen an announcement about this, but try the following query on Yahoo Search: [searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.rdf.rdfa] (link). It shows documents containing RDFa, with Digg at the top. Since this is a Searchmonkey ID, it’s also usable in Searchmonkey to actually extract the metadata and use it to customize search results.

Does your site use RDFa yet? -m

Commentators, having long since run out of useful things to say about YHOO+MSFT, only bemoan how it continues to drag out. In reality, deals of this size do tend to take a while. Microsoft (and specifically Ballmer) aren’t walking. Why?

Because they need Yahoo. They need search share–the deal with Google only puts on more pressure. But they also need a non-schizophrenic brand under which to put all their audience attractors. In short, I’d say MSFT has been terrible at tactics (and non-intimidation-based negotiating), and YHOO has been mediocre at strategy and terrible at execution. Maybe they are meant for each other…

Prediction: by the end of the year 1) some kind of deal happens, and 2) Yang is out as CEO. $28.

Disclosure: I still hold long YHOO shares

Disclosure: The irony of this post is not lost on me

-m

Several folks, including me, have experienced increased CPU usage on Firefox 3, especially on OSX. Try disabling it, going back to the bookmarklet. -m

Even though the timing is about perfect, it’s not gonna happen But if it did, would that be awesome or what? -m

A common point of debate within Yahoo! was whether employees should feel compelled to use Y properties (”eat your own dogfood”) or whether said properties should have to compete on pure merit to earn internal usage. But in any case, there’s always pressure, even if subliminal, to use internal products.

I’ve free of such influence for six weeks now. What Yahoo! services do I still use? Which ones not so much?

Yahoo Answers: not so much. Even the 1 point-per-day for visiting doesn’t entice me. If I had a burning question that would be a good fit for a community answer, I’d go back.

Yahoo Mail: all the time. I used Yahoo mail long before I worked there, and I’ll be using it long after.

Yahoo News: almost daily. Still a good collection of global, national, and local news.

My Yahoo & Finance: multiple times daily. I’ve peeked at iGoogle, but the Y is too comfy, and the competion isn’t easy enough to get comfortable with. But often the page takes up to 30 seconds to load. If that doesn’t improve, I’ll leave.

Yahoo Search: still my default. But only because of tweaks I put in place with SearchMonkey. The baseline quality of results is right on par with Google. I still recommend Y search to friends and family.

Yahoo Maps: rarely used. Google maps is just better, particularly street view.

Yahoo 360: Abandoned. Tons of site bugs, no fixes on the horizon. In fact, they’ve announced shuttering of the service, to be replaced with some unspecified alternative. But who knows when that will happen? So the Meadblog is on hold until further notice. I’ll still check once in a while for postings from friends and family.

Yahoo front page: Still use it to check whether wireless is working. Most often with ping, not HTTP though. :-)

What Yahoo services do you still use? Comment below. -m

Update: a few more inspired by the comments.

Delicious: still use, mainly through the browser extension.

Flickr: still use, but I’m not much of a photos guy. I’ll be using it again shortly to upload screenshots for a blog-post tutorial I’m writing.

According to Ars Technica, Google captured 61% of mobile search market share in the first four months of 2008. Yahoo! came in at a distant 18%, so pretty much reflecting desktop search market share. This is due, of course, to Google being the default provider on the iPhone, and the iPhone being the biggest bulk of mobile internet usage.

So Jerry (or whoever is on deck as CEO), you should probably look into this mobile thing and see what’s up with leadership there and whether anything is salvageable… -m

Here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know. Netflix has gone on record as saying that although their Instant View library, viewable online or via the hardware Roku player, is much smaller than their DVD library, they’re working hard on closing the gap. For instance, one quote says “adding titles at light speed”. But some titles are disappearing over time.

Just today, the Leslie Neilsen flick Wrongfully Accused (the tale of the one-eyed, one-legged, one-armed man) went offline as of today. Yesterday I watched it for free online. I’d really hate to see the kinds of negotiations that must be going on in back rooms between the studios and distributors these days…

If you have an Instant View queue, check it out. Under the “Availability” column, check for dates when your selections go offline. Blank means it’s safe for the time being. -m

During a Q&A session today, I asked a panel of MarkLogic users about whether they saw metadata (and specifically RDF) as becoming an important factor in the near future. Fair enough question, having just come from the SearchMonkey project at Yahoo! The answer:

A qualified yes. Having a strong metadata store and query engine isn’t a crushing must-have-today need. But that day is coming… -m

Other than training sessions today was the first day of the Mark Logic User Conference. And I was surprised by the feel of it: very much like a industry XML conference. Many familiar faces were there, like Norm, Zarella, Kurt, and  Eliot. The sessions were somewhat more narrowly focused around MarkLogicy things, of course, but it still had that feel. I got alot out of the sessions I attended, and had great hallway conversations.

I’ll post more details when I’m not exhausted (which isn’t likely to be any time this week).

Things to check out: the tweets, the liveblog, and don’t miss the CEO blog (don’t worry, he’s a math/physics guy. It’s worth reading.)-m

I’ll be up in San Francisco the rest of this week at the Mark Logic User Conference. If you’ll be there too, be sure to look me up. -m

For instance, The Business Value of Windows Vista. Seriously, Vista for “speed and security”? Or mobile? The comments on this post alone are worth the click. -m

From the Yahoo! Developer blog, new search keywords you can use to hone in on indexed microformats.

For example, to see every hAtom-bearing page that mentions ‘dubinko’ use the query [searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.uf.hatom dubinko]. Works similarly for hCard, hCalendar, hReview, and XFN. I’m sure more are coming soon too. -m

Rumor is that the .Mac service is being renamed to “Mobile Me”. Great, in it’s present state, it’s always been the kind of thing that’s completely useless to me, even aside from the annoying name.

But watch out: everyone’s favorite gang of bankrupt litigious weasels, the SCO group, in a desperate effort to prove they they have a broader business plan than making up claims about owning open source software, already have a mobile-related product called “Me, Inc.“. On the plus side, these guys are so deep into their bankruptcy proceedings that they probably don’t have the mettle to go up against Apple at this point. But neither do they have much to lose for trying… -m

I registered ‘xfv’ on Google App Engine. Too bad there doesn’t appear to be any significant XML libraries supported. I have XPath covered by my pure-python WebPath, but what about Relax NG? Anyone know of anything in pure python? -m

A very short rant on the state of XQuery tutorial materials on the web (not naming any names or linking any links).

I get it. Thank you for your fanatical emphasis on FLWOR constructs, but there is much more to it than that.

A few introductory sources don’t fall in to this trap, though. Mike Kay’s stuff. Priscilla Walmsley’s O’Reilly book for another. I’m pretty much finishing up reading it so I’ll review it here soon. -m

I just found out about a nice little XForms engine called Ubiquity. (Having dinner with Mark Birbeck, TV Raman, and Leigh Klotz certainly helps one find out about such things) :-)

It’s a JavaScript implementation done right. Open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Seems like a nice fit with, oh maybe MarkLogic Server? -m

If you are used to XSLT 1.0 and XForms, you see { $book/bk:title } and think nothing of it. XSLT 1.0 calls the curly-brace construct an Attribute Value Template, which is pretty descriptive of where it’s used. Always in an attribute, always converted into a string, even if you are actually pointing to an element.

In XQuery, though, the curly-brace construct can be used in many different places. Depending on the context, the above code might well insert a bk:title element into your output. The proper thing to do, of course, is { $book/bk:title/text() }. Many XSLT and XForms authors would omit the extra text() selector as superfluous, but in XQuery it matters.

What’s worse, depending on your browser, you might not see any output on the page within a <bk:title> element (or a title element of any namespace). Caveat browser! -m

-m

In my about page, I’ve written my CV in two lines. Why don’t you try it, then link back to here?

I’ve been known to use this as an interview question, and it’s quite a bit harder than it looks. A clever candidate will turn the paper sideways giving themselves more room to write “two lines”, but that’s not the point. This exercise forces one to really think about their qualifications, skills, and experience; one’s “unique selling proposition”.

Writing short, as opposed to rambling on, is notoriously difficult. Someone who can do that with their own CV is off to a good start in my book. -m

P. S. Mark Logic is looking for some high-caliber XML and web folks. Contact me offline if you know anyone looking…

You probably noticed the byline on my recent Yahoo! developer network posting. It, and a few more posts still in the pipe, list me as a “SearchMonkey Team Alumnus”. So yeah, it’s official, I’ve hung up my exclamation point and moved on to something else.

Specifically, Mark Logic, where a group of impressively talented people reside, recently including Norm Walsh. My first day there is tomorrow, so I don’t fully know what I’ll be working on, though it does involve
the core server, and taking it from it current state of awesome raw bare-metal power into something more akin to a application development platform.

Mark Logic strikes me like this: think back 10 years or so to all the hype and introductory articles around this new thing called XML–how it would enable whole new kinds of applications though the miraculous abilities of “markup” and perform realtime structured search over the results. It turns out that all these dreams were missing one critical piece, a way to do all the fancy indexing and repository management needed to make that happen. And the MarkLogic Server, to a very good approximation, IS that piece.

So what do I think of SearchMonkey at this point? No change, really. Good riddance to the ten-blue-links result pages. It’s breaking new ground in search, and Google will have a hard time stomaching an equally radical (and potentially revenue-impacting) change. SearchMonkey is really good news for the lowercase semantic web, including microformats and RDFa. It’s doing all the right things for the right reasons. The project will do fine without me. :-)

I had a good run at Yahoo! and I’m proud to have accomplished all I did there. Onward. -m

Yeah, more than ever before. See my article on Yahoo! developer net. The stuff I talk about here is currently live in the indexer. -m

Reminder: Thursday evening at Yahoo! Sunnyvale headquarters is the launch party for the developer-facing side of SearchMonkey. In case you haven’t been paying attention, SearchMonkey is a new platform that lets developers craft their own awesomized search results. If you’re interested in SEO or general lowercase semantic web tools, you’ll love it. Meet me there. Upcoming link. Party starts at 5:30. -m

Update: The developer tool is live. Rasmus has a nice walkthrough.

If you have webdev skillz, you might be interested in the SearchMonkey launch party on May 15. Good food, good drink, good coding. Space is limited, but I have a few invites to share. Comment here or contact me offline if interested. -m

Tips from Leo Reilly in How to Outnegotiate Anyone (Even a Car Dealer!).

• Be patient. If you insist on having something today, know what you want and be prepared to pay for it.
• Never disclose your deadline.
• Cultivate a positive relationship with the other party.
• Don’t make the other side look stupid (for a prolonged period of time).
• The best negotiators talk only 40% of the time.
• The most intimidating thing you can do to someone trying to intimidate you is to not be intimidated.
• Never be the one to make the first offer.

The most critical aspect of negotiation is the opening offer. Four opening gambits are possible:

1. Lowballing. Offering substantially less to create psychological downward pressure on the price.
2. “Up against the wall.” Forcing the other side to make more concessions than you do.
3. Anchoring. Having both sides make equal concessions.
4. “The Kiss.” Like anchoring, except allowing the other side to take one final (often minor) concession.

If you want to find out what Leo says about how to buy a car, in 5 minutes, below dealer cost, you’ll have to pick up the book though. :-) -m

I haven’t mentioned it yet, but SearchMonkey (now an official name, not just a project name) is in external limited beta. Keep an eye on ysearchblog, lots more technical content is on the way. -m