Dear Friends and Family -

Thanksgiving is traditionally a time of counting our blessings, but I’m prompted this year to take stock of them even more than usual.

Maybe it’s the prospect of change on the horizon for our country, which is long overdue if you ask me. Maybe it’s yesterday’s news of terrorism in Mumbai, reminding me that, for all our education, prosperity, and quote-unquote civilization, we still have a long way to go to coexist peacefully with our neighbors in the world. Or maybe the thought that several of the people Amy and I were delivering meals to the homeless with so joyfully this morning just had their basic civil rights stripped away by a popular vote promoted by religious zealots and supported by garden-variety folks all over the state.

Without a doubt, the manic-depressive state of the financial markets — some say the inevitable outcome of 2 decades of “Boys Gone Wild” on Wall Street with their parents’ Ferraris — proves to me yet again that government is so broken it can’t live up to its most basic mission of protecting its citizens effectively. And while the latest crisis is far from over, and I can actually fill my gas tank again without hitting the $50 mark, the astonishing levels to which we’ve mortgaged the future to keep ourselves afloat may very well impact the quality of lives available not only to us, but to our children’s children. It may be ironic, but for me it’s a sharp reminder that we have it pretty damned good, actually — if we compare ourselves, say, to the billion or so people in the world who lack access to clean water and basic sanitation.

And so onward we go. Because, just as history, proverbially, is what gets written down, life is what you live. There are births to celebrate, weddings to cheer, graduations to attend, and lots of other rites of passage and grateful moments that are bigger in our lives than all this world gloom and doom times ten. This year, I got engaged, had loved ones survive strokes and even plane crashes, helped (in some small way) a political cause I care about succeed, helped create important technology, and still had the excess good fortune and leisure to spend lots of time traveling and listening to great music and generally living well, all over the country. In this bounty, I find much to be grateful for.

The floodwaters of global warming may be real on the horizon, but they have not yet reached our door. Happily, I still have a job to return to Monday morning (at least for the time being). So you can be sure I will spend the rest of this weekend celebrating with good friends, eating real turkey and pumpkin pie, drinking good wine. . . and raising a glass with a thought for you, and to your being able to do the same.

Happy Thanksgiving and much love,
Greg

I am inspired by Obama and his victory. It makes me feel like there is hope for this country yet.

I am inspired by his literacy, his integrity, and his quality management style. So many politicians talk about running the country like a company, but I actually believe him and think it’s more the staffing that needs to be viewed that way. (See Fred Wilson’s great blog post about what we can hope for here.) There is no substitute for talent — especially when compared to cronyism.

I am electrified by his transparency. The first twitter president. An open transition. Change.gov. This is a far cry from the guy who has been suing to keep his meetings private.

What this means most to me, as I reflect on it, is that Barack Obama is raising the bar on what it means to be president. Significantly.

He has the opportunity to inspire us to act like the citizens of the world we are capable of being. And to be proud of living up to our potential.

Here’s to hoping we can never go back. I made two more kiva loans today, both to photograhers in Nigeria named Elizabeth Olaleye and Fumilayo Fatolu, to celebrate our good fortune — and hope.

There might — or might not — be a way to fax in votes for folks who can’t vote at the polls tuesday and don’t have an absentee ballot (or didn’t mail it in time). Here’s my full story, with my questions at the end:

After requesting absentee ballots twice and not receiving them, I was preparing to go to LA’s only early voting location today (12400 Imperial Highway, Norwalk, CA 90650). Internet reports said lines were stretching around the building all week and would be worse today, so I called trying to request an “express ballot” (a procedure I discovered thanks to a commenter on California Faultline) to possibly bypass the line.

Suprisingly, I got through on a saturday after only a few minutes on hold. Encouraging - but not for long. After asking my name and address, the woman argumentatively told me that a ballot had been mailed to me and returned undeliverable. She did not have a record of my second request. We went back and forth a few times, her challenging me about the validity of the mailing address (it’s perfectly valid), etc., before I finally said, “Look, either way I don’t have a ballot and would like to exercise my right to vote, but I’ll be out of state tuesday. Can I do that?”

She then told me the lines were around the block, and I should use the federal postcard oath to fax in my vote. She said it was designed for overseas folks who didn’t get paper ballots in time but could be used for out of state. She told me the link for it was on the lavote.net site, but I couldn’t find it while we were talking, and she didn’t know where the link was (”people are finding it,” she said), so I asked if I could just come in.

“Well you’d better bring snacks and lunch, because the line is around the building,” she said, discouragingly. I asked about the Express Ballot. “Oh yeah, you did request that,” she said, not particularly encouragingly. I decided to dig into the fax option a bit more anyway and signed off.

I eventually found the overseas voter instructions and the oath/signature form (pdf). While the woman had clearly stated these were being used to record out of state votes, the form itself requires you to sign an oath that you are military or a US citizen residing overseas. I did check the fax number she gave me, as I thought it might be jammed with people trying to fax military ballots and whatnot, but I got right through to a fax machine.

I decided to try my luck with an express ballot. A friend and I have appointments for 2pm, and I’ll update this blog on how it turns out. For anyone else who wants to try this, the number is 1-800-815-2666 extension 2. You must ask for an Express Ballot.

But my question, for anyone who might know, is whether that overseas form would be a valid way to vote. If it were to be valid, would you have to sign it as is (ie an oath stating you reside or are temporarily overseas even if you are just out of state)? Would you modify the statement to be truthful, or would that invalidate your vote? Would it be counted if you’d already requested an absentee ballot at a U.S. address (ie, strongly suggesting that you are not in fact overseas)?

I may need to fall back on this method, and I suspect lots of voters who are not able to get to Norwalk and/or get through the lines there on time would want to know, so any information folks have will be helpful.

Thanks - and please vote!!

UPDATE:  In and out in 20mins via Express Ballot. They laughed when we told them we had a reservation for 2pm, and it looked like lots of folks were waiting longer, but they looked us up by last name, our ballots were there, and we were immediately able to vote. Good thing, because the walk-up lines were heinous.  Photos of that here and more to come on flickr.  Still no answer on the military thing, though.

I really enjoyed participating in the inaugural defrag conference last year. It was immediately apparent to many of us there that we were at the start of an interesting community, and I’m really looking forward to this year’s edition.

Join us if you can, or drop me a line if you’re going to be there and want to connect.

We’ve pushed even more documentation and tools live at developer.yahoo.com, including documentation of our new YOS social apis as well as YQL (Yahoo! Query Language).  After working on this behind the firewall for so long, it’s great to finally release it and see coverage like this article in Mashable coming in.

I’m off for Sun Valley tomorrow, on the eve of VCIR Fall - the Venture Capital in the Rockies Fall conference.

I love participating in events revolving around startups and funding, and this one promises to be exceptional, given an active group of VC’s and entrepreneurs from around the region, and a region I think is really enjoying a startup culture growth spurt from Boulder to Missoula. The format is one day of startup company presentations interspersed with talks from Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, HP, and others, bookended by socializing and networking evenings.

OK, I’m sure the setting won’t be bad either, though I have a bit of a dilemma in that my cold weather and flyfishing gear won’t fit in the same weekend bag. Oh well, I guess I’ll be cold!

If you’re in the area - or even just interested - come check it out.

I’m thrilled to see this coming to fruition: the OpenSocial Foundation is now live.  Details - including ways to get involved - can be found here.

In attending this SDForum SearchSIG event tuesday night, I was keen to learn what Wikia, FriendFeed, Mahalo, and Facebook were doing about social search. As it turns out - and as I pointed out during the Q&A to lively discussion (which I think was recorded but doesn’t seem to be posted yet) - the answer is nothing much.

My premise in making that comment was that social search be defined as a search deriving its results from “a statistically meaningful sample of people meaningfully related to me”. I gave as an example Zagat’s guide to NYC restaurants, which, back in the day, was exactly that - a usefully large group of, mostly, actual foodies.

Mahalo, imho, is simply an extension of the editorial approach into semi-pro range. Instead of one food editor of the NYTimes, you could have, I don’t know, 10?, editors of the NYC pages. Wikia, simply the cult of the amateur doing the same thing. In both cases, these are curated results pages. If the curators are competent, passionate, and/or otherwise motivated, this is great and a step forward from algorithmic results. But making better results pages ain’t social search.

Neither is telling me what my friends think. Sure twitter lazyweb is a great way to get a recommendation for an indian restaurant in Palo Alto, but it’s a lousy way to get one for a dentist in missoula. Especially if you don’t live there and have a bunch of friends there.

Even del.icio.us and other “social search 1.0″ tools are still, more or less, dumb boxes of votes. Those votes are by smart people and often people like me (hence why I find delicious popular interesting), but there’s no variability on a given query on the axis of “social”. And, like mahalo and wikia, the results are mostly url’s - i.e. links to other pages where you as often as not have to execute another search or dig through socially undifferentiated data to extract value (a link to a restaurant page on yelp, for example, with a bunch of reviews from people I don’t know or trust).

There are a bunch of tools that let you ask questions of people. LinkedIn does a great job of this, again within a specific community, but they are very clever in the way things can seep out beyond the first degree network without hitting the undifferentiated population of “everyone”. That said, it’s still an expansion of “me”, on the assumption that my business colleagues and their business colleagues are to some degree usefully alike. While somewhat true, this is not nearly as useful as a larger population of people “like me,” who might or might not be related to me socially.

Lijit is doing a similarly interesting and useful job of letting me search the corpus read by my network, and with a little help from MyBlogLog and del.icio.us, my network’s network. Lijit is awesome, and I often use it to search my own stuff.
But what I really would like to see from “social search” is something that can search my network/neighborhood AND search other neighborhoods like mine, where “like mine” is pivotable based on context (friends, business, geo, special need, etc.). Like last.fm for stuff other than music maybe.

(I’m barely commenting on Friendfeed and Facebook because, to date, those are seredipitous discovery tools more than search ones, and ultimately you’re mostly finding people, not useful data derived from groups of people.)

Is anyone doing anything interestingly like this?

This is a project I’ve been helping drive for a while, and I’m happy to see it come to fruition: Yahoo! user address books are now officially portable. (Additional coverage: TechCrunch, Techmeme, and a great interview with Joseph Smarr at Plaxo.)

Developers can build against it on a self-serve basis (no BD deal needed for basic use), enabling users to import their address books or pieces of data from it. We also have a sync interface for approved partners. Access is via bbAuth, enhancing user security (and will likely be via oAuth at some point in the future).

The key news here is Yahoo! is making this data freely available, on the assumption that it’s the users’ data - not Yahoo!’s. As you look at this alongside the openness of some of our other social API’s (e.g. MyBlogLog), there’s a consistent theme here in that Yahoo! is not trying to “own” this data, but is rather following the O’Reilly maxim of creating more value than we collect — and letting that value inure to users and the developers building stuff for them.

Watch this space — you’ll be seeing more of that theme.

New West has a newly redesigned homepage.

They continue to do a nice job blurring the boundaries between newsroom journalism and web2.0 formats like blogs and user-generated content. The latest version is more consciously built around aggregation — of their own stories, and of user comments and contributions — blended nicely together and presented seamlessly.

It also includes a very nicely done custom headline roll powered by Newsgator that is very intuitive and never mentions the letters RSS. I’ve embedded Courtney’s full tour below UPDATE: not embedded ’cause it breaks my blog - go see it here.

While admittedly I’m not unbiased, I think New West is doing a great job pushing the medium in ways that leverage but take the geekiness out of the technologies we’re all convinced will transform mainstream media. Plenty of other newspapers and online media outlets could learn a thing or two from them.

Congrats to all my friends at New West! Readers, if you’ve never visited, check them out.