The Beck concert last night rocked. I had one of the most meta-digital-mobile moments ever recorded in the history of the web: I was standing behind Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield as he watched, on his phone, a Flickr stream of photos being uploaded in real time by the fans all around, who were us sending up phonecam pix of the live video feed of the puppet dopplegangers of the live Beck concert. And I was liveblogging this to a friend via SMS.

For taste of the puppetastic Beckage, come correct and check this video. There are zillions of pix around too. The concert itself was fantastic - rocking versions of some of his classics, a powerful performance of “The Golden Age”, acoustic covers of the Flaming Lips and Outkast, medleys of Bowie, Michael Jackson, and others.

The guero silverlake scientologist rides again -go see him if you get the chance.

The turnout and buzz here on the Yahoo! Sunnyvale campus has been as good as I’d hoped. The keynote has been delivered, the inspirational shwag has been distributed, the band is setting up, and the sessions are in full swing - reminding me just how hard it is for a non-developer to leverage an API - and, natch, the posts and photos are pouring in. Check out the hack de hack: a flashy flickr stream of the day’s pix.

An entrepreneur, no matter what his métier, finds inspiration everywhere. There is never enough time to read all of the relevant books or dig into the parallels in other industries – you’re too busy trying to build things and stay above bog-line in the digital information swamp (and better off for it). But every once in a while, I come across something that captures just the right balance of engagement, instruction, and inspiration – and that, even if not profound, offers the right ROI on your time. (One such book, Philip & Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing, was signficantly responsible for my transition from book publishing to the internet.)

Recently a friend recommended Getting Real, from the folks at 37Signals (Backpack, etc.). I read it over my Oregon vacation and find it especially a propos after a couple of very exciting days at DEMO. I will stop wasting words and just tell you to just get it if you are at all inclined.

On Saturday, I had the opportunity to attend the first open house at the Marmol-Radziner Prefab modular modern home factory in downtown LA. I’ve been excited about prefab for a couple of years now (after studying urban architecture and theory in college and getting very interested in cohousing thereafter), so I’ve been passively keeping tabs on this trend lately. After signing up for this tour, I realized Amy’s parents were going to be in town during it; delightfully, they were interested in joining. So we had an outing.

I couldn’t believe how many cars were in the makeshift parking lot for the reservation-only visit – easily 150 – and we met at least one person who had flown in for the tour. The factory itself was fascinating – basically they build tractor-trailer-sized steel frames in a yard out back, set them up on jacks, and wheel them slowly down two huge lanes where they’re prepped, coated, hung with SIP’s (Structural Insulated Panels, which are basically oreo sandwiches made of plywood and Styrofoam that offer plug-and-play rigidity and insulation) and/or windows and doors, and then have all the interior components (electric, ducts) installed. The third lane has areas for metal, wood (e.g., cabinetry), and materials prep. Cool stuff – makes you want to go learn to weld.

On the other hand, we were all shocked at how much custom work each of these modules actually involves. (There are some photos here.) Amy, her mom Julie (who has a sharp designer’s eye), her dad Jim (who’s got good engineering sense), and I spent much of the tour pointing out all the handwork – not just in the cabinets and trim but also in the most basic structural components. Four guys for several days to sand and coat one steel frame. Sheetrock and electrical installed the usual way in the interiors. 80 people working full-time for three and half months on one house – with hand-cut openings, custom welding, nails, and caulking everywhere. This does not fit any but the most literal definitions of pre-fab: Basically they’re building you a custom house, only they’re building it in an urban warehouse for a modest cost savings, and then shipping it at great expense to your site. And at upwards of $300 a square foot installed (assuming you don’t go too far), it’s hard to see the benefits as being worth the constraints, even in the epicenter of one of the frothiest real-estate markets in recent history.

As Jim put it, you hate to be negative about someone taking so much risk to be innovative. And their designs are stunning, especially in the context of an appropriate site, and managed carefully down to the details of the toilet-paper dispenser. (See photos of their prototype Desert House via FabPrefab.) But my line of the day was, “This is what you get when you put an architect in charge of a factory.”

Until it’s trending toward a price per square foot that makes it attractive relative with conventional construction, this won’t be interesting to me in any real way. I’d feel much more celebratory if the good folks at M/R were more focused on constraint-based development and positioning this as a prototype aiming at $150 a s/f by 2010 - and if all the Dwell magazine types stopped heaping praise on them until they did.

I’ll be in San Diego for DEMO for the next few days, watching emerging companies demonstrate their innovations.  Then I’m off to Yahoo! HQ for Open Hack Day, which you should definitely check out if you’re at all inclined.  If you’re going to be at either, please drop me a line!

There were, quite literally, about 1000 people in line; it was the only art show I’ve ever been searched for sharpies and graffiti implements on the way into; and the elephant in the room was. . . well, gone by the time I got in, but the Banksy Barely Legal show basically rocked.

There are a lot of artists out there who try to be funny and “street”, and plenty of angry youngs artists trying to do remix, but Banksy just nails the right balance of intellectual wit without pretension, authentic ire at authoritative regimes, actual artistic capabilities, and pop-culture sensibility. Plus he’s freakin’ hilarious. Hope you were able to catch it, but if not, there are tons of photos on Flickr.

photos by Notrivers and Beopenguin via CC

When you check into a hotel after a day of business travel and in advance of another one, all you want is for everything to just work. Here are all the things that didn’t just work in the 9 hours I spent at the Fairmont San Jose last night, between days of meetings at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale HQ:

• It’s not a good start to walk up to your room and find dirty room-service dishes outside the door - you spend the first 5 minutes uneasily checking out the room to make sure the previous tenant is really gone.
• The room is fine, but the absence of an alarm clock is a little unusual. . . so you set up a wakeup call, and (as I always do) a backup 15 minutes later.
• Is it normal for the housekeeper to charge into the room with barely a perfunctory knock before 7 a.m. - and before the first wake-up call? Your very first thought is, “Oh shit, they blew the wakeup call and I’ve overslept my meeting” - i.e., you wake up to an unpleasant adrenaline rush - and only then do you get annoyed that there’s a housekeeper in your room at 6:55 a.m.
• Then they blow the wakeup call, giving you three calls instead of two, at different intervals than requested.
• Just for fun, you step on the digital scale. . . and get “Err - Batt” on the display.
• As you get ready, naturally you call down to the valet stand to have them bring the car up. There is no answer, and it rolls to an operator, who only listens to the first three words you say before dumping you back into the same ringing line without so much as a “please hold”. You get some random lady’s voicemail, who doesn’t even have a proper outgoing message. Getting impatient, you try again three more times but get no pulse. So you plan to go down in person when you leave.
• Though you heard them noisily clearing the room-service dishes during the night, the newspaper sleeves are still there - so no today’s paper for you, only yesterday’s New York Times
• The guy at checkout is appropriately apologetic when you politely point out a few of the issues. He writes down your concerns but has no explanations for you, just a little foreshadowing on the next problem to come. . . .
• The valet line - where at least 15 people are waiting for their cars, some for as long as 45 minutes, while many of the cars are clearly visible right from the valet stand. People are complaining loudly and asking for the general manager, who is nowhere to be seen. Everyone in line is late for something, and the scene behind the desk is less organized than third-world post offices I have visited.
• Miraculously, your car arrives almost immediately after you get to the desk - presumably because you got in so late the night before - but in front of the now-livid line of other people.

Really, what’s so hard about this? The whole point of doing hospitality (or anything else) at scale and for demanding customers is to build systems so things don’t go wrong, and have back-up systems in place for when things inevitably do. It’s not like they didn’t know exactly how many people were parked in the garage the night before, and they could easily have a pleasant voicemail message automatically apologizing for the delay in the garage if someone called in sick and they couldn’t find a stand-in. And seriously, if you’re not going to check the batteries, don’t put electronic devices into rooms.  Who really needs a scale anyway?

Sure, Fairmont can slack a little given they’re in a booming convention town and are probably approaching a 100% occupancy rate, but it will eventually catch up with them. My team at Yahoo! sent over a dozen people to this hotel for a week during SES last month - and I can assure you we will be shopping around next time.

This week, Joel Spolsky (whose book Joel on Software is required reading for web entrepreneurs and product managers) launched a job board. It got me thinking about the fact that TechCrunch has a job board, paidContent has a long-running and successful pay-per-post job blog, and, among other sites I consume regularly, Fred Wilson has, instead, an Indeed.com badge configured to list start-up jobs. So my question is, Why do we need niche job blogs when we have highly searchable, filterable, supposedly better, horizontal sites like monster.com, and aggregation/meta-search models with all the web2.0 technology you could wish for like Indeed.com?

Answer: because they work better! Among the 3 niche sites mentioned above, I can find, without hitting a single “next page” button or filter, listings for Director of Philanthropic Relations at Squidoo (wow!), a Product Manager at Google, design guru at Internet Brands (CarsDirect, etc.), and various other VP- and Director-level positions at startups and large internet players all over.

On the other hand, the most interesting job on Fred Wilson’s badge - which is basically a persistent search of jobs with the word “start-up” in them and do not have the word “engineering” in them, a reasonable-looking proxy for non-technical start-up jobs - promises a position as a product manager at a Sequoia funded company, but links to a dead craigslist homepage. Clicking through the badge to see the full list of jobs, one finds 24,250 results for mortgage loan originators and “start-up opportunities” requiring skills like:

candidates will have 3 years or more of progressive experience in operations and customer service, a working knowledge of DOT safety requirements and superior communication and organization skills. Candidates must also meet the following requirements: Have a CDL Class B w/Tanker and Haz-mat endorsements; ability to install propane tanks; excellent customer service, interpersonal and communication skills; and must be qualified for Propane Tank Installations and Bulk Deliveries.

Sorry guys, the only propane installation I’ll be doing any time soon will be for the BBQ I’m having this weekend! And filtering 24,250 jobs has all the hallmarks of a low effort-to-reward exercise when the sliders are inefficient, non-normalized job titles.

On the employer side of the equation, Joel has a good analysis of why it’s hard to find the best people on job sites (nutshell: because they’re rarely seeking jobs). So you need to find them in the places they congregate for other reasons. . . such as reading useful blogs like Joel’s.

This is interesting because it has everything to do with the social dynamics that are behind social media - there’s a delicate balance they must maintain between selectivity (filtering noise) and value (receiving signal), and that balance differs across social groups and functions. LinkedIn is of value to me in business if most of the people in my network are similarly thoughtful to me about who they accept as contacts (it creates a reputational system), but it is not useful to me in finding stuff to buy from trusted parties like ebay is (because there is no marketplace associated with it). Myspace is of low value in maintaining business relationships, but great for bands with a following. paidContent shows that job boards can scale effectively to large audiences, but only because there’s a pricing engine (and possibly an editorial one) maintaining a filter on the thousands of junk listings that would turn up there if they were free. On the other hand, craigslist is a much better place to find apartments for rent, because you need all the signal you can get there and can efficiently filter lots of noise via parameters like price, bedrooms, and location.

Blogs continue to turn out to be great proxies for niche social networks - if a place that I find valuable for information becomes a meat market for jobs, that’s great for me as both a potential employer and employee. On the other hand, the more spaces like this that emerge, the more I have to spread my job listings and consumption across multiple sites. So how do we aggregate this more efficiently?

Hello friends: how about a feed network for job blog sites? How about a Hype Machine for job listings? How about a utility from technorati or Newsgator or MyBlogLog that can identify sites I’m reading or getting readership from or have audiences like me and then surface me feeds of certain kinds of links (podcasts, job listings, product links, Flickr pointers) from my OPML file or community?

What else?

This is cool! I just geotagged the Flickr photo accompanying the previous post. Among other good things this provides to the world, it is sure to delight Bigfoot enthusiasts everywhere!