One thing I’ve learned over the years is to recognize a great opportunity when it comes along – and to that end, I’m pleased to share some good news.

Starting this week, I’m in a new Yahoo! role, as part of the business team supporting platform and incubation teams like MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Developer Network, Pipes, Brickhouse, and Advanced Products. These are some of the most innovative thought leadership teams at Yahoo!, and I’m excited to be joining them.

I’ll be doing a combination of market strategy, business plan development, and partnership development - a pretty cool gig I’ve had the chance to shape collaboratively with my new team and peers over the past weeks, and one that I’m very happy to finally share.

Over the last year and a half, as part of the Yahoo! Publisher Network, I’ve had the good fortune to work with (and in some cases, welcome to the fold) many of the folks on these teams, as we’ve sought to develop Yahoo! capabilities for publishers and innovate through acquisition. So I’m jumping from one innovative team to another - a very natural next step for me, as I’ll now participate more directly in the success of numerous Yahoo! platforms, in addition to getting involved in a formal incubation environment.

As I write this, I’m in San Francisco – you’ll be seeing a lot of posts from the road! And to my YPN friends, I’m moved to quote the father of American popular existentialism, Charles Schulz:

I hate good-byes. I know what I need. I need more hellos.

So farewell (but not goodbye) to my old friends, and hello to my new ones - though I don’t think any of you have yet been able to score well on this quiz from my uncle!

Salim Ismail has joined Yahoo! as head of Brickhouse, the nascent in-house incubator. Fantastico - after seeing all the enthusiasm from the Pipes launch (and hearing a lot of on-the-ground interest in it at SXSW), I look forward to seeing what comes next in the life of this exciting idea.

Posts:

• Salim Ismail
• TechCrunch
• Bradley Horowitz

I’ll be in Austin from the 9th through the 14th for the interactive portion of SXSW. Just like last year, I can’t stay for the music portion, much as I’d like to.

But if you’ll be there and want to connect, please drop me a comment or email.  There are lots of events on upcoming too - including the Yahoo! party.

It’s been a challenging week for my good friends on the MyBlogLog team and those of us who work with them. I’ve stayed out of the fray externally, but I know that what went down can be chalked up entirely to good intentions, and I hope we can all appreciate the fact that true innovation only happens when some risks are taken.

As a crack mogul-skiing friend of mine once told me while helping me improve my downhill lines, “If you fall any other way than on your face, you’re not doing it right”.

Hear hear, and here’s to you guys — and to everyone in the MyBlogLog community helping us improve the service as we transition this early-stage startup to Yahoo-grade stuff.

Chad has a good wrap of what I hope are the closing arguments of this particular trial.

I’m very excited about this morning’s announcement that Yahoo! has acquired MyBlogLog.

As a beta user of the reader roll and an instant fan of the analytics, I’ve been hooked on MyBlogLog since I started using it and immediately became an internal proponent of this deal, which has been a treat to watch move forward. I’ve also had the pleasure of getting to know the team really well - in fact, Eric Marcoullier and I first got in touch via the “welcome” email he sent, to my personal address, when I signed up. Congratulations Scott, Eric, Todd, John, Steve, and the rest of the MBL team - I’m delighted for you and look forward to working together at Yahoo!

The deal also afforded me a chance to watch some of Yahoo’s thought leaders in action - Chad, Bradley, and Jeremy were the key ones who made this happen, though I was delighted to see how many folks at Yahoo! got it so quickly and made the wheels turn so smoothly. There were other suitors for investment (and a veritable swarm of interest at the Web2.0 conference); even though this is an early-stage company, it’s great that Yahoo! collectively recognized how good a fit this is for our community and publisher services offerings and figured out a plan to preserve this burgeoning community while bringing it into the Yahoo! fold.

I’ve also had a front row seat watching the pros in our corporate development department do their thing. Fascinating - and a very interesting perspective on the value of startups and VC in corporate innovation.

There are a lot of reasons why I think this is cool for users and great for Yahoo! Among other things, it’s a nice little tool for distributed aggregation on the community front. (My more official post on the subject will appear over here shortly.) The MyBlogLog team seems pretty excited about it too; here’s their announcement.

UPDATE: Lots of additional coverage:

• Forbes CES blog
• GigaOM
• TechCrunch
• Yahoo! Developer Network Blog
• And plenty more. . .

Andrew Leonard has a perceptive (and funny) piece on Kiva running on Salon.com, chiefly revolving around his discomfort with the fact that donors have to choose from among the prospective recipients. Since these are based on short, online-personals-esque profiles, you have no choice but to make snap judgments about their suitability for loans, and it’s hard not to wonder whether people are primping their profiles to bring down the $25 tranches.

While these wouldn’t be the first sell-side folks in history to try to pretty up an investment, in fact I shared some of the same discomfort. My own moment of truth involved moving past a profile for the proprietor of a “pub” -a going concern - who needed $500 for “inventory”, which see (more…)

Congratulations, Emily, Diane, and Audrey, who won the Hack Day contest with a wearable that photblogs on the fly and leverages Yahoo’s Flickr and ZoneTag (see the TechCrunch writeup).  Congratulations are deserved by everyone else who participated and brought so much creative enthusiasm to the event - i was especially impressed by the people I met who came from far away at great inconvenience and expense, as well as those who hacked right on through the Beck concert; they were really living and breathing the spirit of the event.
I want to say a huge thank you to the Yahoo! organizers who made this happen, Chad and the YDN team, along with all the volunteer staff.  The impact of this on Yahoo! itself is huge, and it’s the kind of thing that makes me psyched to work here.  Thank you.

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.

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!

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!