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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

It’s one of the highlights of my job that I get to meet with a lot of startups, developers, VC’s, and industry bloggers (species that are often cross-bred). Many become my conference and cocktail-party familiars, twitter and facebook friends, idea collaborators, daily RSS reads, and even sometimes real friends. Many, of course, do not, but in the course of an average week I connect with dozens of people, a bunch of whom I can dialog usefully with vis-a-vis my job, and many of whom I end up connecting to other parts of Yahoo! Often enough, I connect people to other 3rd-party companies.

Today’s environment is transparent, open, and conversational - meaning almost anyone can get to anyone and communicate with them publicly, semi-publicly, or privately. This is great - when I need to find someone, it tends to be quite easy to reach them directly or with one degree of separation via my network. When someone needs to reach me, I am equally easy to find (and in fact have a public “contact me” email link that’s one click away from a search on my name). As conversations become substantive, companies are increasingly transparent about their objectives, plans, competition, and even finances, all of which materially increase effectiveness.

So much for the good stuff. The challenges are: a) that I’m still under the constraints of a public company, and can not in any way be “conversational” about material inside information; and b) that open doors like mine are magnets for everything from unrelated BU inquiries (from people who should know better) to “the Yahoo! suggestion box”, and the signal-to-noise ratio of inbound items can create a lot of distractions and confusion if I don’t filter aggressively.

We could deal with the first issue the way public companies often do (wait until release and then sic our sales “BD” people on you), but I and many of my colleagues try to operate in the more open mode when we can. In these meetings, we share what we can publicly, are open about our constraints, and sometimes put companies under NDA to discuss more details. Often, however, we do not. People - especially, it seems, web2 types who believe all information should be free — tend to be careless, forgetful, sloppy, and sometimes overtly insubordinate to confidentiality restrictions on information shared under NDA. (Recently, for example, I revealed product plans under NDA, and the recipient not only told a Wired reporter, but introduced me for on-the-record comment!)

In general, I’d rather have a non-confidential conversation anyway. So, we often skip the NDA, we tell you what we can, and we trust that you can deal with the fact there’s information we can’t tell you. If we’re operating in an area close to a given company that we’re talking to, I’ll take pains to make everyone aware of the potential for conflict.

Very often, these kinds of meetings are at our request. Equally often, they’re at the company’s request (or their investors’). Any company that’s been around more than a few cycles will likely have knocked on many doors, been pinged by multiple groups, maybe engaged with corp dev, had their investors tee up various VP’s, etc., trying to push a deal or with a very thinly veiled hope we will acquire them. Very occasionally, these kinds of meetings do lead to immediate deals or m&a conversations, but usually not, and we often can’t say too much more than “interesting, thanks” or “please circle back to us next quarter” or “we’ll engage with you when we’re closer to release”.

Sometimes, we’d really like to say more - about the product fit, about where we see the market going, about ideas that for Yahoo! that cascade from your demo. Or there might be a natural deal that’s two quarters away. Other times, we might find your idea fantastic in the abstract, but don’t see an obvious way plug it into our roadmaps meaningfully given technology / strategy / personnel and any number of other issues. But we often find ourselves in the situation where can’t tell you why or share ideas that reveal our specific plans.

Sometimes people find this frustrating (as Jeff apparently does). Especially once you’ve made the rounds a few times, or as the organization changes over time, this is understandable. But as much as I love newsgator (loyal user, comment on their blog, almost went to work there, etc.), Yahoo! still doesn’t have a product that’s ready-made for an RSS aggregating enterprise media widget and attention data distribution platform. That I can disclose. Yet. (Sorry!)

Particularly when you are solving market problems in a new way, you might not get the response you are looking for on the first (or even nth) visit. Your six-month attempt to sell Yahoo! your solution might not effectively land you on a roadmap that was planned 18 months out. But I would appreciate it if you did not slam me and my colleagues for not saying enough at a meeting, or for not offering a deal to your satisfaction on the spot. That’s how the world works; deal with it or don’t come.

(I would also appreciate it if you would not expect a mid-level manager on my team to provide a substantive comment on the MSFT situation. Does he look like a PR spokesperson or Yahoo! board member? It’s a PUBLIC COMPANY; what do you think we’re going to say in a BD meeting?)

Additionally, it would be nice if the beneficiaries of all these open doors at Yahoo! did not abuse them to end-around deals they’ve been unable to do directly. Or trash us for not being coordinated enough when we hand these end-arounds right back to the BU owners. Or comment negatively about Yahoo’s lack of collaborative culture when we refuse to give out the cell-phone numbers of our colleagues.

Every once in a while, when I’m burned by one of these frustrated or abusive would-be partners, I regret being as available as I am. I guess today’s version of one of my father’s favorite maxims is, “no good deed goes unpublished”. But I know I’ll be greeted with another fantastic or inventive startup tomorrow, and I’m reminded of why I love what I do.

The more interesting alternative to irritable demands and cranky blog posts, of course, is to appreciate the entrepreneurial nature of Yahoo and the people who work there. To know that we are as keen as you to create new and innovative products.  To work with us, using the BD opportunity to build relationships and surface potential solutions. To demonstrate disruptive solutions that help us challenge orthodox ways of thinking about Yahoo! products. To enable us to drive orthogonal intersections across internal channels, even if it means multiple meetings and engagement points. To light a collective fire under any signs of “not invented here” roadmaps.

I’ve always thought that’s what strategic partnerships were all about — it’s certainly what interests me. Believe me, there are lots of people at Yahoo! who are hungry for and receptive to this approach.

So, if the chance to pitch an emerging media solution to a 600-newspaper consortium while they’re in build mode, or to engage the world’s most popular start page in a conversation about your widgets in the run-up to YOS is the kind of opportunity that appeals to you, then we’d love to hear from you.

Again.