I’ll chime in that I think Yahoo pipes is a really neat idea. As every decent UNIXhead knows, pipes let you combine small command-line tools easily by routing the output of one tool into the input of another tool. For example “cat census-names | cut -d’,’ -f2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rg” might take a list of peoples’ names, extract just the last names, sort the list, unique-ify the list and produce a count of how many times each name occurred, then sort by the biggest number

Why isn’t email authenticated? I’ll tell you up front that I know very little about this subject. I can’t tell Sender Policy Framework from DomainKeys (link, link) from SenderID.
But what the heck — it’s 2007! How can this not be solved? If you had told me back in 1997 that email wouldn’t be authenticated yet, I would have slapped you in the face

How do you know if the holiday season was better or worse this year? Ask Visa (registration required):

Data from Visa is considered a reliable gauge of the economy because $17 out of every $100 is spent on its 500 million cards. Like monthly retail sales reports from the Department of Commerce, Visa’s holiday forecast includes spending on gasoline, grocery stores and restaurants.

Now that’s a metric! Sure, I can think of many ways a credit-card-based metric can be biased, but it’s probably a pretty interesting cross-section of economic activity

(A personal, non-work mini-rant about page view metrics.)
I want to come to Yahoo’s defense about something. A recent spate of reports says that Yahoo has been surpassed by various companies in terms of page views. Why is that relatively bogus? Because of Yahoo’s switch to AJAX for its mail

At Pubcon in Vegas, the speakers did a bit of 10-second market research on 1000+ site owners and webmasters. The questions were: “How many of you use IE as your primary browsers? Now, how many of you use Firefox as your primary browsers?” By my count, among the savvy webmasters who go to Pubcon, Firefox users outnumbered IE users 2 to 1 or 3 to 1.
So I was interested to learn (via The Inquirer) that one metrics company recently claimed Firefox use is growing in Europe

This is pretty big news. In a press release entitled “Yahoo! Re-Aligns Organization to More Effectively Focus on Key Customer Segments and Capture Future Growth Opportunities”, we learn that Yahoo will undergo a re-org. The press release opens with:

Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet company, today announced a reorganization of its structure and management to align its operations with its key customer segments — audiences, advertisers and publishers — and more effectively leverage Yahoo!’s significant strengths to capture future opportunities for growth.

Dude, that was all one sentence

(Okay, I did a serious SEO post about PubCon. I’ll do a fun one about the bowling at the MSN party. As it happens, I didn’t hit the Yahoo party, the MSN party, or even Greg Boser’s birthday party this time around. But I heard from several people that they were a lot of fun.)
Google’s mission statement is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful

Earlier this week, I sat down and wrote for about 40 minutes about hacked sites, then promptly lost that post forever because my webhost’s database machine was pokey right then. My fault for running Firefox 1.5 on my laptop instead of 2.0. Wordpress 2.1 will also have autosave built in. My breath is definitely bated for the Wordpress autosave feature