bobpage.net

The new Hertz web site is miles and miles better than the one it replaces. More functionality, easier to find your way around, and it even works in non-IE browsers now.
Not all the bugs are worked out, however:

You know how you try to do some research on the Web, and when you type in a term on your favorite search engine, you get a ton of links related to buying stuff? Bleh.
Totally randomly, I stumbled across Yahoo! Mindset, a demo from Yahoo Research Labs. It uses machine learning applied to […]

Is it just me or does this seem crazy? Perhaps all the auto-resize magic happens in the IE plugin, which is how you can dump 300 vacation photos into your mail all at once. But how about some Firefox love?
Yeah yeah, it’s beta.
Yahoo Photomail

David W. Boles apparently prefers Yahoo! Sponsored Search.
I wonder how many people have done a comparison?

I think that Yahoo is definitely gaining ground or maybe has already surpassed Google. Consider this example: Google lists 1 other website on the entire web that links to me. Yahoo lists 422. There’s a link in the Yahoo results that points to a comment I made on another blog just a couple of days […]

comScore Media Metrix released a bunch of Web-related numbers today, see
Online Consumers Catch Spring Fever In April.
The results are looking very mature, and show that the Internet and Web are becoming mainstream in people’s lives. What I mean by that is that the big gainers seem to be around seasonal sites, e.g. Mother’s […]

Forrester released the results of a survey in an report called What’s On Web Analytics Users’ Minds? The report mirrors a lot of the issues we see here at Yahoo! (instrumentation concerns, multiple sources of “truth”, no silver bullet for counting users) but there’s one sentence that jumped out at me - this was regarding […]

Check out the John Battelle posting comparing the Yahoo! Search and Google visions and missions.
I particularly liked the Y! Search “FUSE” (for Find, Use, Share, and Expand) - it nicely sums up the attitude at the search team, but also infuses (ha!) a lot of the thinking at Y!.

I’m at the point where a quick scan of my spam folder tells me if I want to read anything in it. I may even go days at a time without reading anything, and then just dump the whole folder. I’ve had a few false positives — email that wasn’t spam, but looked […]

Happy Anniversary to you both.

Remix. Remix. Remix. Web APIs are cool.
Yahoo! News Tag Soup

Great advice from David Schatsky on governing your web site . This passage struck me:

Some guidelines are about navigation, some are about product information, some are about promotions. Each of those are different competencies. Delegate responsibility for each of those areas to different folks.

Why not also look at specific metrics for each? Designers think […]

If you have a blog, you may already know about FeedBurner, a “feed enhancement service.” I don’t serve my feeds from FeedBurner, but lots of people do.
They’ve always provided some free statistics, and recently enhanced the free stats with ad summary performance and circulation trend charting. But they now have a premium service called […]

This could be the thing that gets people over the hump of subscribing to music.
For a long time I thought it was silly to be “renting” music — if you like a song and want to hear it for years, it would be cheaper to buy it, rather than renting it every month. Kinda […]

If you’re a Windows user and don’t mind getting raw web log juice under your fingernails, check out Gary Cooper’s Log Parser Basics, which has a good introduction to the free SQL-like Microsoft command-line utility for unearthing gems from your log files.