Come join us at Brickhouse as we host Wordpress this Wednesday, July 2nd, at 7pm. We'll have pizza and beer, and there'll also be an appearance by Wordpress' founding developer, Matt Mullenweg. Sign up on Upcoming if you'd like to attend.

A couple of weeks ago we released a new IMVironment which lets you listen to music from popular mp3 blogs while you’re chatting with your friends on Yahoo! Instant Messenger. As you encounter tracks that you like, you can save them as a playlist in the IMV and send your “remix” to your friend over IM so they can check it out.

Music blogs have become increasingly popular over the last year both for consumers and advertisers as “Fortune 500 companies are waking up to the fact that young hipsters are congregating on MP3 blogs”.

The theory goes that, “the people who troll for music on MP3 blogs tend to be tastemakers who wield considerable influence over their peers.” Why are these kids digging on music blogs so much? Well – you’ll have to try for yourself. Check out the IMV to start exploring music blogs for yourself. When you do – you’ll encounter a pretty amazing place where “BlogJs” like Aurgasm’s Paul Irish are working to “scout out music you've never heard and deliver only the finest."

The IMV is the latest chapter of a web music story we’ve been telling all year long. It's an initial foray into making the web music discovery process a truly social experience, something that you do together with a friend.  If you use YIM, you can give it a spin by clicking on the IMVironment drop down next time you’re chatting with someone and selecting the “Honda Fit” IMV. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Don't be frightened, but evil and frustration lurks in your web browser. Yeah, that same seemingly benign and ultra flexible tool that you're using to read these words has a dark side. Something you probably don't think about much, because you're numb to it. It's hidden in plain sight, so hard to see because it's everywhere, filling your day on the web with a nameless angst. Lest you write me off as a nutty zealot, I cease my babble and reveal the little bugger:

Looks innocent, doesn't he? Melodrama aside, it's really a terrible experience using browse boxes to upload 20 pictures. My pictures are usually named IMG_4087.JPG or something equally descriptive, and furthermore they're usually tucked away in one or more places that I'm not used to browsing -- but often I can click over to them pretty fast. It's even worse when they stack these guys 10 deep and expect us to spend more time finding the photos than it takes to upload them!

A proposed solution

About a week ago Yahoo! proposed a solution to this mess. The PhotoDrop application lets you upload pictures to Flickr by dragging and dropping them into your web browser. You can drag any number of pictures at once, and without any delays you get a preview of the pictures you've selected. Furthermore you can rotate, scale, crop, and apply filters to these pictures all right on your desktop without talking to any servers or watching a spinning beachball (or rotating hourglass, if you're so inclined).

This solution is based on a new technology released by Yahoo! called BrowserPlus™. The cool thing about the technology is that it will soon be open for anyone to use, so that regardless of where you spend your time on the net, the folks who build the websites that you use will be able to make your uploads faster, and let you do a whole lot more right there in your browser.

Finally, BrowserPlus is a piece of software that you have to download and install, and a lot of us are weary about installing plug-ins. That's the bad news. The good news is that you only have to install it once. Having done so any number of sites that use it can run without interrupting your browsing. We're focused on making this first time install as painless as possible, and at the same time keeping BrowserPlus lightweight and secure. So check out the prototype and let us know what you think! till the next, lloyd

Almost two and a half years after it was released, the ZoneTag prototype from the group formerly known as Y!RB is still out there. ZoneTag remains some people's favorite application for geotagging photos and uploading to Flickr (owners of Nokia phones, feel free to try). Interestingly, since launch, ZoneTag had been used on numerous cross-country trips - at least one done on motorbike, and one with a truck - yeah, that one was me.

However, there's a new outstanding achievement in the ZoneTagging-coast-to-coast category. Joe Rehana, aka Joe Trek, has been ZoneTagging his way from San Francisco to Maryland on his bicycle inline skates. No "motor" there. We've been following him since the start of the trek as we noticed (thanks, Rahul) his photos in the ZoneTag stream. Now, Joe is still in California (see his picture map), but at this pace, he's likely to make it to Maryland long before the Democratic primaries are over beginning of the fall semester.

Yes, the future of travel photos is almost here. This is just what Scott Adams wishes for, complete with easy annotation of the photo's content based on your location (click on Joe Trek's photo below to see the tags). The nature of consumer capture and sharing of media is changing these very days. One on hand, the Nokia N95 and other high-end cameraphones and location-enabled cameras now merge high-quality imaging (and video), location awareness, text-input capabilities, and, most importantly, network connectivity (did anyway say Eye Fi?) in a device that's in the hands of millions of, you know, regular people. On the other hand, Flickr and other services offer APIs for posting and adding metadata to photos that help disseminate as well as archive all this content. At the end of his trip, or even during, Joe Trek will have the set of photos geotagged, annotated, explained, and archived till the end of time on the Flickr servers. This should be the experience of every vacationer out there. Why wouldn't it?

p.s. Joe, if you're reading, may I suggest using Fire Eagle to have your location automatically updated on your blog?

[updated: Joe is not biking, he's inline skating with his gear in a baby jogger - holy @$%*!]

We're hiring at Brickhouse, our San Francisco office at the corner of 3rd and Bryant, where there are lots of great things happening. If you like working on small startup-like teams to deliver products like Fire Eagle and Yahoo! Live and invent entirely new things, then check out the openings below. If you're interested, email me (chadd at yahoo-inc dot com) and tell me why you're perfect for one of the roles.

Software Engineer, Brickhouse (you will be working on Fire Eagle initially)

Community Manager, Advanced Products / Yahoo! Live

Flash Developer, Yahoo! Live

(Photo from our very own Tom Coates)

This week at Brickhouse, it's all about hosting organizations we love who just happen to have all-caps names. On Wednesday, our friends at NASA are visiting to tell us about their World Wind project, an open source 3D interactive world viewer. Patrick Hogan, Project Manager and Randy Kim, UI, Data and Graphics Lead will be joining us. Sign up on Upcoming. This is part of our continued hosting and support of the Luna Philosophie series from the NASA CoLab team.

On Thursday, we have Stefan Magdalinski from MOO talking about the MOO API and how you can use it to produce and deliver beautiful and delightful cards, stickers, and postcards from MOO. See all the event details on Upcoming.

Both events include the requisite pizza and beer. Stay tuned for more Brickhouse events!

Photo credits: Richard Moross and NASA/Reto Stöckli

Leonard Lin put together an excellent list of the presentations at Web 2.0 Expo, complete with links to slides and video when available. All of the presentations are worth checking out, but I wanted to point out the ones on the list from Yahoo (not all slides are available yet -- we will add to the list as they become available):

A Flickr approach to Making Sense of the World, from Rev Dan Catt of Flickr

Capacity Planning for Web Operations, from John Allspaw of Flickr

Grasping Social Patterns, from Christian Crumlish of Yahoo! Developer Network (from Ignite SF)

Tagging: Opportunities and Challenges of Scale, from Kakul Srivastava of Flickr

Also, be sure to check out CTO Ari Balogh's keynote in which he introduces Y!OS (the Yahoo! Open Strategy) and Neal Sample's deep-dive into Y!OS.

Over the past couple of months, we've been quietly working at Brickhouse and focusing on what matters most: delivering delightful new products. In February and March, the teams at Brickhouse were busy shipping Yahoo! Live (which launched on February 7) and Fire Eagle (launched March 5). Both are thriving in their early days.

Yahoo! Live, our experiment in social broadcasting, has been blowing the doors off, hitting over a million users in its first few weeks. We've featured broadcasters ranging from rock stars (Motley Crue) to well-known DJs (Paul Oakenfold at the Winter Music Conference) to emerging stars like Sheena Melwani. Yahoo! Live can be purely entertaining, but it also touches people's lives in wonderfully unexpected ways. Just as one example, the deaf community quickly discovered Live and created the DeafRead channel, which has become an all-hours gathering spot for signing and chatting (reading this testimonial really warmed my heart). Yahoo! Live has become a truly meaningful "third place" for all types of social interactions. With a full-featured developer API, developers can build their own experiences around the Live platform, too.

Fire Eagle launched as an invite-only developer beta barely six weeks ago and is building momentum as we move towards a general release (request an invite at the Fire Eagle home page). On the day we launched, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb wrote: "Standards based platform plus strong privacy equals the best scenario I can imagine for a location tracking service. We'll see what kinds of innovative applications get built on top of it." Well, the developer community has responded with enthusiasm and new applications are emerging regularly. If you have an invite, you can already leverage Fire Eagle in a growing gallery of applications including Dopplr, Firebot, Dashboard widgets for OS X (dmg file), Loki toolbar for IE/Firefox, a Movable Type plugin, Navizon, Wikinear, and ZoneTag. Aside from the applications listed in our gallery, many other developer partners have integrated with Fire Eagle or will be integrating soon: Plazes, Outside.in (details here), Lightpole, Rummble, plus many more in the pipeline. If you would like to become a Fire Eagle developer, join the developer group.

We're excited about Yahoo! Live and Fire Eagle, and this week's Web 2.0 Expo (taking place just down the street from us at Brickhouse in San Francisco) gives us the perfect opportunity to thank the communities who have helped these projects do so well in their first several weeks, so we're throwing a party in the Brickhouse space as part of the "South Park Crawl." Just RSVP on Upcoming or show us your Web 2.0 Expo pass to get in. The Fire Eagle and Live teams will be on hand and we'll have loads of Fire Eagle invites, a couple of our favorite DJs from Yahoo! Live, and plenty of beer. Be sure to use Fireball "Web 2.0 Expo edition" (a Fire Eagle / Twitter / Upcoming app that just launched last night!) to find out where your friends are during the show.

Thank you for using Fire Eagle and Yahoo! Live, and see you at the party!