We got down in the weeds on these and did a lot of research, ultimately settled on offering high-level guidance, and finished the patterns in the course of writing the social patterns book, where we filed tagging under the group of patterns known as Collecting, under Social Objects.

Tagging and other forms of collecting are also an example of social design patterns that mimic game dynamics. Collecting objects is a core “easy fun” activity in many games, and similarly these extremely lightweight social interactions around gathering or tagging objects enable a form of self-interested behavior that creates aggregate value and potentially richer forms of engagement.

Our three new tagging patterns are Tag an Object, Find with Tags, and the somewhat controversial Tag Cloud, which some people view as an “anti-pattern.” Drop by, check them out, and let us know if we can make them any better.

Christian Crumlish
Curator, Design Pattern Library

The first India Hadoop Summit was held on Feb 28th, 2010 at DAYANANDA SAGAR EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS, Bangalore, in partnership with CloudCamp event. It was organized by Yahoo! Research and Development India in association with CloudCamp committee.

This was the first Hadoop event, of this scale, in India, and brought many Hadoop enthusiasts together. Speakers and audiences from Hadoop development community, Hadoop user-groups, Industry evangelists, university researchers and college students came together to learn more about using Hadoop in various environments.

The morning began with a keynote session “Hadoop and its impact in Computing” (slides) by Hemanth Yamijala from Yahoo!. Hari Vasudev, VP Platform Technology Group at Yahoo!, spoke on Yahoo!’s commitment to Hadoop and Open-Source (slides).

In the afternoon, a Hadoop panel followed several fascinating sessions. Some of the Hadoop sessions:

1. “Data Management on Grid” by Srikanth Sundarrajan, Yahoo! (slides)
2. “Machine Learning using Hadoop – Real Case Study” by Krishna Prasad Chitrapura, Yahoo! (slides)
3. “Multiple Sequence Alignment using Hadoop” by Dr. G. Sudha Sadhasivam, PSG Tech Coimbatore (slides)
4. “Benchmarking and Optimizing Hadoop” by Mukesh Gangadhar, Intel (slides)
5. “Challenges and Uniqueness of QE and RE processes in Hadoop” by Jayant Mahajan, Yahoo! (slides)
6. “Tuning Hadoop to deliver performance to your application” by Srigurunath Chakravarthi, Yahoo! (slides)

The ending panel was moderated by Basant Verma, Yahoo! The participants were Chidambaran V. Kollengode from Yahoo!, Dr. T.S. Mohan from Infosys, Jothi Padmanabhan from Yahoo!, and Dr. G. Sudha Sadhasivam from PSG Tech Coimbatore. They discussed a range of topics pertaining to Hadoop’s adoption, usage in research, and the future of Hadoop & Cloud Computing.

Yahoo! India also hosted a booth during the event, including a Hadoop cross-word puzzle and some popular Hadoop swag. Stay tuned to hear more about our continued commitment to Hadoop and to Open Source Technologies.

Preeti Priyadarshini
Program Manager, CCDI Grid Computing

However, there is one little problem. Like competing rich Internet application (RIA) technologies that present images, animations, and videos, all of that non-text-based content is extremely hard for search engines to parse and index. As a result, many website owners who are initially thrilled at the cutting edge presentation shown on their websites are later confounded when their beautiful sites suddenly fail to show up in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The problem is that the very technology used with the intention of blowing away their customers, when not thoughtfully implemented, can literally blow away their page rank as a result. In those cases, the site developer/webmaster failed to account for search engine optimization (SEO) when they implemented Silverlight.

Silverlight applications are packaged up for deployment into files with the extension .xap. These files represent the instructions to start the application and, in most cases, contain the content of the application. Unfortunately, search engines can’t easily read Silverlight XAP files. Yes, the technical parsing and content extraction capabilities used in the world of search are improving every day. But as of today, you’d be wise to cater to what the search engines already do very well: read text. This means you need to add text-based information -metadata and more – to the Silverlight objects you employ on your website.

You might think it’s not worth the effort to do such work. If you don’t care about being found in search, you might have a point! But consider this: if some of your intended clients use operating systems or web browsers that are unsupported by Silverlight, what will they see when they go to your Silverlight-enabled site? Will the site still be usable? Will its presentation still make sense? Or will the page be blank? Do you even know?

If you care about these audiences, then the same backward compatibility work you’d do to help them will also serve you in your SEO efforts. As an overall investment, if you want to use advanced content technologies to improve the user experience for your customers, you might well want to invest in making your site more accessible to all potential users, including search engine crawlers (aka bots).

Basic SEO

Right off the bat, there are several things you can do to help the search engine bot learn more about your Silverlight-infused pages. Because bots cannot “read” Silverlight content the way we can, the wise addition of metadata is all the more important in these pages. This information helps the bots interpret what is the theme of the page, how the content relates to other pages and sites, and provides keywords to help the search engine understand the page well enough to rank it accurately among other, relevant sites for search users.

Much of this advice is actually basic SEO, but as Bing so commonly sees RIA-laden pages that possess none of this information, it bears repeating here. All of your pages, not just those using Silverlight, should have these elements in the source code:

• Descriptive <title> tag. Every page should include a descriptive and unique <title> tag. That information is part of what a bot reads to assess what sort of content is contained on the page. Using a title such as <title>Silverlight application</title> is about as useless as no <title> tag at all. Get specific!
• Descriptive name=”description” <meta> tag. Another important page element that bots use to determine the contents of a page is the text within the “description” <meta> tag. This information is often used to help create the website description snippet used on a SERP. As before, don’t go generic here – be specific and unique. There is often so little text-based information on a Silverlight page that every little bit of unique content will be that much more meaningful to the search engine indexer.
• Descriptive <h1> tags. The first level heading is second only to the <title> tag for being the place to define the thematic contents of a page. As such, stick to only one iteration per page, but make it meaningful and unique.
• Discoverable navigation. No man is an island, but a web page with no discernible navigation links to other pages might be. And any page built without any discoverable navigation to other pages must not be very important – at least, that’s the way bots will see it. Be sure every page on your site is linked to at least one other page, and link out to other pages from every page so the bot doesn’t get stuck in a blind alley and abandon crawling your site any further.
• Descriptive alt text. When you add an <img> tag to your page, be sure to provide that additional meta content. Bots can’t read the contents of that image, even if it is merely an image of text, so the alt text you add is critical for helping the bot better understand what it cannot see.
• Meaningful application name. Just as there is some SEO value to creating human-friendly URLs, where the directory and file names spell out logical words rather than globally unique identifier (GUID)-based gibberish, there is value to naming your Silverlight application in a manner that helps identify its purpose or role in the page. An object in the page code identifying “SilverlightApp1″ is meaningless to everyone but the originating developer (and even then, it’s questionable!).

Every one of these elements is an opportunity to develop keywords for your pages. Be sure to use keyword-rich text in every opportunity. But as always, do so wisely. Keep it readable and oriented for human readers, not stuffed for bots. Keyword stuffing will only get your site in trouble.

Graceful degradation

OK, so the basic SEO stuff has been knocked out, but what more can you do for a Silverlight page? As it turns out, we’ve only just begun to optimize.

The key to success in ensuring that down-level users will not be abandoned when you use an advanced technology like Silverlight is to implement a graceful degradation strategy. That means if a client, for whatever reason, cannot access the advanced primary technology offered (in this case, Silverlight), they still have a means to get something out of the page by means of lesser, secondary technology, be it metadata, substitute text on the page, a static image, or whatever else you can provide, content-wise, to assist those users.

To provide that graceful degradation experience to your users, modify your Silverlight pages to include one or more of the following solutions.

1. Present alternate, static page content

Instead of using the <embed> tag, use the <object> tag to instantiate your Silverlight content in your page. The <object> tag allows the page to provide secondary, down-level content to be presented in case the initial, primary content (such as a Silverlight application) cannot be presented. By using the <object> tag, you can include text descriptions and other relevant content following the instantiation of the application in the code. Write these text descriptions toward the non-Silverlight user, describing the Silverlight application’s role on the page, its function, or any other pertinent information that would help down-level users understand what would have been shown if they were able to access Silverlight. Be sure to use your page’s targeted keywords as you describe the Silverlight content.

Below is an example of how you can include contextual, alternative information within your page’s Silverlight <object> tag code:

As you can see, the alternative content included the important <h1> tag and some informative content identifying the role of the Silverlight application. And by providing a link to installing Silverlight, you might enable another user to step up and see your page in its primary view.

2. Use multiple <div> sections

Another strategy for creating a graceful degradation of Silverlight includes using multiple <div> sections on the page: one for the actual Silverlight content and another to be shown on computers that do not have Silverlight installed. Similar to the previous example, this technique sample demonstrates the presentation of static page content:

Note that the alternative <div> is created by default as hidden content. Contrary to the generic advice given in the recent page-level web spam article, The pernicious perfidy of page-level web spam, the use of hidden content in this case is recognized by the search engine as contextually related to the graceful degradation strategy for Silverlight. As such, its use in this case will not raise any red flags to the search engine concerning potential web spam. As usual for these types of things, interpreting user intent is key to search engine bots identifying whether or not an ambiguous page element might be malicious.

3. Expose alternate, dynamic content

What if you are using Silverlight for more than just a single webpage application? What if you have a site-wide, Silverlight application used in an e-commerce scenario? In that case, you’ll want to expose your inventory catalog of deep link content to search rather than have it left invisible in Silverlight. For this, you’ll need to take a different approach. The alternate content here must describe any and all end point(s) that you want to make available to the search engine bot.

Instead of doing a deep dive here on this technique (this article is already getting long!), I’ll instead refer you to a few useful resources of information on how to expose these end points to the non-Silverlight user and the bot. Both include good code examples and a clear explanation of how the technique is employed:

• SEO for Ajax and Silverlight Applications
• Sine of the times: Search Engine Optimization for Silverlight Applications Part 2

4. Use the createObject function in JavaScript

This is a more developer-oriented SEO strategy that you can employ with Silverlight. This technique uses JavaScript to automatically generate the markup code needed to create the <object> tag and its required parameters.

Again, as no one wants to read a white paper posing as a blog column, I will simply point you to helpful resources for more information:

• Search Engine Optimization for Silverlight applications
• MSDN Code Gallery: Silverlight.js

Test the new down-level experiences

Once you’ve implemented your Silverlight graceful degradation strategy, test it in non-Silverlight-enabled environments. Popular choices among SEOs include text-based, web browser environments such as Lynx browser or SEO-browser. You can also use operating systems currently incompatible with Silverlight, such as Windows 98, Linux, FreeBSD, or SolarisOS, or unsupported web browsers, such as Opera. For details on Silverlight compatibility, see the list of Compatible Operating Systems and Browsers.

Planning graceful degradation of Silverlight for SEO is identical to planning for those clients that are not Silverlight-enabled. Once your pages present useful, alternative content to non-Silverlight clients using the suggestions above, you can rest assured that search engine bots will also be able to see the results of your effort. And until bots can read RIA-based multimedia content like humans can, that is how you do SEO with Silverlight.

For additional information on performing SEO on Silverlight-enabled webpages, see the following:

• Images and Flash and script, oh my! (SEM 101)
• Optimizing your very large site for Search – Part 3
• Silverlight SEO
• Synergist: Simple Silverlight SEO with ASP.Net and XSLT
• Synergist: Other Silverlight SEO Techniques
• Silverlight SEO (Search Engine Optimisation / Search Engine Optimization)
• Sine of the times: Search Engine Optimization for Silverlight Applications
• Bing search: seo silverlight

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our SEM forum. I’ll be back soon!

– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center

But thanks for turning up here

The sheer avalanche of SEO information can be overwhelming, for beginners and experts alike. Who do you know who to listen to? What information do you need to know, and what information is filler?

Why should you even listen to SEOBook?

1. Most Information Published On SEO Is Filler

You can learn 80% of what you need to know about SEO pretty quickly. You don’t need the additional 20% in order to achieve, unless you’re a masochist – otherwise known as an SEO professional

Most of the information you’ll come across on the topic of SEO is written by, and for, a professional/enthusiast crowd. There is a massive echo chamber of opinion, constantly replenished, produced using publishing tools based on the notion of communicating something, often.

It can result in a lot of noise, and not much in the way of signal, especially when you’re learning. If you’re starting out, and want to focus on learning SEO, it’s a good idea to tune the industry chatter out. It’s more likely to confuse than help in the early stages.

2. Understand The Business Of Search

Search engines aren’t your friend. At best, they tolerate SEO, but only when it aligns with company goals.

The search engines have a business to run, and their goals aren’t the same as yours. Whilst search engine reps often come across as helpful and friendly, because they typically are helpful and friendly people, keep in mind that what they are saying serves their company first and foremost. Any advice they give you is, quite rightly, designed to further company goals.

That’s their job.

Chances are, your goals and the search engines goals will be aligned in many areas, but take their advice with a grain of salt. They don’t care if your site succeeds or not, as there are plenty of other sites to index.

3. Define Goals

Before you undertake SEO, define your website goals. Do you want to make more money? Get more attention? Get more leads?

The purpose of SEO is to get your site seen in the search engines. Your aim is to attract the visitors that help you achieve your goals. A high ranking for a certain keyword won’t necessarily help you achieve your goals unless your site matches visitor intent.

Think about the web from a visitors point of view. What do they want to find? What content will they engage with? What will they spend their money on?

There’s little point ranking well if the content you provide doesn’t make you money and/or gain audience. It’s getting increasingly difficult to rank pages that aren’t closely aligned with the searchers intent. So, the more you understand your audience, and the more content that matches their intent, the more you’ll get out of SEO.

4. Get A Credible, Well Organized Course

Like SEOBook’s course for example

This isn’t a sales pitch. There are a number of great courses out there. Choose one or two that suit your budget and objectives, and dive in. Chances are, you will need to shell out some money, but the cost of a decent, well structured course is nothing compared to the wasted effort spent heading in the wrong direction.

In a nutshell, SEO is about about publishing content people want to engage with, and linking. You need to create content that matches visitor intent, you need to be crawlable, and you need to have inbound links. Good SEO courses will have this message at their core.

Did I mention links enough?

5. Connect With People

It’s natural to want the secret sauce – those secret dark techniques that result in number one rankings.

Whilst this was characteristic of SEO years ago, it’s less true now. These days, SEO is more a holistic, strategic process aimed at connecting with people, as opposed to a dark, technical art aimed at tricking machines.

Focus on making connections with people. That means understanding what people want. You can do this by undertaking basic market research, using the search engines themselves!

6. Test

Don’t listen to me. Well, maybe just a bit. Don’t listen to the repeaters in forums.

Test and measure for yourself. It’s one of the best SEO courses you can do. It’s ongoing, and it’s free.

Start with a simple, focused well constructed site. What is a well constructed site in terms of SEO?

With every change you make, every new SEO strategy you adopt, test the results. Did the change help you achieve your website goals? Did you get more traffic? Better quality traffic? If your rankings improved, did this result in more/better traffic? It can be difficult to isolate variables at the best of times, but there is no chance of doing so if you try too many techniques all at once.

Make changes one step at a time. Test and measure repeat. Become at expert at measuring SEO against your goals.

Build up your own private knowledge base of SEO in your niche. Your niche may require different strategies to other niches, which is why well-meaning advice in forums and on blogs can hinder you. You’ll also become a better judge of who is offering you good advice, and who is just repeating something they heard.

The YQL team pose with their YQL shirts on.

Most importantly we’ve improved the process which we use to process your contributions to Github. This makes it even easier for us to accept your contribution and roll it into the console and our environment file with key from the NYT, Amee and others (it’s store://datatables.org/alltableswithkeys in case you were wondering).

Thanks to all the tables you’ve been contributing we now have a massive 700+ tables available to use today with 600+ community contributed tables. We aren’t satisfied with that though, we still want more tables. So if you contribute a new table that we add to the Github repository we’ll send you one of these awesome YQL t-shirts. You’ll be the envy of all your (geek) friends.

We have tables for getting your status from Twitter, for making a blog post on Wordpress, for finding articles about President Obama on the NYT without signing up for a key. The list is huge, and the possibilities endless.

Don’t forget we have docs for building tables yourself, and a guide to issuing a pull request to add your changes to the main repository.

select * from internet; just got even better.

Tom Hughes-Croucher (@sh1mmer)
select * from yahoo.geeks where job = "technology evangelist";

• The emote API tries to tell you the mood of a certain text.
• MacOSXHints has a cool command line tip how to burn a playable DVD from a VIDEO_TS folder.
• The cappuccino team found a way to cause a stack overflow in Internet Explorer with a recursive loop.
• Border-radius.com has a great little tool to create rounded corners with CSS for all supported browsers.
• Jess3 did a beautiful animation of the state of the internet data.
• Understanding CSS3 and CSS2 border properties explains exactly that.
• Sunlight Labs have released Clearmaps – a mapping framework for data visualization.
• How we built gottalovebacon.com using YQL and YUI tells the story of that.

You can propose links to us on Twitter (@YDN) or try bookmarking them on delicious with the tag “forydntt“.

A record number of students stayed up ALL NIGHT with an amazing amount of energy and buzz. There were an impressive number of innovative hacks, including a craigslist rideshare finder, a multi-source news aggregator, a zen lense into Yahoo! Answers and twitter, and a structured view into craigslist housing posts.

And the 2010 UW HackU winners are:

For media junkies, you can see all the presentation videos, as well as Eric’s, Reid’s and Paul’s pictures.

Special thanks to Professor Marty Stepp, Kim Todd and the whole ACM crew for organizing everything and being fantastic hosts! And of course huge props to all of the hackers who battled exhaustion and coded, debugged, juggled, laughed, ate, sang and drank their way through the night. We had a blast!

Looking forward to storming Georgia Tech next week!

About the CCK API

Many developers who use Yahoo! Web services and APIs distribute applications that allow their users to access their own Yahoo! user data. This requires you as the developer (the third party) to have your own OAuth Consumer Key and Secret, while ensuring each of your users (the fourth party) also have their own distinct OAuth credentials. The Consumer Key ensures that the right data, for the right user, is going to the right developer.

The Create Consumer Key (CCK) API allows developers to easily provide Yahoo!-issued Consumer Keys, Consumer Secrets, and Application IDs to their users.

The CCK API offers the following benefits to developers:

Streamlines the process of using your application: Your users do not separately request an OAuth Consumer Key from the Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN).

One call: Simply create one form providing the necessary information for a Consumer Key, such as access scopes and redirect URLs.

One-click authorization: Your users do not need to know about access scopes and you have the option to automatically send Yahoo! Information back to your application with no copy-and-pasting necessary for your users.

Use Cases

Developers building applications they plan to distribute (and which require access to private Yahoo! user data) should consider integrating with the CCK API. Examples of distributed applications might include a JavaScript sharing widget that interacts with Yahoo! Contacts or a Wordpress plugin that blasts new blog posts into Yahoo! Updates, etc.

Getting Started

The Create Consumer Key API has been documented on the YDN site and includes sample code to get you up and running quickly.

If you need help, or would like to suggest ways of improving this service, please post a message in the YDN OAuth forums or message us @YDN on Twitter.

Example Integrations

JanRain’s RPX is a hosted software solution that makes it easy to add Yahoo! based sign-in on your website using OpenID, adds social publishing from your website to Yahoo! Updates and Status APIs, and provides access to a Yahoo! Users Contacts. With the Create Consumer Key API, JanRain users now have a simple, streamlined flow for configuring their RPX integration with Yahoo!. JanRain posted about their integration here.

We’ve also created a WordPress plugin that connects your WordPress blog with your Yahoo! account. When you publish a new blog post it will share an update that’s visible to your Yahoo! connections.

Daniel Raffel
Senior Product Manager
Yahoo! Open Strategy

On Sunday, Jon attended the 4th annual BarCamp Miami. There was a mix of about 200 developers as well as business and marketing folk and about 32 presentations throughout the day. Jon delivered a one-hour YQL workshop to a crowd of 40 developers. Overall, this was one of the best BarCamp’s YDN has participated in. Many thanks to Alex De Carvalho for organizing the event.

On Monday we attended the Future of Web Apps beach party at the beautiful Nikki Beach on Ocean Drive. This was an opportunity for sponsors (like us) to setup table-top exhibits, mingle with attendees, and give a 20-minute talk to about 250 attendees. The weather was not great so our beach party turned into an indoor picnic. You can check out Jon’s YQL overview slides here.

Photo credit:FOWA Miami 2010 by Bruno Miranda

On Tuesday, FOWA sessions were held in the historic Colony Theater on Lincoln Road. There was a great mix of speakers and sessions. I really enjoyed Alex Hunter’s talk on the future of brands and how important it is to be emotionally connected to your brand. Aaron Patzer, Mint.com’s CEO, gave an interesting talk on Mint’s history and how he brought it from idea to being acquired for $170M. If you couldn’t make it to FOWA, slides and videos will be posted on the conference site in the next few weeks.

You can have a look at Jon’s YQL workshop slides now:

Stacy Milman, Events Manager, YDN
Jon LeBlanc, Technology Evangelist, YDN

Jim's Mac laptop was running Centos. He used Xen and Red Hat's Virtual Machine Manager to host a couple of virtual machines representing the web, application, and database tiers of a SugarCRM installation. Each of the guest operating systems was running a copy of the new SIOS CloudStation product. Each copy of CloudStation was configured (using a web-based GUI) to replicate the state of the virtual machine to an Amazon EC2 instance running in a user-selected Region.

Once everything was up and running, Jim showed me how he could selectively kill the local virtual machines while keeping the application running. The demo was designed to feature a very short RPO (Recovery Point Objective) so that changes made locally just seconds before the database was killed were available from the cloud-based virtual mirror. Jim walked me through a number of different failure and recovery scenarios.

It was quite impressive and makes a great demo of the cloud-based DR (Disaster Recovery) and HA (High Availability) that I've been telling my audiences about for the last couple of years. Once configured, CloudStation can fail over from local processing to the cloud, from one cloud region to another, or even from one cloud provider to another. It can also be used as a migration tool, or what is sometimes calls P2V (Physical to Virtual) or P2C (Physical to Cloud).

Read more in the Solution Brief (PDF) or sign up for the March 24th webinar.

– Jeff;