If you’re desperate to get out to Miami’s South Beach next week for this year’s Winter Music Conference but stumped for the cash or time, never fear as Yahoo! have come up trumps (sort of).

Last month, Yahoo! Live was launched - the latest “social network” from Yahoo! to make the most of the online video market, allowing users to stream live video internationally using the Flash video camera technology and some hefty streaming servers. Generally speaking, it’s been quite well received. Not only have they opened up the API for developers to mess around with, but there has also been quite a large following in the DJ community with many DJ’s broadcasting live sets on the system too. When I’m online (and have something to actually broadcast), I’ll be available on my channel (which can also be viewed in my labs).

With such a huge event coming up full of DJ’s and producers kicking off the party season in Miami, it seemed like a match made in heaven for Yahoo! Live to head on out to all the parties and broadcast everything live to the globe from Tuesday 25th March to Sunday 30th March 2008. Rather than leave you to find your way around all the available streams though, they have created a dedicated pool of live video streams just for the week at wmc.live.yahoo.com.

Among the frivolities, expect to see big name DJs like:

• Paul Oakenfold
• Moby
• Paul Van Dyk
• Satoshi Tomiie
• Adam Freeland
• Mark Farina
• Roger Sanchez
• Armand Van Helden
• Steve Lawler

… as well as concerts and parties from:

• X-Mix Productions
• Oakenfold Bourne Sessions
• Defected in the House
• CR2 Live and Direct
• Stealth
• Marine Parade
• Ultra Music Festival
• Remix Hotel Beatport pool party
• SAW Recordings

Below are some of the scheduled Yahoo! Live streams from the Winter Music Conference in Miami. To make life even easier for you (and make sure you don’t miss your favourite gig), you can download or subscribe to the schedule in your computer calendar.

(All times are Eastern Pacific Time (GMT-5) which obviously has a knock on effect for all the UK viewers.)

• It all starts with Paul Oakenfold who will be accompanied by members of the Florida Classical Symphony with special guest Cee Lo of Gnarls Barkley on Tuesday evening from 7-9pm.
• SAW Records & Stussy presents SAW WMC 2008 with music from the likes of Satoshi Tomile and Audiofly from Shine Nightclub (Shelbourne Hotel), Miami Beach
  Wednesday night til 10pm to 5am.
• The X-Mix Productions WMC Party at Suite, Miami Beach is sure to be a huge night with Armand Van Helden on the decks
  kicking off Friday night from 10pm to 5am.
• Stealth will be pulling an all-nighter at the Mynt Lounge, Miami Beach on Saturday evening from 10pm to 5am Eastern Pacific Time (GMT-5)

If you’re into your dance music (and knowing the majority of the visitors to this website only come for the podcast, that is quite likely), be sure to check out the WMC Y! Live site over the course of next week to get some exclusive behind-the-scenes footage of new music for 2008. It should be amazing!

Please note: Yahoo! Live is still a beta product so don’t be entirely surprised if the service is temporarily down from time to time. The guys in Sunnyvale have been working their socks off to create this product and are continuously making improvements so be gentle!

Over the weekend, I read Gary Marshall’s article “Status Anxiety” in .net magazine suggesting how most people are liars when updating their online status, a feature usually found in social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter. He claims that most updates on said social networks are either made up or an exaggeration of what is actually happening and, if people were honest, their status would succumb to one of two options:

1. “is dicking around on the Internet“
2. “is drunk as a lord”

How often have you found yourself fitting into one of the above options?

Now, anyone who knows me personally also knows I am a bit of a fanatic with updating my status. Thankfully, it doesn’t take much effort for me to do so. I update my Twitter stream using the IM bot in Adium (which also keeps track of all my friends statuses) and I have “installed” one of the only useful Facebook applications, TwitterSync, which automatically updates my Facebook profile when there is a change on Twitter. Minimum effort for maximum effect!

The reason I say it is for maximum effect is because I find myself, like many “professionals” (those with a profession which they are particularly proud of), make the most of this social feature for promotional purposes. They pick and choose what they put in their status. Rather than enlighten all their friends and contacts with the fact “Dave is feeling better after a nice poo”, they make sure they pick status updates which put them in a good light, suggesting their life is beyond the humdrum persona of mere mortals. Am I abusing the system, indicating the marketing success of MySpace is now moving towards other social networks such as Facebook and Bebo? The introduction of FB’s Fan Pages surely point towards this shift and how society are changing with it.

There is no hard fast decision on this debate but it’s interesting that Gary bought it up. I have thought about this fascination of following friend’s statuses on many occasions, wondering what it is that has the nation constantly logging into their FB homepage to see exactly what their nextdoor neighbour’s parents were eating last night.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you find yourself being selective about your status update or are you quite open, happy to divulge your private happenings? Should your Twitter status really be used as a promotional tool? Why are so many people obsessed with the lives of others? Are we moving our Big Brother obsessions away from the television and towards the Internet instead?

Someone once told me “there’s no harm in a bit of shameless self-promotion“. With that in mind, I’d thought I’d set up a little experiment (although it could also be seen as an ego trip).

Facebook has become a ruthless force on the Internet. When the masses started to get sick with all the fugly MySpace pages, Facebook seemed to crop up out of nowhere offering all those social network users a lot more friendlier interface and a little more privacy (although that could be questioned after recent events with the advertising threat Beacon).

Being slightly obsessed with social networking, I registered an account last year and started to find friends and acquaintances from my travels, university and even school now (who needs Friends Reunited anymore?). I’ve even taken to making friends with some of my favourite music artists which can only lead to bigger and better things.

So anyway - back to The Experiment. I’ve created a group dedicated to One Phat DJ. When I noticed fellow podcaster DJ Cruze had a group dedicated to him, I thought it would be a great opportunity for some healthy competition. Who could get the biggest following? At the moment, he’s way out in front. It doesn’t help matters that he actually speaks in his podcast, consequently getting an opportunity to plug the group. That’s noone’s fault but my own though - a blog post from earlier in the year will clear up why.

What I want you to do is simple - join the group and spread the word. I’m not expecting all readers of this website to be interested in the podcast - you guys are exempt. However, if you are a listener to the One Phat DJ Podcast, regularly or infrequent, join the group and get involved.

I’ve tried to make sure the group isn’t another complete waste of time too. The entire podcast archive is available to listen to directly from within Facebook, there are some images for you to download and use (which I’ll be adding to very soon), the Wall is a great opportunity to leave some comments and thoughts on the podcast and you could even start a discussion (I’ve just created one to get your ideas for the Best Of 2007 mix). If you have any suggestions for the group, go ahead and let me know.

Now it’s just time to sit back and (optimistically) watch those numbers…

My time spent at Yahoo! so far has been much of a quiet affair. This is not to say I have nothing to talk about - there are many stories to tell but, unfortunately, my lips are sealed on the project I have been working on. All I can say is it will be the first international product to be entirely conceived and developed in Europe (rather than being something developed and converted from Sunnyvale or Korea), as well as the first product that doesn’t inherit the synonymous Yahoo! branding. Do not worry - more will be announced when the gates are opened.

The reason for this post is to highlight last week’s antics during the second “internal” Yahoo! F2E Developer Summit. Originally conceived in 2005, the purpose of this event was to bring together all front end engineers (often referred to as “Webdevs”) from around the globe to listen and interact with the typical conference format. Considering how many Web Celebs actually work inside the Yahoo! walls, it’s not hard to find several days worth of brains to give their thoughts on their domains. It’s also a fantastic opportunity to actually get to know other Webdevs, something that is difficult with the growing numbers in London alone.

Topics ranged from Norm!’s Laws (otherwise known as coding standards) to Nicole’s 14 website optimisation rules (which mainly focused on the use of implementing CSS sprites, if only due to time restrictions) to Christian’s tutorial writing suggestions (to name but a few).

It wasn’t an entirely internal affair mind - several outsiders were invited such as the Clear Left boys, Gareth Rushgrove, Natalie Downe and her other half Simon Willison.

Simon was invited to give the event’s keynote talk, originally penned as thoughts into portable social networks, but instead he set the bar high discussing his research into a newly coined term, Comet. In its simplest form, Comet is the next natural step after AJAX whereby communication is swapped around to actually push content rather than regularly pulling (or polling) content from the server. Considering this technology has been available since the hey days of Netscape Navigator 2, it’s quite astonishing to think its only just making appearances in services like Google Mail and Google Spreadsheets but its still early days. I’m sure with plenty of publicity around another catchy buzzword named after a cleaning product, it won’t be long before we see more of this technique. For more information about Comet, Simon’s presentation is available on Slideshare.

The whole event was wrapped up Friday evening with a Pub Quiz, hosted by the lovely Norm! and sponsored by some Czechoslovakian beer. Teaming up with Steve, Ben, Nick and Stuart, we set expectations high as the ambitiously named Epic Fail. With five tough (and strict) rounds of hardcore nerdy questions such as naming five rendering engines, naming lesser-known browsers just from the icons and nailing key Web (and Yahoo!) oriented dates, we did considerably well. Ben managed to get the launch date of Firefox 1.0 to within 4 days, bagging us a pocketful of purple schwag but it went right to the end with a nail-biting tie-breaker where Steve estimated only 4,000 short of Bugzilla’s 380,000 bugs filed (as of Friday morning). Epic Fail walked away with some USB powered goodness while team Google came in last - interesting…

So with much excitement, fun and education, that was that. A great time had by all which I’m sure will be repeated at some point in the not-so-distant future. Kudos has to go to Norm for his efforts.

Tags: yahoof2elondon07, summit, conference, yahoo