Headline July 22, 2016/ ''' YAHOOLIGANS? = *YUMMY-IANS!* '''

''' YAHOOLIGANS? = 

*YUMMY-IANS!* '''

AS HISTORY CROSS-ROADS FOR YAHOO -the master original 'surfers' recall how they made the website an Internet sensation and destination:

''Yahoo Mail is still my primary email. My home page is still My Yahoo. I still look at the sports page,'' said Mr. Sikula, who is a stage director and a freelance editor after being laid off in 2010 as part of a big surfer cutback.

'' But I don't know why the company exists. And I think that's what they are trying to figure out, too.''

The Nature Of Being

If she hadn't chosen to study Japanese at Stanford,  Sirinija Srinivasan would never have found herself in charge of building Yahoo's directory into a guide to the Internet for a curious world.

Ms Srinivasan who grew up in Kansas was an undergraduate attending a tech-focused  Stanford program in Kyoto, Japan, when she got to know two fellow students over shared meals: *Jerry Yang and David Filo*  

After graduation, she was working on the Cyc Project, an early effort to create  artificial intelligence, when the pair asked her to help them turn their directory into real company.

Jerry and David knew that I alphabetized my CDs,'' Ms. Srinivasan, 44, said in an interview in her Palo Alto, Calif. ''My sock drawer is quite beautiful.''

When she joined, her business card  Ontological Yahoo. a term reflecting her philosophical approach to the job.

''This is not a perfunctory file-keeping exercise. This the defining the nature of being,'' 

''Categories and classifications are the basis for each for each of our worldviews.''

Faced with the vastness of the web, Yahoo surfers hoped to identify the most complete, relevant or interesting sites on a given subject. To choose which topics to focus on, the surfers relied in part on a daily  log visitor's top queries.

Once in a while, surfers made mistakes. For instance, they initially categorized  Messianic Judaism as a Jewish sect, failing to notice that its adherents, who follow many Jewish traditions, believe that Jesus Christ was the Messiah, a defining trait of Christians. ''We had faxes coming in nonstop from Rabbis,'' Ms Srinivasan said.

Yahoo also offered automated search tools by teaming up with various companies, including AltaVista and Google. Eventually, though, Yahoo realized that it had to develop its own version of the technology.

Human judgment   -what Mr. Yang referred to as  ''the voice of Yahoo'' - remained a core value of the company.

When the  Grateful Dead musician Jerry Garcia died in August 1995, Yahoo searches on him spiked immediately. The surfers put a Garcia link on the home page. ''That was the birth of Yahoo News,'' Ms Srinivasan said. Today. it remains one of the most popular online news portals.

The surfers role as corporate conscience expanded with the company. They worked on a  child-safe version of Yahoo called Yahooligans. They selected the news headlines worthy of homepage display. Over time, Ms Srinivasan and her team even fielded questions like how much cleavage to allow on homepage ads.

Despite the efforts, Yahoo kept loosing ground to Google in search. Microsoft made an unsuccessful hostile bid to buy the weakened company in 2008. Ms Srinivasan left two years later, soon after Mr. Yang stepped down as chief executive. ''In Japan, they have a saying. Leave when the cherry blossoms are full,'' she said.

Ms. Srinivasan now splits her time between Palo Alto and Brooklyn, where she is working on a music startup, Loove. The company is trying to revamp how the music industry works and help audience understand the full story behind what they listen to, much as the  farm-to-table-movement did for food.

She also sits in the board of trustees of her Alma mater, Stanford, a school that has churned out several generations of Silicon Valley moghuls. But unlike many former technology executives, Ms. Srinivasan focuses her attention there on the arts and humanities.

''Tech is sexy. It's employable. Parents love it,'' she said. ''All of that isn't worth a hill of beans unless we know why, to what end. We call it the humanities for a reason.''

Captain Canada

Yahoo, like the early web itself, was largely focused on American content. But it had global ambitions. Seana Meek, an Alberta native and a single mother, was working for  Futurekids, which taught children computer basics, when Yahoo hired her to organize the Canadian sites in the directory.

For Ms. Meek personally, it kicked off a  20 year career odyssey through modern Silicon Valley and some of the tech industry's most significant trends:

*E-commerce, virtual reality, fraud-fighting  -even a mobile haircut app*.

The Honour and Serving of the ''Operational Technology Research'' continues. Thank Ya all for reading and sharing. And see you on the following one.

With respectful dedication to all the Students,Professors and Teachers of the world teaching technology and social networks. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and !E-WOW!  -the Ecosystem 2011:

''' !WOW! -!E-WOW!- Surfers '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless