Two years ago, I launched Upcoming.org and announced it to the world. Today, along with my partners Gordon Luk and Leonard Lin, I’m unbelievably proud to announce that Upcoming.org is now a member of the Yahoo! family.

I’ve always had a warm and fuzzy feeling about Yahoo. It’s been my browser homepage since forever, and I still have akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/ stuck in muscle memory. Recently, the nostalgia has been replaced by admiration as I’ve watched them making smart decisions, acquiring great companies (Flickr, anyone?), and hiring all of my friends. The end result is that they’re doing some of the most interesting work online, and I found myself linking to them more and more over the last year.

So when Stewart asked if we’d be interested in coming to Yahoo, we were surprised and flattered. It’s immensely satisfying for a company as interesting and high-profile as Yahoo to validate the hard work we’ve done, and to see the future potential for growth.

After all, Upcoming was always a side project, fueled by passion and caffeine in the spare hours when we weren’t at our respective day jobs. When I think about how much we were able to pull off with so little, and what we’ll now be able to do with the staggering resources Yahoo has to offer… Well, it blows my mind a little. Sunnyvale, here we come!

I’ve posted more details on Upcoming.org, and both Gordon and Leonard have written about it on their own sites. For Yahoo’s take on it, Paul Levine from the Yahoo! Local team wrote about the news on the company blog.

Oh, and a profound thanks to everyone who’s supported the site since the beginning. I kiss you!

October 10, 2005: Thanks so much to Leonard for answering questions and covering e-mails while I was at Web 2.0 last week. We’re all getting ready for the big move later this month, but I’ll be around by e-mail and IM if you want to say hi.

The last chance to submit proposals for the Emerging Technology 2006 conference is this Monday, September 19. The overall theme of the conference is the progressive trend toward making technology useful, helping us rediscover what’s meaningful instead of overwhelming us with information. But it’s just a theme, so don’t let it hold you back if you have a great idea.

This year, I’m honored to be sitting on the program committee with such geek luminaries as Clay Shirky, Tom Coates, Cory Doctorow, and Rael Dornfest. (I’m not sure how that happened, but I suspect a bug in Rael’s committee nomination code.)

Anyway, get those proposals in! I promise to selfishly try to design a conference that I’d want to go to.

We added badges over at Upcoming.org! This is something I’ve wanted to do since the site launched, but didn’t have the time or resources to pull off until now. Read more about the change, along with Gordon’s formal introduction to the community.

Neat, huh?

My favorite new artist is Feist, the genre-defying Canadian singer-songwriter formerly with Broken Social Scene. Her album was released in France in mid-2004 but only found a U.S. release in April, and I’m in love with it. Like I usually do when I get obsessed with a musician, I went looking for any related media I could find about her.

It’s a bit disheartening that the only place I could find high-quality music videos of her were in Usenet, and even those were ripped from MTV2 UK’s “120 Minutes” show. After doing a little research, the state of music videos online is just generally poor. Music videos are promotional material to spur album sales, right? Then why do we need to suffer through postage-stamp video and buffering Realvideo streams to watch a well-produced advertisement? I’m not asking for DVD-quality here; just something on par with Apple’s movie trailers.

One reason could be the bandwidth concerns, but that’s getting cheaper every day (and there’s always BitTorrent). Or maybe the labels are worried they’d be giving something away they could potentially profit off of? I don’t know, but that seems desperate. There are exceptions, like the Decemberists distributing a music video over BitTorrent, but they’re very rare.

Anyway, I’m hosting high-res MPEG videos for “Mushaboom” and “One Evening” below. If there are record labels or legal websites distributing video downloads of this quality, let me know.

Download: Mushaboom (MPEG, 27MB)

Download: One Evening (MPEG, 25 MB)

Oh, and if you’re a fan, don’t miss the video of her live KCRW performance.

I know it’s strange to break a two-month silence for something like this, but I don’t care. This is my blog, dammit, and I’ll rant about six-month-old memes if I want.

For the last few weeks at work, we’ve been obsessed with House of Cosbys. So obsessed that other departments are starting to worry about us; it’s consuming our lives. I first linked to it back in March, long before the recent legal threats from Cosby himself, so I don’t know why it’s taken this long to infiltrate our brains. (I suspect one too many late nights on a recent deadline is ultimately to blame.)

But it has, so I want to share some Cosbyana for other potential Cosby-heads out there. If you haven’t seen the first episode, watch the high-res House of Cosbys pilot before proceeding.

To kick off Cosby Fest 2005, I’m hosting the entire Bill Cosby Talks To Kids About Drugs album from 1971. Don’t miss “Dope Pusher,” a song about hard drugs sung/screamed by Cosby and a choir of kids, backed by some serious funk. Download it now.

I’m Web-Surfing Cosby, You See

Outtakes from the Curiosity Cosby recording sessions

Amazing Cosby Team Triosby fan art one and two, from Episode 3

House of Cosbys exit theme song MP3s

Listen Up Theo, a not-safe-for-work House of Cosbys music video

Cosby Core tattoo

Cosby stencils and graffiti (and more) on Flickr

Cosby Show Season 1 was just released on DVD

Little Rascals/Bill Cosby urban legend on Snopes

The Bill Cosby Fun Game, Cosby goes on a murderous rampage

The Pac Man and Cosby Show, a comic apparently made by a blind man using MS Paint

Dear God, this has to stop now.