So, I moved to Palo Alto and finally started at Yahoo last week. (Summary: Fascinating place to work, brilliant people, kooky corporate culture, boatloads of potential.) Things are finally starting to settle down, which means the dry spell on Waxy will be ending very soon.

In the meantime, I’ve been meaning to post this for the last couple weeks… The House of Cosbys, which I wrote about recently, was finally taken offline by Bill Cosby’s lawyers. In its place, the videos have been replaced with this message. The original videos are now very difficult (if impossible) to find online.

I’ve decided to archive them on Waxy for as long as I possibly can. They deserve to be seen, so watch them, mirror them, torrent them, and don’t let them disappear again. March 14, 2006: See below for news!

House of Cosbys: Episode 01 HD from Justin Roiland on Vimeo.

House of Cosbys #1 – High Quality Quicktime

House of Cosbys #2

House of Cosbys #3

House of Cosbys #4

House of Cosbys #5 (warning: offensive content; unofficial, fan-made response to cease-and-desist)

Listen Up, Theo (House of Cosbys music video, not safe for work)

Curiosity Cosby Blooper Reel

If you have any other House of Cosbys-related videos, please e-mail me. Feel free to post links to mirrors in the comments.

November 13: CommonFlix is hosting BitTorrent downloads of each video. Also, thanks to Alex for the music video!

November 16: Thanks again to Alex, I think I have the complete collection online for posterity.

January 22, 2006: Temporarily redirecting to the Google Video mirrors to alleviate some bandwidth limitations.

March 14, 2006: I got cease-and-desisted for mirroring these videos. Please use a mirror below to watch or download them and stay tuned to the main posting for news and updates.

* Google Video

* YouTube

* Download.com

* CommonFlix (BitTorrent, formatted for iPod)

* EOD.com (thanks, Greg!)

* Watching Paint Dry (thanks, Alek!)

* Stroeck.com (thanks, Michael!)

* Nonstuff.com (thanks, Robert!)

* I’m Just Sayin’ (thanks, Krup!)

* 1hug.com (thanks, David!)

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 Recently, the nostalgia has been replaced by admiration as I’ve watched them making smart decisions, acquiring great companies (Flickr, anyone?), and hiring all of my friends.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.