The week started off with Paul Tarjan's Search Monkey Brain Jam. We had over 70 students attend and some excellent questions, and wound up with SearchMonkey in four out of our six hacks.
On Tuesday we hosted the CS Faculty and Student appreciation barbecue, which was a big success and a great way for Yahoo! to kick off the year at Stanford. Over 160 students and faculty came out to enjoy the beautiful weather, food and conversation. We received tons of thank-yous and many of them stayed after to hear more about our new open technology push from Rasmus Lerdorf and Dav Glass.
We had two days to cool down, and then on Friday we crammed in a room for the final hack hours before the judging. In keeping with our tradition, we hacked along with the students. Dav and Paul took the YUI documentation system and added RDFa markup to the HTML output. We didn't know of any other vocabularies for marking up code structure, so we made out own. Soon, any documentation generated by YUIDoc will be part of the semantic web.
Two-time defending champion Michael Fischer showed off a pair of hacks, his "what if they mated" hack from OpenHack 2008, and a new hack that builds a social graph from your email correspondence, and then sends you text messages when "important people" send you an email.
The SearchMonkey prize went to Lucas Garron, who amazed us not only by solving Rubik's Cube in 19 seconds but also with his SearchMonkey infobar for the World Cubing Association. Now Lucas can easily keep an eye on his competitors and their records in various competitions.
Third place went to Bob Lantz, for Conference-O-Matic, a new way to look at the Association for Computing Machinery's conference database. Bob's hack scrapes the content from many different ACM pages and then uses YUI to present an easily-navigable file browser pane.
Second place went to Stefan Krawczyk, for his VTA Bus View SearchMonkey app. Stefan usually uses a search engine to find his bus routes, and by embedding the data right in the page he can now save a click. We've asked him to extend his plugin to other bay area transit options, so soon we might have our transit options all in Yahoo! Search.
First place went to Diana Gentry, for her cross-site Book Info Grabber. Diana's SearchMonkey app provided helpful links to other sources of information based on the book's ISBN number. Users can look up the availability in their local library, or comparison shop across multiple sellers. Book Info Grabber currently works with Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but Diana plans to extend it to any page that has an ISBN.
Onwards to CMU!