Jeremy Zawodny
Encyclopedia
Craigslist
Craigslist is a centralized network of online communities featuring free online classified advertisements, with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, services, community, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums....
, having left Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
's platform engineering group. He has been described as "Yahoo!'s MySQL
MySQL
MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
guru".
He maintains a popular weblog focused on Yahoo! initiatives, which is listed in CNET News.com's
CNET
CNET is a tech media website that publishes news articles, blogs, and podcasts on technology and consumer electronics. Originally founded in 1994 by Halsey Minor and Shelby Bonnie, it was the flagship brand of CNET Networks and became a brand of CBS Interactive through CNET Networks' acquisition...
index of the 100 best technology-related blogs. According to CNET, Zawodny has "helped put MySQL and other open-source technologies to use".
Work at Yahoo!
He was considered internally and externally to be Yahoo!'s resident MySQL guru. Upon joining the company in 1999, he replaced the existing data-management system for the Yahoo! Finance news feed with MySQL.He has also worked as an evangelist on the "influencer marketing
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing, is a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals rather than the target market as a whole...
" team in Yahoo! Search and helped to launch the Yahoo! Search blog. He was part of Yahoo! Search’s Technology Development team.
On June 12, 2008, Jeremy announced on his blog that he would be leaving Yahoo!.
Outside Yahoo!
Prior to joining Yahoo!, Zawodny worked for three years at the Marathon OilMarathon Oil
Marathon Oil Corporation is a United States-based oil and natural gas exploration and production company. Principal exploration activities are in the United States, Norway, Equatorial Guinea, Angola and Canada. Principal development activities are in the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway,...
Company in Findlay
Findlay, Ohio
As of the census of 2000, there were 38,967 people, 15,905 households, and 10,004 families residing in the city. The population density was 2,266.3 people per square mile . There were 17,152 housing units at an average density of 997.6 per square mile...
, Ohio
Ohio
Ohio is a Midwestern state in the United States. The 34th largest state by area in the U.S.,it is the 7th‑most populous with over 11.5 million residents, containing several major American cities and seven metropolitan areas with populations of 500,000 or more.The state's capital is Columbus...
in their Information Technology Services.
Jeremy Zawodny also writes a monthly column for Linux Magazine
Linux Magazine
Linux Magazine is a European professional journal. It addresses itself to readers who work professionally with operating systems based around the Linux kernel. Linux Magazine is published by Linux New Media AG and was born after the great success of Linux-Magazin...
and speaks at numerous conferences about MySQL, Yahoo!, and open source
He is also the co-author of High Performance MySQL (ISBN 0-596-00306-4) and holds a B.S. in Computer Science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
from Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green State University, often referred to as Bowling Green or BGSU, is a public, coeducational research university located in Bowling Green, Ohio, United States. The institution was granted a charter in 1910 by the State of Ohio as part of the Lowry Bill, which also established Kent State...
.
Weblog
Zawodny maintains a blog, which he started in 2002. It focuses on Yahoo! initiatives and has been praised as a "bridge blog", one that has helped build relationships for Yahoo! and attract potential employees to the company.Several of Zawodny's more controversial articles have attracted particular attention. On May 24, 2003, he declared that Google's
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
PageRank
PageRank
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page and used by the Google Internet search engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set...
algorithm is no longer viable, due to bloggers and SEOs
Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid search results...
learning to game the system. This claim is seemingly at odds with Google's continued use of PageRank, and Zawodny's article "inspired many interesting rebuttals".
Zawodny predicted on January 9, 2006 that "2006 will be the year in which once great Slashdot
Slashdot
Slashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...
dies", its method of using an editorial staff losing out to increasingly popular community-driven competitors such as Digg
Digg
Digg is a social news website. Prior to Digg v4, its cornerstone function consisted of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems...
and reddit
Reddit
reddit is a social news website where the registered users submit content, in the form of either a link or a text "self" post. Other users then vote the submission "up" or "down," which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site's pages and front page.Reddit was originally...
. In response, The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
noted that Slashdot was apparently not losing traffic, suggesting that while a new breed of users were attracted to the younger sites, Slashdot readers were remaining loyal.
Although Zawodny is known for his enthusiasm for Yahoo!, his posts critical of the company have often been noted by the media. Such posts include his condemnation of Yahoo! software installations that alter user preferences as "insulting and disrepectful",
an accusation that Yahoo! Finance suffered from a "lack of leadership" and "serious lack of vision",
and a labeling of Yahoo!'s enterprise instant messenger
Instant messaging
Instant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...
as a "freaking money pit" and a product "customers don't want".
Zawodny was also an early advocate of RSS
RSS (file format)
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format...
feeds at Yahoo! and predicted in 2003 that the technology would someday be ubiquitous.