Jeremy Zawodny is an incoming employee of
CraigslistCraigslist 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.-Description:...
, having left
Yahoo!Yahoo! Inc. is an American public corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, , that provides Internet services worldwide...
's platform engineering group. He has been described as "Yahoo!'s
MySQLMySQL is a relational database management system which has more than 6 million installations. MySQL stands for "My Structured Query Language". The program runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases...
guru".
He maintains a popular weblog focused on Yahoo! initiatives, which is listed in
CNET News.com'sCNET Networks, Inc. was a media company based in San Francisco, California, United States. The company was co-founded in 1993 by Halsey Minor and Shelby Bonnie. It was acquired by CBS Corporation in 2008 and its properties were merged into CBS Interactive...
index of the 100 best technology-related blogs. According to CNET, Zawodny has "helped put MySQL and other open-source technologies to use".
He was considered internally and externally to be Yahoo!'s MySQL resident guru.
Jeremy Zawodny is an incoming employee of
CraigslistCraigslist 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.-Description:...
, having left
Yahoo!Yahoo! Inc. is an American public corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, , that provides Internet services worldwide...
's platform engineering group. He has been described as "Yahoo!'s
MySQLMySQL is a relational database management system which has more than 6 million installations. MySQL stands for "My Structured Query Language". The program runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases...
guru".
He maintains a popular weblog focused on Yahoo! initiatives, which is listed in
CNET News.com'sCNET Networks, Inc. was a media company based in San Francisco, California, United States. The company was co-founded in 1993 by Halsey Minor and Shelby Bonnie. It was acquired by CBS Corporation in 2008 and its properties were merged into CBS Interactive...
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 MySQL resident 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 marketingInfluencer 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 Corporation, , headquartered in Houston, Texas, is a worldwide 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...
Company in
FindlayFindlay is a city in and the county seat of Hancock County, Ohio, United States. Located in northwestern Ohio, the city lies approximately 50 miles south of Toledo. The population was 38,967 at the 2000 census. It is home to the University of Findlay. The city's official nickname is "Flag City,...
,
OhioOhio is a Midwestern state of the United States. The thirty-fourth largest state by area in the U.S., it is the seventh-most populous with nearly 11.5 million residents...
in their Information Technology Services.
Jeremy Zawodny also writes a monthly column for
Linux MagazineLinux Magazine is a European professional journal. It addresses itself to readers who work professionally with the Linux operating system. Linux Magazine is published by Linux New Media AG and was born after the great success of Linux-Magazin. It is published in English and every issue includes a...
and speaks at numerous conferences about MySQL, Yahoo!, and open source
He is also the author of
High Performance MySQL (ISBN 0-596-00306-4) and holds a B.S. in
Computer ScienceComputer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems. It is frequently described as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that create, describe and transform...
from
Bowling Green State UniversityBowling Green State University is a public four-year institution located in Bowling Green, Ohio, USA, about 20 miles south of Toledo, Ohio on I-75. The institution was granted a charter in 1910 by the State of Ohio as part of the Lowry bill, which also established Kent State University...
.
Weblog
Zawodny maintains a prominent blog, which he started in 2002. The blog 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 Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies. Google has also...
PageRankPageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, 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
SEOsSearch engine optimization is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" or un-paid search results as opposed to search engine marketing which deals with paid inclusion...
learning to game the system. This claim is seemingly refuted by 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
SlashdotSlashdot, sometimes abbreviated as /., is a technology-related news website owned by SourceForge, Inc. It features user-submitted and editor-evaluated current affairs news with a "nerdy" slant. Each story on the site has an Internet forum-style comments section attached...
dies", its method of using an editorial staff losing out to increasingly popular community-driven competitors such as
DiggDigg is a social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories. Voting stories up and down is the site's cornerstone function, respectively called digging and burying...
and
redditreddit is a social news website on which users can post links to content on the Internet. Other users may then vote the posted links up or down, causing them to become more or less prominent on the reddit home page.- Overview :...
. In response,
The GuardianThe Guardian is a British daily newspaper owned by the Guardian Media Group. Founded in 1821, it is unique among major British newspapers in being owned by a foundation .The Guardian Weekly, which circulates worldwide, provides a compact digest of four newspapers...
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 messengerInstant messaging is a form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text. The text is conveyed via devices connected over a network such as the Internet.-Overview:...
as a "freaking money pit" and a product "customers don't want".
Zawodny was also an early advocate of
RSSRSS 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.
External links