Yahoo local's yahoos...

So, at Where 2.0 (with AnnaLee, Jason, Sean, and Jon to name a few), the vendor booths are pretty damn cool... Google Earth is freakin' awesome and MSN Virtual Earth seems like it will be cool (although the demos only seem to do Seattle right now).

One of the funniest parts of the day was the guy at the Yahoo Local booth apologizing for their schwag... they have neat little dashboard-mountable compasses for your vehicle. The guy said, "I'm sorry that the arrow is pointing away from North..."

Of course, the arrow is supposed to point away from North. The whole premise with these types of compasses is that you have to be able to read the compass from behind it. If it worked like a normal compass, you'd have to be on the hood of your car to read what direction it's pointing. No, on these compasses, the dial is inverted so that whatever you read on the back side of the compass is the reading in which the compass is pointed.

In truth, I didn't realize this until later... but it's especially funny that Yahoo Local is supposed to be somewhat of a geo-savvy service. They've got the cool schwag down pat... now they only need to make sure their reps. don't bungle the small things up.

UPDATE [2005-06-30 17:00:00]: Man, Google has changed the format of the urls in search results so that they're now redirected from google.com... yes, people, Google is profiling us.

Anyway, I wanted to mention that I met some great people from Yahoo local... they're not all yahoos.