Chris Sherman is up the panel moderating, he stumbles on the words "Social Search" together. DaveN is on my left drinking coffee. The Google Sitemaps team is having a lunch event after this session, I am personally not going, even-though it should be pretty cool. Tim Mayer snapped a pic of DaveN and I, so I snapped one back (will post soon). The room is pretty full.
Tim Mayer is up first. He gives a brief overview that he gave this morning. Same slides, so I may skip his intro to the beef of the session. See here for this coverage, sorry for not covering the same thing again. Cool Lamps...He then hands it over to...
Yumio Saneyoshi from Yahoo! Answers. Quantifying Human Knowledge: 7B people in the world, lets say each person know 5,000 subjects and can write 10 pages on each subject, so you get 350 Trillion pieces of knowledge. There are 40B web documents, so we only captured a fraction of that knowledge with Web search. Yahoo! Answers tries to capture this. This enables people to easily resolve everyday questions by sharing their knowledge, experience and opinions with their community. We archive and index this info into search so future visitors an quickly tap our rich knowledge repository. Yahoo! Answers complements web search, it is not a substitute. He shows the Yahoo! Shortcuts integration of Yahoo! Answers in Yahoo! Search (wow that ! key is getting a lot of use this sessions!!!!) They also show how Yahoo! Answers itself is actually indexed in Yahoo! Web search. He shows how Yahoo! isnt biasing their own content in the organic results, Google also ranks it very well. Participating in the culture of sharing: What inspires a single person to answer over 2,000 questions? It is more than just time on their hands. People are giving back to their community. It is fun to answer questions. Answers is the evolving Social Web at work. Democratization of Expertise: How do I grow my eyelashes? How can we end poverty? No question is too dumb or too obscure and the answers range.... They have seen exponential growth of Yahoo! Answers, 12x UU and 25x PageViews. Yahoo! Answers has the highest market share for a Q&A site. More than 12 million visitors last month. Monetization via category sponsorship, brand-specific channel and expert sponsor profiles,
Joshua Schachter the founder of del.iou.us and with Yahoo!. He starts off explaining what is del.icio.us. He explains how bookmarking is selfish in nature. He explains that you can share, find multiple ways. Enabling Discovery; by user and by tag, authority and reputation by user and publisher, allowing users to consume data in many ways (web, RSS and platform based). Collective Memory & Discovery; remember, organize, share and discover (circular). They work with publishers to allow easier ways to add data to the system (add to del.icio.us).
Kakul Srivastava from Flickr. Photography has historically been about event based photography. With digital photography, user behavior has changed, since it is free. People have been tracking the 'in betweens', "Ambient photography," you are tracking the stream and not just events. Focused on enabling ambient sharing; participating (making it easy, more higher volume photos being taken), metadata (tags for finding, and auto tagging with views, favorites, etc) and network (strangers commenting on photos is cool). Flickr has grown very quickly. There are Flickr fans, groups meet up to take pictures together. Flickr's vision is "Eyes of the World." She talks about the Nokia Flickr partnership. She also shows on the Yahoo home page and shows how some pictures on Flickr were highlighted on Yahoo! Also shows how the Flickr tags were shown on the Yahoo! homepage based on a weekly mining of this data. The BBC has been regularly been featuring Flickr content. Also CNN had some Flickr photos on CNN TV.
Ashish Baldua to talk about Yahoo! Trip Finder. Trip Planner is a planning tool and a publishing tool for people who want to share knowledge with the rest of the world. A user comes to Yahoo! to plan his trip, then the user shares the trip with his friends or public, then the community benefits from this shared trip. 20,000 high-quality public trips created already, since launching about two months back. He shows a map of the broad coverage Trip Planner covers. He shows the "Journal View" for an editorial like view and easy to drag and drop photos. The social features has discussion, thumbs up, comments, and more. Monetization: Sponsorships with MasterCard, travel advertisers are looking to decommoditize their businesses by creating compelling rich narratives about their products and brands, match user's trip plan to travel agents for lead generation and lead generation avenue for booking sites.
This content is close to real time, please excuse any typos and other errors in this content.
