Yahoo seeks to exploit Internet's people power with new services
Timed with the launched of Yahoo's My Web 2.0, The New York Times reports on Yahoo's "rapidly growing array of Web services all seeking to exploit the Internet's power to bring people together." (Also see Terry Semel's comments on the subject earlier this year.)
From photo- and calendar-sharing services to "citizen journalist" sites and annotated satellite images, the Internet is morphing yet again. A remarkable array of software systems makes it simple to share anything instantly, and sometimes enhance it along the way.Inexpensive to create and worldwide in reach, the new Internet services are having an impact far beyond the file sharing at issue in the Supreme Court's decision on Monday, which focused on copyright violations using peer-to-peer software.
Indeed, the abundance of user-generated content - which includes online games, desktop video and citizen journalism sites - is reshaping the debate over file sharing. Many Internet industry executives think it poses a new kind of threat to Hollywood, the recording industry and other purveyors of proprietary content: not piracy of their work, but a compelling alternative.
The new services offer a bottom-up creative process that is shifting the flow of information away from a one-way broadcast or publishing model, giving rise to a wave of new business ventures and touching off a scramble by media and technology companies to respond.
"Sharing will be everywhere," said Jeff Weiner, a Yahoo senior vice president in charge of the company's search services. "It's the next chapter of the World Wide Web."
In its race to catch up with the search-engine leader Google, Yahoo is turning to just such a shared resource: the wisdom of friends and business associates. On Tuesday, Yahoo introduced My Web 2.0, a new version of the company's search engine that will harness the collective power of small groups of Web surfers to improve the quality of search results.
The service, which the company's executives refer to as a "social search engine," is based on a new page-ranking technology that Yahoo has named MyRank. Rather than relying on which pages are linked to most frequently on the Web - the so-called Page Rank technology pioneered by Google - MyRank organizes pages based on how closely search users are related to one another in their social network and on their reputation for turning up helpful information.
Essentially, by combining file sharing, social networking, tags and search, Yahoo! proposes to create and entirely different view of the online world that leverages the value of user-created content.
You can seee My Web 2.0 here: http://myweb.search.yahoo.com/myresults/benefits
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Jun 29, 2005 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(0)
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