Web 2.0

I’m up at Web 2.0 today. My panel is done, so I can relax and soak things up a little bit. Right now I’m listening to a Yahoo presentation on FUSE, YPN, and media buys. For example, right now they’re talking about a voiceover ad on TV where they told viewers of The Apprentice to search for [apprentice car], and then they hand-coded a Yahoo! Shortcut to drive users to information on the Pontiac Solstice. Ahh: someone just asked them where they draw the line between search and things that are paid for. The speaker said that the shortcut shows up in the sponsored link section. Hmm. The shortcut actually doesn’t say sponsored and isn’t a different color or anything–it just has the “Y!” logo that designated hand-chosen content. Not a big deal, but it’s neat that someone else asked about that too.

Anyway, my favorite pointer so far is the microformats.org. Things like hCalendar turn iCalendar standards into little HTML fragments that are user-friendly (esp. with CSS), plus they’re machine readable too. And the data isn’t out-of-band like RSS is–it’s incorporated on the HTML page–so it’s a little easier to handle. Pretty neat stuff.

4 Responses to Web 2.0 (Leave a comment)

  1. When are you to launch a real social tool?

  2. Hi Matt,
    I was not there for that presentation as I arrived at the conference at about 4pm to hear Barry Diller, Omid and the MSN guys. Some very bad misinformation. We do have an “about” link below the shortcut that points to this URL: http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/
    It discloses what a shortcut is. The shortcuts are below the sponsored listings and not within them as the speaker said (I don’t even know who this was?)

    I know you are inferring that this is commercial and not relevant but let’s do Marissa’s “taste test” and compare your #1 result to ours for this query:

    Googles: http://pontiacsolstice.getastart.com/?utm_source=goog&utm_medium=ppc&utm_term=apprentice%20car&utm_campaign=mod

    Yahoo:
    http://autos.yahoo.com/newcars/sportscars.html

    Am enjoying your blog (except this post of course)
    Tim

  3. Tim, we can do this by email if you prefer. There is an About link for shortcuts, but the most that page says is “Some of the content may come from partners who pay to be included in Yahoo! or have another financial relationship with Yahoo!” which leaves it open whether a certain shortcut was paid or not; is there a way to tell which shortcuts were editorially chosen for merit vs. money?

    The only reason I wrote about it is that the shortcut gave me pause for thought, and then someone asked the exact question that I was wondering about. The speaker was really enthusiastic about [apprentice car] (and I noticed [apprentice technology] this week), but the audience didn’t seem as enthusiastic about that shortcut.

    I checked on the speakers: David Mandelbrot, Will Johnson, and Anne Frisbie. Anne’s presentation was the one that didn’t seem to overlap with “rabid room full of coder geeks” as much. Each speaker was fantastic–the presentations were great–but the Q&A felt a little strange. People were asking specific questions like “Do I get to export my Web 2.0 data?” and the answers were usually “I don’t know.” “Not right now” would have been a fine answer (Google doesn’t offer an export of Personalized Search history right now), so it was strange that so many questions had “I don’t know” as an answer.

    If I came across as Yahoo!-critical, I don’t mean to be. The session overall was great, and the presentations were really well done.

  4. Thanks for the feedback on the presentations Matt. I will feed it back to our team. We should have people on the panels that can answer detailed questions. You know I usually do.
    See you in Vegas next month.
    Tim

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