Thursday, July 07, 2005
Internet Users Driving New Services on Web
Inexpensive to create and global in reach, the new Internet services are having an impact far beyond the file sharing at issue in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on Monday, which focused on inducement to copyright violations. Many Internet executives say the abundance of user-generated content is reshaping the debate over file sharing, and that it poses a new kind of threat to Hollywood, the recording industry and all purveyors of proprietary content: not piracy of their work, but a compelling alternative.
"Sharing will be everywhere," said Geoff 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 Google, the search engine leader, Yahoo is turning to a shared resource: the collective wisdom of friends and business associates. On Tuesday, Yahoo announced My Web 2.0, a new search engine that will harness the collective power of small groups of Web surfers to increase the quality of search engine 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 that relying on which pages are linked to most frequently on the World Wide Web, the so-called Page Rank technology pioneered by Google, MyRank organizes pages based on how closely users are related to one another and on their reputation for turning up helpful information. My Web 2.0 allows Web pages found useful by one member of a group to be instantly accessible to a network of trusted associates and to their network contacts as well. The service, Yahoo hopes, will combat the problem of search-engine manipulation by using real people to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Yahoo is not alone in looking for ways to leverage digital content created by grass-roots Internet communities. In June, both Apple Computer and Microsoft announced they would add a content- subscription feature known as RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, to their software in an effort to take advantage of the explosion of Internet user-created digital content.
"We are now entering the participation age," Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems president and chief operating officer, said Monday at an industry conference in San Francisco. "The really interesting thing about the network today is that individuals are starting to participate." And the announcements keep coming. On Tuesday, Google said it would make available a free version of its Google Earth software program that permits users to easily view and annotate digital images of the entire earth. A new feature of the service will be the ability of user communities to annotate digital images to make them more useful. Other early examples include a user-created map overlay of the London subway system, and a link between Craigslist's real estate listings and the Google maps, making it easy to visualize rentals in entire neighborhoods or cities.
"We have built this common ground that other people can leverage," said John Hanke, general manager of Google's Keyhole satellite imaging group. A range of Internet developers and open-source experts think that the Internet's new phase will help bring about the dream of computerized "augmentation," by blending the collaborative skills of tens of thousands of individuals. The Yahoo My Web software makes it possible for users to categorize or "tag" Web pages they have found, as well as annotate them. Tagging makes it possible for groups of independently acting computer users to create classification systems from the "bottom up."
Similar tagging systems are used by Web services such as Flickr, the photo-sharing service purchased by Yahoo, and by Technorati, which indexes more than 11 million Web logs. But Yahoo is the first major company to adopt the approach to harness the activities of individuals.
Innovation From the Fringe Technorati's founder, David Sifry, said a new set of standards will extend tagging into areas like reviews, calendar events and profiles of individuals. The My Yahoo system makes it possible to use tags to find categories of information as well as human experts on subjects of interest. The system has a feature making it possible to see whether an associate who has found and saved a document is available to be contacted through Yahoo's instant-messaging system.
The development of tagging systems is an example of how Internet innovation is often coming first from grass-roots experimenters rather than from traditional Internet companies. "There is a lot of innovation coming from the fringe," said Tim O'Reilly, chief executive of O'Reilly Media, a publisher of computing books.
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