Yahoo! Research at WWW2007
The head of Yahoo! Research, Prabhakar Raghavan, recently spoke at WWW2007. I didn’t attend the conference, but found some interesting notes (here). On one hand, he speaks to how it is important that we make data and the processing of data much smarter, so that we spend less time querying and deducing information, and more time transacting and interacting.
I believe a big problem on the internet is the amount of information we need to query to arrive to a logical transaction. For example, to find out how you should invest your money, it requires you to query dozens of topics and arrive to your own conclusion. Social networking around financial services is starting to help bring together information and people so that every person can make a faster transaction leveraging shared knowledge and, consequently, share the outcome or knowledge for the common good, leading to an endless loop of interaction. However, the Internet is far from that.
Prabhakar Raghavan also spoke about how you can build online communities and increase interactions within them. An interesting method to study interactions is by using the hierarchical approach employed by Yahoo!’s, called START:
- Star: the user says “I like this”
- Tag: creating tags on pictures, etc.
- Access: the user views a page (in a visible way)
- Routing: forwarding things to friends
- Text: write a review, blog article, etc.
Clearly, in many of the most sensitive areas of our lives, such as relationships and family, medicine, and, the most intriguing to me atleast, finances, there is a lot of work to do to increase semantic tools and interaction.
