Yahoo! Putting People at the Center

Tomi Poutanen, Senior Director, Product Development, Social Search Department, Yahoo! spoke at the Ontario Library Association conference in Toronto yesterday. He emphasized Yahoo!’s vision, FUSE, enriching peoples’ lives by enabling them to find, use, share and exapand all human knowledge. They do this through people and algorithms, through social search — human editors + topographical analysis + topographical analysis. They are using the power of Web 2.0, user generated content, wisdom of crowds, and a culture of participation to “better search through people”. Tomi talked about Yahoo! Answers and gave advice to librarians:
*embrace the new social media (interesting that there are only 1.5 million users of del.i.cious and Tomi seemed surprised by the number of librarians in the room who were part of that group)
* share your knowledge and build networks
* become an authority & and expert