Yahoo Leading the Movement to Social Media

Back to Rapid eLearning from my recent and extended tangent on the 'flat world,' there was a fabulous article in the San Jose Mercury News this week about Yahoo’s mission to take the lead on 'social media.' Yahoo just hired Marc Davis, a media professor at the University of California-Berkeley, to help "chart a course through the rapidly evolving world of 'social media' -- from blogs and social networking services to interactive mobile devices." Some excerpts from the article follow:

"The concepts that form the core of Flickr -- tagging, sharing and community -- are spreading through Yahoo's many departments. Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and her husband, Stewart Butterfield, visited with most Yahoo departments to understand how a Flickr approach might help their products by involving users more. It's what Yahoo executives are now calling the `Flickrization of Yahoo.' Yahoo's attempts to 'Flickr-ize' its search engine have also given birth to a service called My Web 2.0, which lets people bookmark and tag Web pages that interest them."

"The next major shift is going to be about more than which search engine has the most documents. What's next is an experience that is personalized, that gets better the more I use it.''

"Yahoo's embrace of social media and user-generated Web content is evident elsewhere, too. The company launched a social networking and blogging service called 360 this year. It recently acquired Upcoming.org, a Southern California Web site whose events calendar is assembled entirely by the public. It has plans to let people create and share their own audio podcasts. And it recently began including blog content in its news section, elevating grass-roots journalism and writing closer to mainstream media."

"Increasingly, you're seeing the barriers to entry, to creating content, being lowered,'' said Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's senior vice president of search and marketplace. "Increasingly, technologies are allowing people to create, develop, produce, market and sell content in ways heretofore unimaginable... We want to create a platform so that the knowledge in people's heads flows onto the Web for the benefit of others.''

The implications for learning in the enterprise should be clear—the dissemination and acquisition of knowledge will be driven increasingly by user generated content and the experience will become increasingly social and personalized. It will be interesting to see how the learners of the future (today actually), who have been brought up in this alternative learning reality, will respond when confronted in the enterprise with formal courseware and learning management (control) systems. We need to learn how people are learning in the real (consumer) world and rapidly adapt and adopt. Web 2.0 will inevitably drive eLearning 2.0—we just need to figure out what that really means. Look to Yahoo and others to point the way.

(And not to belabor the point, but Web 2.0, social media, and eLearning 2.0 are simply manifestations of all the flat world trends and technologies we've been talking here about for the last few months.)