WebProNews

Paul Levine from Yahoo! was at Where 2.0 discussing what Yahoo!'s up to with local.

Participation is key and it's what's guiding their strategy. Enabling users to find use share and expand. They want to tap into the vast amount of content that's already out there or, things that are in people's minds. Imagine, only 30% of the commercial operations in the US have a web presence enter an opportunity (hint).

Yahoo!'s vision for local - enrich people's lives by enabling them to find, use, share, and expand all human knowledge.

-a platform for user generated content - allow usres/consumers to add to and create content. Yahoo! Has built the container enabling users to contribute.

-Provisioning for ratings and previews

-Eg. Yahoo! Answers - tool being built by users

-Yahoo! Video - upload, tag videos

-Moving forward we'll see more integration of flickr and maps

-Much energy and innovation with maps is focused on trip planning and helping peple get information about going from point A to point B

-Of interest from the labs geo-referencing content.

-See zonetag.research.yahoo.com

Where's the business around this? The 25 million US businesses that aren't online is a vast, untouched market. (eg. Local fetured listings)

Recall, free APIs - flash and AJAX flavors. Divinci Code and Baskin Robins have recently held commercial promotions built on Yahoo! Maps

API pros

• Global coverage
• Support for open standards (geoRSS)
• Complimentary content APIs - flickr, traffic, events, local search
• No commercial restriction!!

A reminder, see the new blog at http://www.ysearchblog.com

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Anything Geospatial: Tracking developments affecting GIS, geospatial technologies, location-based services, mapping, google earth and google maps. Published by the creator and editor of GISuser.com & LBSzone.com