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Last month, at The Next Web 2009, Chris Sacca – investor in Twitter, was interviewed on stage and also chaired a panel about the Twitter ecosystem. The following post is a combination of his comments. Before being a major investor in Twitter, Sacca worked for Google, where he ran the the alternative access division, whose ambitious aim was to get everybody connected to the internet. They mostly focused on user experience and solving user problems. |
 Bradley Horowitz at The Next Web 09 courtesy ofDailyM |
After Jeff Jarvis had his take on Google we had somebody from the inside – Bradley Horowitz.Horowitz was the man who advised Yahoo to buy Flickr and after redefining his role there he made them acquire Delicious. Previously he had formed Virage (video categorization engine) and sold it to Autonomy after dropping out of his degree at MIT Medialab where he worked on image categorisation technologies. (more…) |
 Jeff Jarvis (left) and Andrew Keen courtesy of Ann Helmond
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Jeff Jarvis (author of What Would Google Do?) and Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur) painted opposing views of the techno-cultural landscape. Keen actually regarded Jarvis as a ‘cheerleader’ for Google although Jarvis himself said he used the company as an example for changes in the real world. |
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Ricardo Baeza-Yates gave us Yahoo’s view that they do not believe in black boxes as a way to solve the complexities of search but that its more about what can be learnt from users.
Of course nothing new here but he gave a holistic view about how Yahoo is addressing the different areas of the conundrum. |
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A year ago I was involved in a major restructure of 7 major websites. Each had a new taxonomy and controlled vocabulary created. A clear vision of the direction of each site was drawn up and site maps and wireframes produced. The one problem we had, was there wasn’t a generic metadata schema that was adhered to. It was a combination of ad hoc, legacy tags. Some originated from the SEO team and some from the developers and database administrators on each site. |
