The second panelist explained how her company is helping social media expand. Karon Weber recently joined the Yahoo!’s Youth and Education Research Group after two decades of developing digital animation software. She said that social media operates at the intersection of people, media, and technology.

Karon Weber.  Click for larger image.

Yahoo runs three of the biggest social media projects on the web. Their site Del.icio.us allows users to store the addresses of favorite websites online. This allows users to access these bookmarks from any computer, add new bookmarks from anywhere, and share favorites with others. Since everything on Deli.cio.us is someone’s favorite, the site also serves as a user-rated web crawler. The second site, Flickr, allows users to share photos on a public or a private website. It has five million registered users, and eight out of ten photos are public and searchable. Weber did a search on the day of the panel and found that Flickr offered 47,000 free photos of Giant Pandas. Many of the photos are tagged with information such as the latitude and longitude where they were taken, so a teacher who uses a panda photo from Flickr can show where the photo was taken on a map.

The most social of the projects is Yahoo! Answers, which allows users to ask and answer any question. People who answer questions are ranked with points as if they were sellers on Ebay, with a similar feedback system. This means that people who give good answers gain status and become popular on the site. Yahoo! Answers has dealt with 65 million questions so far, and each question hatches a story. For example, the question, “Are there trips to see Giant Pandas?” yielded the answer, “I am in Chengdu now and will check out conditions at the zoo today and at the base camp research center tomorrow.” Learners on these sites create and share content as they are consuming it, said Weber.