Knowledge Karma - Loomia and Yahoo! learn from users

I've just spent a week trawling round Silicon Valley, talking to a mix of developers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, industry observers and big cheeses from well established companies. The overall impression I was left with was that the digital world is waking up to the fact that there's more to life than pure algorithms. The human element is playing an increasingly important part.

Loomia is a start up which helps website owners drive traffic to the information of most relevance to the visitor. It works by studying and recording aspects of the user's behaviour. This information is stored anonymously but is provided to the website owner on receipt of a code. The user experience can then be fine tuned.

User behaviour ranges from which links are followed (those near the top of a list, for example, will be less meaningful than those lower down the list), to how long the user dwells  on the destination page, to what they do when they get there: do they add their own rating (of a restaurant, for example) or do they buy something?

Yahoo! Answers, which I had cause to use while away, relies on humans submitting answers to questions in return for points based on their popularity. (My question, if you're interested, was "why does the dial-up window keep appearing when I'm on broadband?" Maybe it was jetlag, but I'd forgotten where the setting was. The answer was profoundly obvious, nevertheless I was deeply grateful to the responder. It took eight minutes from activating my account, to getting five answers. The third did the trick.)

A lot of people are only too happy to share their knowledge, with little thought of return. They don't really do it for points at Yahoo! although they're probably pleased to get a high ranking and prominence.

Blogging, of course, is another way of sharing knowledge with others. The more information and relevant links that are given, the more valued the blog. This is early days for IWR, but I'm hoping we'll all find our 'blog voices' and make this a valuable and interesting stopping point for you on your internet travels.