connecting*the*dots

By simply enabling blog search results from a search query in the Yahoo! News interface, Yahoo! has moved leaps and bounds into the world of Web 2.0. And they didn’t even have to implement a "shiny" Ajax application.

Yahoo! exposed the common man’s opinion and perspective to the common man. How much more people-centric could this move be? First Technorati gets into the article level of closed environments like Newsweek and bubbles up the voice of bloggers. Now Yahoo! jumps up a level in a person’s mental model for searching and brings blog results back before getting to the article level.

I feel like I’m watching one of those amazing scenes in the Godfather, where a bunch of hits are carried out to a violin solo, while yet another Corleone is being baptized.

Chills down my spine good.

As an aside, I do think I need to call up my friends over in Sunnyvale. I got pretty righteous about the need for this feature while I was conversing with the Yahoo! design and product teams this past June… In any event, I just hope the community keeps this type of forward-thinking user experience design in motion, specifically as it relates to the needs of people (not users).

Man, online discourse is about to get really interesting.