The third key note talk at ICDE turned out to be better received by people, absed on informal feedback, than the first two. This was by Bradley Horowitz on Social Search. Bradley talkd about the FUSE (Find, Use, Share, and Expand all human knowledge) mission of Yahoo. He argued that Yahoo wants to build trust and relationship with users. He described some of these using examples of Flickr, Del.ici.ous, and Yahoo! Answers.
The idea of creation and organization of knowledge by users is compelling one. The trick is to develop tools that will make it very easy and more or less effortless for users. That really seems to be a key factor in making these approaches successful.