The connection to related content probably looks something like this:
This page that I tagged --> People who have also tagged this page --> The tags that these people used for this page --> The pages that these people tagged using this universe of tags --> Rank by most frequently tagged
or perhaps like this:
This page that I tagged --> My tags for this page --> Other pages that other people have tagged using these same words --> Rank by most frequently tagged
This screenshot looks at the related pages to Mark Glaser's OJR story on "The good, bad and ugly of contextual ads from Google, Yahoo".
The related links are really interesting but not for the reasons that
you'd think. I would have guessed that a bunch of articles on
AdSense and YPN would appear...some of which do in fact appear.
But what's interesting is that the results include links to some very
thoughtful posts that are a little tangential to the specific topic,
and yet the links are completely relevant to what I would want to know
in this context. For example, one of my links here is to the
MarketingVox story "Study: Most Searchers Can't Tell Search Results from Ads, Use Search to Shop" and Poynter's "The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism" by Steve Outing.
The unfinished part of our experiments in tagging back at InfoWorld were the connections to the world outside of our tags. We showed related links based on the tags our own editors submitted with each of our own articles. But the loop between our tags, other people's tags, and the people who also tagged our articles was not yet closed. (Any progress on that front, Jon?)
Joshua
worked out an interesting relationship between the people who tag
things and the tags that they share, a form of group knowledge
sharing. The first important milestone in this journey was
getting so many people tagging successfully. The ease of use of
the tool and syndicatability (is that a word?) of the del.icio.us data
opened up that possibility. MyWeb
then evolved the concept with the connection to your community and the
filter that comes from that relationship. Joshua then fired back
with this feature which opens up a whole new world of
discoverability. What outcomes will people find from this new
data? What new tools and features will appear next? I guess
one question we need to start asking is, 'what do people want these
tools to do?'
1) Allow My Web 2.0 users to export their data. Open data is where it's at - and a big reason why I (admittedly a geek) chose to go back to delicious.
2) Add 'description' tag to your RSS feeds. This seems like a no-brainer, but having no description tag makes it practically impossible to use My Web 2.0 as a linkblog.
3) Have an open frontpage for each user's My Web 2.0. I know, it's all part of the Yahoo community (aka walled garden), but really there is no reason why you can't have a 'public' page for My Web 2.0.
I realise you're not in the My Web 2.0 team, but I've posted these concerns to the Message Boards and nothing seems to be being done about them. I only comment here because I think Yahoo can do a lot more to enhance the openness and 'Web 2.0'ness of this service - which are undercurrents of your post here.