Well, now, isn't this fascinating — Yahoo acquired del.icio.us. Wonder if this means I'll be able to stop using the combination bookmarklet for del.icio.us and My Web 2.0 at some point and get one bookmarklet to rule them all. Automagic sync between del.icio.us and My Web 2.0 bookmarks? Or will the services get merged somehow? Anybody have predictions they want to throw down?

One of the big ticket items of the day was the launch of Yahoo Answers, which aims to be every bit the community-powered knowledge base that Google Answers isn't. Both allow you to ask questions, but the latter's queries are answered by pre-screened experts while Yahoo is taking a long-tail, wisdom of crowds approach — any Yahoo member can answer a question, and user ratings determine the "best" of the crop. A reputation system will supposedly weed out the experts from the spammers.

I'm all for the experiment and I'm quite curious to see how it turns out. It would be nice to have a general one-stop shop for this kind of collective Q & A, as opposed to tracking down and poking through various subject-specific user forums. Also, this service has promise to capture the more ephemeral day-to-day questions that don't really fit into any of those forums: "What are some good gift ideas for moms?" "How can I learn to breakdance?" (despite popular opinion, I did not submit that one.)

But, as an experiment, it faces many of the same challenges those user forums have faced (and many failed) before. Greg Linden notes (via Pete Cashmore) that popularity voting does not truth make. Gary Price notes that spam, scams, infomercials and troublemakers are all very likely outcomes for the user community to police on its own, as Yahoo currently has no plans to maintain the knowledgebase. I suppose we'll know if the service becomes successful when Andrew Orlowski starts writing scathing invectives about it.

Wow, pretty sweet — Yahoo is integrating blog search with their news search, as well as adding Flickr photos and My Web 2.0 results into the mix. This brings together user-created and mainstream media in a way that's unprecedented, totally beating Google to the punch on this one as well as leveraging the goodness of both Flickr and My Web 2.0. From the announcement, we should expecting yet further integration of community created content (podcasts, e.g.) in the future.

The index only includes a subset of the larger blogosphere (those that are included in the My Yahoo feed directory), but will grow to ideally include everything from the blo.gs ping stream. The interface doesn't quite put blogs on equal footing visually — they're off in a sidebar while the regular news search results are in the main pane — but I actually sort of like the way this is done. It's not going to alienate mainstream users who want to stick with their traditional MSM sources, but will provide a still visible alternative. Social software nerds (raising hand), bloggers, and others already kicking back with their second (or fifth…) cocktail in the cluetrain dining car can just click on through to the interface that shows blog search results in the main pane and Flickr results in the sidebar at right (here's an example search on Web 2.0). I dig it. For once, I only have one small request — I want a way to make the blog news search interface my default for news search, so I don't have to click through each time (with option to click through the the mainstream search results).