• Yahoo is turning to just such a shared resource: the wisdom of friends and business associates. On Tuesday, Yahoo introduced My Web 2.0, a new version of the company's search engine that will harness the collective power of small groups of Web surfers to improve the quality of search results. The service, which the company's executives refer to as a "social search engine," is based on a new page-ranking technology that Yahoo has named MyRank. Rather than relying on which pages are linked to most frequently on the Web - the so-called Page Rank technology pioneered by Google - MyRank organizes pages based on how closely search users are related to one another in their social network and on their reputation for turning up helpful information.
• My Web 2.0 allows Web pages found useful by one member of a group to be instantly accessible to a network of trusted associates and to their network contacts as well. The service, Yahoo executives hope, will combat the growing problem of search-engine manipulation by using a collection of human eyes and minds to sort the wheat from the chaff.
• The Yahoo My Web software makes it possible for users to categorize or "tag" Web pages they have found, as well as annotate them. Tagging makes it possible for groups of independently acting computer users to create improvised classification systems. The My Yahoo system makes it possible to use tags to find categories of information as well as experts on particular subjects. The system has a feature making it possible to see whether an associate who has found and saved a document is online and available to be contacted through Yahoo's instant-messaging system. Yahoo is organizing the collections of tags on a central server, and they create what is being called a "folksonomy," to distinguish the classification system from a traditional taxonomy.

• A feature of the service will be the ability of user communities to annotate digital images to make them more useful. Other early examples include a user-created map of London overlayed on a schematic of the city's subway system, and a link between Google Maps and the apartment rental and real estate listings of Craigslist, making it easy to visualize where rentals are in neighborhoods or entire cities.
• "It's beyond what is possible with individual effort, but once it's there, millions of people will have a tremendous impact," said John Hanke, the general manager of Google's satellite imaging group. "We have built this common ground that other people can leverage."

• Spore, scheduled for release next year, will incorporate a variety of software tools that let users "evolve" a civilization. Rather than a massively multiplayer game, the current fashion in online role playing, it will be a "massively single player" game. Although they will all be connected by the Internet, game players will not interact with one another, but rather with the civilizations that other players have evolved. The entertainment value will be in exploring civilizations created by other players and interacting with characters controlled by artificial-intelligence software.
• Spore is intended to appeal to young game players who have no interest in being entertained passively. "We have a whole generation of kids who feel entitled to be game designers," Mr. Wright said.

The development of the tagging system typifies the bubbling up of Internet creativity. "There is a lot of innovation coming from the fringe," said Tim O'Reilly, the chief executive of O'Reilly Media, a publishing company based in Sebastopol, Calif.