danielknox.net

DailyMe is recruiting for two Data / Research Scientists - role is advertised here on KDNuggets, as well as on LinkedIn.

The Data / Research Scientists will support DailyMe’s Chief Scientist and I as we seek to further improve the already impressive performance of our Newstogram recommendation system.

After seeing Nick Mihailovski’s Google Analytics / Protovis mash-up last week, I couldn’t resist playing around with the Protovis visualization package over the weekend.

My first visualization effort is a treemap showing the popularity of sub-categories within DailyMe.com based on Newstogram data for October 2009 (built upon the Protovis treemap example).



The colors represent primary categories, while the size of each sub-category corresponds to its popularity as measured by the ‘Digital News Affinity’ (DNA) score for October 2009.

The search field at bottom of the treemap highlights certain categories / sub-categories (e.g. searching for “sports” highlights the 14 sports sub-categories).

Check out the working demo (requires a modern browser e.g. Firefox, Safari).

After lunch, Bruce Kasanoff, got everyone excited with his keynote: “Personalization will be THE driver of the economy within the next 8 years!” (yes, not “a”, or “one of”, but “THE”). He very much broadened the perspective of everyone but illustrating that the theme of customization and personalization is much larger than we cover today here.

His argument: the basic mechanism of personalization, “sense - reason - respond”, can be applied for many markets — or are already being applied. Consinder the revolution in media. DailyMe, MeeHive, DailySnooze, or FanFeedr are all start-ups that recently started with offerings for the future of media. All these companies’ core is an algorithm to match user preferences to existing content. Still no one in this industry uses the term mass customization or personalization to address this.

Interesting post on Techcrunch re YouTube rating system.

YouTube are now soliciting via their blog for suggestions to improve their rating system, and at least one person is advocating a system similar to DailyMe’s ‘Face-It’ which would allow viewers to tag content with their impressions e.g. “hilarious” or “cute” or “interesting”.

DailyMe CEO Eduardo Hauser responded today on the Huffington Post to recent criticism of personalization and ‘the Daily Me’.

Interesting passage from speech by Michael Crichton from 1993 predicting the decline of conventional media and the rise of DailyMe:

Once Al Gore gets the fiber optic highways in place, and the information capacity of the country is where it ought to be, then I will be able, for example, to view any public meeting of Congress on tape. And I will have artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page, or a nightly news show that addresses my interests. I’ll have twelve top stories that I want; I’ll have short summaries available, and I can double click for more detail. How will Peter Jennings or MacNeil-Lehrer or a newspaper compete with that?