danielknox.net

Interesting that the top two online retailers in the Foresee Online Retail Satisfaction Index (Netflix & Amazon) are the ‘poster children’ for e-commerce personalization. Would be worth investigating how many of the top 100 have implemented some form of personalized recommendations on their sites to see if this is indicative of a larger trend.

Business Insider reports that one of AOL’s strategies is to improve network-wide search to improve circulation between their network of sites.

While improving search makes sense, I feel like they’re missing a bigger opportunity which is network-wide discovery powered by personalization. I mean, why wait for someone to search when you can provide network-wide content cross-promtion targeted to each user’s individual interests. I bet that would have a much bigger impact on circulation between AOL sites.

I was excited to read this afternoon that Microsoft is on the verge of rolling out a new version of the MSN.com homepage to its 100M+ users.

A preview of the redesigned homepage is available here. The redesign finally gives the site a more modern look (farewell “iconic” blue background) and introduces some cool features around search, social media and local news. However, the following feature is potentially the most interesting:

Headlines on the page will now be customized based on user behavior, so, for instance, people who tend to be more interested in entertainment news will be more likely to see those type of stories.

Last week Google Reader introduced two new features to help users find interesting content. Google claims that one of these, the new and improved Recommended items section, has items “selected just for you”.

Today was the first time I had the chance to play with the Recommended items section and I have to admit to being totally unimpressed. For some reason, Google Reader thought I’d be interested in ctrl+z stationary (above), glass toilets, little people and some research about women’s preference for hairy geeks! In fact almost every item in my Recommended items section was a popular (100+ ‘likes’) photo or cartoon with no relation to the hundreds of items I read every day through Google Reader. If there is personalization happening it is either incredibly subtle or not very good.

Interesting PBS interview with Krishna Bharat (creator of Google News) and Josh Cohen (GM for Google News) which clearly sets out Google’s plan to focus on greater personalization and provide tools to help news industry become more personal…

Can you talk about some projects you’re working on now, anything coming up with publishers?

…..

Bharat: The other thing we have a broad interest in is personalization. Every time a reader looks at something and says ‘that’s not for me’ and moves on, there’s inefficiency in the system. Along with getting the top news of the day, we want to make sure the rest of their experience is as efficient as possible — not only on Google News but on other publishers’ sites. Trying to be smart about selecting content will help the industry, and that’s something we’re investing resources to try to figure out how that can be done differently. And when we have technology that’s ready, we’d be happy to work with the industry to make that successful.


Would you go by what users input or by their browsing history?

Bharat: A bit of both. Obviously if users are willing to tell us, that’s great. It’s very accurate. Beyond that, there’s plenty of evidence from the way they browse the content to tell us where their attention is going.

The L.A. Times has introduced a new personalization feature provided by VisualDNA.

The questions seem to go on forever and the end result (a page containing some vaguely personalized news) is hardly worth the effort… although its hard to be too upset with a service that tells you “You’re a Hot Shot”!