on Aug 13th, 2007Personalization is one cookie away
I wrote about personalization some time back and about how we should actually be approaching this problem. Google has got their act into place and are making your own light weight personalization meter, but its for ads 
Google is going to put a cookie in your browser that will record information everytime you read an ad served by Google. The cookie helps Google predict what kinds of ads the person clicks on and will probably help serve better and more relevant ads. Up until now the ads are served based on the content of the site and also the publisher’s preference on the ads. The cookie also doubles up as a proof of click ( think click fraud) and more material for publishers to analyse the hits to their ads and mine for patterns. Though the purpose is for ads, Im happy its a step ahead in personalization. The cookie acts like a distributed store of personal information that can be mined by ad servers and then acted upon.
The possibilities of this technology could be endless. Based on my previous post, where I wrote about a distributed implementation of a personalization database which all applications can use to customize data better, google’s cookie is one step towards such a solution. If every browser had cookies of personalized information then applications ( aka good applications) can mine these cookies and get useful information about the persons Net habits and preferences. But a cookie has size restriction and cannot probably be used to store the abundance of personalization information. You can use a add on activex plugin or a firefox addon like google gears with underlying SQLite database and do wonders with it. Of course this would mean about two years of thinking of standards and more bureaucratic gibberish, but once done, it will be a truly distributed system and the web, partially personalized.
You could be served the right category of blogs on wordpress, get the right videos on the opening page of you tube, see the relevant news on CNN , see the most relevant feeds on your RSS reader and much more. Personalization ahoy !!