Personalised Content.. The next technology Milestone?

With the deluge of information available on the web and the little time that the peole have to wade through the corpus of information, personalised content will surely be the next breakthrough that the internet giants and the startups would be looking at..

Personalised news[ www.findory.com] , personalised search [www.google.com], personalised recommendations [www.netflix.com] and a lot more fields.

Greg Linden (the founder of findory) has written about it here
http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/10/reddit-digg-and-personalized-news.html

The following article gives a market perspective of personalised news
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/personalized_news_market_overview.php

I was not aware that Yahoo had acquired Search Fox the pioneer in this field
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/01/16/yahoo-acquires-searchfox-assets/

Yahoo has a huge potential for personalisation and behavioural targetting given their huge user base. With information about each user, they can easily profile him and give the user what he wants.

But the main hurdle in this field is generating correct recommendations inspite of sparse information about the user. The recommenation algorithms also needs to be scalable to churn out recommendations in real time.

I am aslo going through quite a few recommendation engine techniques, exploring some open source..
The ones that I found were interesting are

RACOFI
http://taste.sourceforge.net/
http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/

Right now I am on a vacation .. blogging from an internet cafe..

I will write about these tools [once I try them on the netflix data set] in the near future..

So get your thinking caps on.. and explore the ways to exploit this new technology and M A K E M O N E Y