A quote by Sep Kamvar repeated by Greg Linden sparked some thoughts on personalization that I’ve managed to boil down to a simple old age adage:

It’s what people do, not what they say that matters when it comes to personalization.

This is why I believe contextual and personalized attention data is the most important personal information one can aggregate. I see this happening with services like Google’s Search History and Twitter/Facebook’s activity feeds at the very edges of this personalization movement.

It’s an area I believe the semantic web needs to work on in order to fill out the middle and become successfully adopted. Standardizing actions on the side of the developer and openly(with privacy in mind) recording these actions with dynamic ontologies. Associating the data with these actions. I say dynamic because meaning often changes over time and as Sep highlighted; checking every box and labeling someone as having a general interest doesn’t necessarily return useful results. It’s the history that matters (why dynamic ontologies) and personal information has to be personal to be effective.

Twine and other sites like it are interesting to me in capturing the data they do for a number reasons, however they all seem to be one shop shows, only capturing some attention from their own narrow usage patterns. This is where I see the real power to the people; aggregating attention cross-application and intelligently customizing usage for user experience. VRM is one area that comes to mind to manage all of this.

The way I see it, right now the only actions we have on users visiting sites are; entry, internal actions and exit. I think this is why only search history and location are returning results. I’m more likely to visit local business and services more if the ads are relevant to my location and search contexts. The closer something is, the more personal it often feels and closer to instant gratification you become.

Contexts include the who what where when how and why of a persons action. Who they are and their history of performing actions, what they’re looking for in relation to, where they are while seeking that. When they are seeking the what aka the time/day, how they’re attempting to obtain their goal and why being their motivation for doing so.

Who is the history - The records of a persons actions.
What is they seek - The goal aka resource aka search term
Where they are - Their location (IP address / wifi mesh / GPS location)
When they’re seeking - Is it after work? Middle of the day? Just after school?
How they’re seeking - What service or applications are they utilizing? Voice, Phone or Web?
Why they’re motivated - Is it research or are they in the mood to purchase something? History is telling.

If I’ve missed any, please leave a comment.

I believe this is why results always come back to context as Sep highlights with his statement that “recent searches are much more important.” It’s where they are and what people are doing right now.

Having said that, another area I see yet to be fully exploited is using time-varying attention information to predict what users may be motivated to do next or soon and return results(not necessarily all of them) that reflect that before the user even knows they want them. I call this the consumer cycle as most people are just patterns stuck in a cycle that evolves over time. I hear Microsoft Research are doing this with Visual Studio by tracking actions and customizing the interface. I know Werner Vogel’s of Amazon in a recent InfoQ video displayed a diagram Jeff Bezos drew that highlights their business growth cycle and the feedback loop. People are growth cycles too and if you can figure out those patterns then and you can pander to their every whim even before they know they have them. Targeted suggestion can really be a powerful form of persuasion. Friends do it to other friends all the time. This is why it’s important to also know a person’s friends and in what contexts they pay attention to them. A friend might buy a new phone and the person ask them about that purchase. Great time to personalize an experience and display the information from other sources(friends/known sites) the user can use.

What I find interesting is that all of this is related to a more fine-grain approach to handling users personal data in applications. The decision is then one of how dynamic to make an application such that collaboration and convenience are enhanced and not sacrificed in the overall user experience. One person might require a completely different experience to the next. So how best then to share those disparate world views? Links with history and session data that form historical views on data comes to mind. I’ve not seen much work on this regard but I haven’t really look that hard. Still, I believe this will be vital for the platforms of the future. Avi’s Seaside has been one of the few attempts I do know about, if you know any others I’d like to hear about them.

Now all of this dynamic data collection requires architecture to support it. I’m of the belief that a deterministic approach with history and session data stored for context recall may be the best approach to personalization across future contexts. Most of my research is focused in this area, so it better be.

With that, I’m off to revise my Combinatory Logic skills.

SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities) is an ontology for describing discussion forums and posts on topic threads in online community sites. This includes but is not limited to: blogs, bulletin boards, mailing lists, newsgroups, etc.

I came across this word today: Fauxonomy. There seems to be some disagreement about it's meaning however. The first thing that came to my mind was fauxonomy as machine generated taxonomy made out to look like user-generated taxsonomy(folksonomy), however some who support scientific taxonomies have dubbed folksonomies as fauxonomies themselves. Either way I'm sticking with my interpretation. My french was never any good though…

It's been great getting some feedback on my previous post with regards to this topic.

Thanks for the feedback guys.

Daniel raises some valid points I'd like to expand upon. I'm still thinking about Jasons. And have an uneasiness about some of them

Anyway, re-reading part of i-tags, I understand that the current i-tag specification simply points to a predicate of vocabularies describing the content tagged.

I'm not very well versed on these things however what I had hoped could be achieved is the ability to include in an i-tag, an indentifier as to where an embedded objects metadata can be found. I envision this being done through say a microformat predicate class.

Here an example of me tagging myself with my hCard as metadata in my about page:

<a rel="tag" class="i-tag" href="http://depressionisms.com/tblog/i-tags/craig-hCard/">Craig</a>

Heres an example i-tag as I see it, at that link above:

<div class="i-tag">
  <!-- i-tag header metadata describing the i-tag itself -->
  <div>
    <a class="id" href="http://depressionisms.com/tblog/i-tags/craig-hCard">I-Tag</a>
    <a class="subject" href="http://depressionisms.com/tblog/about/">About Craig</a>
    <a class="author" href="http://depresssionisms.com/tblog/about/">Author: Craig</a>
    <a class="publisher" href="http://depressionisms.com/tblog/">Cataga</a>
    <a class="verifier" href="https://verify.opinity.com/">I-Tag Verifier: Opinity</a>
    <a class="date" href="http://xri.net/($d*2006-01-12T12:13:14Z)">Tag Date: 2006/03/22 08:19</a>
  </div>
  <!– i-tag body metadata describing the subject identified above–>
  <div>
    <a class="predicate" href="http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag">Tags</a>
    <div>
      <a class="object" rel="tag" href="http://technorati.com/tag/person">person</a>
      <a class="object" rel="tag" href="http://depressionisms.com/tblog/category/i-tags/">i-tags</a>
    </div>
  </div>
  <div>
    <a class="predicate" href="http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-license">Licenses</a>
    <div>
      <a class="object" rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nd/1.0/">Creative Commons NoDerivs 1.0</a>
    </div>
  </div>

<div>
    <a class="predicate" href="http://microformats.org/</a>
    <div>
      <a class="object" rel="microformat" href="http://neuraxon77.pip.verisignlabs.com/hCard/">hCard</a>
    </div>
  </div>

</div>

The example above being my hosted hCard stored on an OpenID provider. Restricting access to that data to trusted users or sites. The ability to mark attributes in that secure data as publicly publishable or not. Like email addresses.

Instead of displaying email addresses in full view for spiders, they're replaced with a placeholder for requesting those details, the placeholder being a Yadis Identity form discovering my OpenID or i-name provider contact form. The placeholder opening say an AJAX form whereby the users name, email address, and message requesting why they want access are then transmitted to my provider, the user never having to leave my site. If I then approve the request, they get an email saying so, either with the content they requested or the original link where they were looking for it. If the link, they head to the site and on entering their email and a returned password(for email user verification) in the request information area(this, along with their details could be included in the link?), they get that information displayed. If the user has their own Yadis Identity the password wouldn't be required. To get the content they wanted, users might be encouraged to get an identity! Identity viral marketing.

Ideally, what I'm looking for is one way - a tag or identifier - to describe what the content is about on a page or section of a page and who has permission to it.

For me personally and the project I'm working on, I have the need to be able to tag an object embedded anywhere in a page, and use that tag to provide additional information on the object like licensing and privacy restrictions. Whether that be a users name, an image, part or the entire document, I want to be able to tag it on creation with the tag containing the metadata for it. Say one part of a document as copyright, another part under a creative commons license. I want to be able to distinguish those sections. An image on a page may be copyright but the text might not be.

There's a lot to learn of what's out there at the moment to do this. Right now for me it's as clear as mud. I probably should have been clearer in my previous post that I may have been thinking about i-tags outside its current scope there.

Thinking about it another way, I'm wondering if eRDF could be be used by defining my own standard rdf schema for tagging content or something. It's all very confusing at the moment because I think I'm trying to do something outside the scope of everything I'm finding. Or misunderstanding what I am. All a learning process.

Really appreciate the feedback on this though.