Personalization

Personalization (broadly known as customization) consists of tailoring a service or a product to accommodate specific individuals, sometimes tied to groups or segments of individuals. A wide variety of organizations use personalization to improve customer satisfaction, digital sales conversion, marketing results, branding, and improved website metrics as well as for advertising. Personalization is a key element in social media and recommender systems. Personalization is affecting every sector of society—work, leisure, and citizenship. The idea of personalization is rooted in ancient rhetoric as part of the practice of an agent or communicator being responsive to the needs of the audience. When industrialization led to the rise of mass communication, the practice of message personalization diminished for a time. But the significant increase in the number of mass media outlets that use advertising as a primary revenue stream, and as they sought to attract customers through buying space and time in forms of entertainment and information, they made efforts to gain knowledge about the specific demographic and psychographic characteristics of readers and viewers. Another aspect of personalization is the increasing prevalence of open data on the internet. Many companies make their data available on the internet via APIs, web services, and open data standards. One such example is Ordnance Survey Open Data. Data made available in this way is structured to allow it to be inter-connected and re-used by third parties. Data available from a user's social graph may be accessed by third-party application software to be suited to fit the personalized web page or information appliance. Current open data standards on the internet include: Attention Profiling Mark-up Language (APML) DataPortability OpenID OpenSocial Web pages can be personalized based on the characteristics (interests, social category, context, etc.), actions (click on a button, open a link, etc.