Personalization

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Personalization (or personalisation) is tailoring a consumer product, electronic or written medium to a user based on personal details or characteristics they provide.

1 Web pages
2 Search engines
- 2.1 Profiling models of personalization
3 Print media
4 Promotional merchandise
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Web pages

Web pages are personalized based on the interests of an individual. Personalization implies that the changes are based on implicit data, such as items purchased or pages viewed. The term customization is used instead when the site only uses explicit data such as ratings or preferences.

On an intranet or B2E Enterprise Web portals, personalization is often based on user attributes such as department, functional area, or role. The term customization in this context refers to the ability of users to modify the page layout or specify what content should be displayed.

There are two categories of personalizations:

rule-based
content-based

Web personalization models include rules-based filtering, based on "if this, then that" rules processing, and collaborative filtering, which serves relevant material to customers by combining their own personal preferences with the preferences of like-minded others.

[edit] Search engines

Google is the first of the "Big Three" search engines to introduce personalized results on a massive scale. Weighing a number of factors including but not limited to user history, bookmarks, community behaviour and site click-through rate and stickiness, Google is providing results that are specific to what they believe you are searching for.

Currently this service is only available to those who are logged into their Google account.

Danny Sullivan wrote a piece on the subject at http://searchengineland.com/070202-224617.php

[edit] Profiling models of personalization

This section is a stub. You can help by expanding it.

Personalization does not necessarily need to be based on individual user accounts (as is conventional); it can also be based on region or language (see Localization) or browser.

[edit] Print media

Main article: Mail merge

In print media, ranging from magazines to promotional publications, personalization uses databases of individual recipients’ information. Not only does the written document address itself by name to the reader, but the advertising is targeted to the recipient’s demographics or interests.

[edit] Promotional merchandise

Promotional items industry (mugs, T-shirts, keychains etc.) are also regularly personalized. Personalized children’s storybooks — wherein the child becomes the protagonist — have also appeared.[1]