Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has written a nice post on a user profiling in a social community Piczo. The idea is to let the user decorate his profile page in a similar way teenagers do with their bedroom. Hanging posters, playing music etc. Everything is tagged, you can share the decorations with others. This is beneficial to both the user (for he gets cool decorations) and for the advertiser (for he gets better profile information). Not a new idea, but I like it anyways. It’s good because the user takes the action and is in control. He decides how to decorate, and if the matching is done rightly, there might be a better connection between the user and the advertiser. Interesting to see if this will spread advertisement virally, as advertisers obviously hope. It sorta ties in nicely with one of my earlier post on matching user profiles to advertisement (here and here). Bottom line, profiles are not that accurate when used in advertisement matching, but user actions might be a better indicator. I had an interesting on-line conversation on it with Jordan Mitchel. His company works on context and behavioral advertisement.
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Thank you for the link, Alexander!
I think one of the most important areas of the Web, both to users and advertisers, is the use of attention data — as a *benefit* to users. Many call this the “implicit web”.
Jeremy Liew has an interesting recent post on another company that demonstrates this concept, at http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/09/26/attention-data-and-xobni/.