Personalization is key

We are surrounded with so much information that we need somehow help. We need tools and applications which are tailored to us, that know what we like and what we want (and what we do not like and do not want!).

“Personalization the most important part of Google’s expansion“, stated Google CEO Eric Schmid. Using the keywords we look for in Google, the websites we visit, the people we know it becomes quite easy to have a picture of who we are and what our interests are.

Greg Linden, the person that contributed to the recommendation system of Amazon has an interesting blog. Interesting is also his findory website, a site which provides personalized news.

You can now have also recommendations using bittorrent thanks to tribler.

And so on and on…

Yahoo Getting Academic On Social Networking

Yahoo research has just hired two scientist experts in social networks, Dr. R. Preston McAfee and Dr. Duncan Watts. I found this news through this post at search engine land

I know Watts’works. He is the author of several articles on social network analysis and the small world phenomenon. He has written also two books, Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness and Six Degrees.

Duncan has also co-athored The Structure and Dynamics of Networks, a book written with two other world known experts in networks dynamics, Barabasi and Newman.

Barabasi has written the popolar book, Linked.

Mark Newman and Duncan Watts are both part of the External Faculty of the Santa Fe Institute.

Training

If you are a sportman and you train seriously, you also have to monitor your training activities, health condition and performance.

In this field you can choose one of the leading devices and wristwatches made by:

These devices allow you to store data concerning the performance and conditions achieved in your sport activities. The data can then be downloaded in the computer and analyzed. Nowadays, the information that can be obtained are quite amazing.

The information include:

  • GPS coordinates
  • hearth rate
  • distance
  • altitude
  • barometric pressure
  • and many others

It is not by accident that all these innovations come from Finland. A country that spends heavily in research and at the same time has an exemplary welfare state. If you want to know more on how this can happen, see The Information Society and the Welfare State by Manuel Castells and Pekka Himanen.