ReadWriteWeb

This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the five biggest Web trends of 2009. Our first post was about Structured Data, our second about The Real-Time Web. The third part of our series is on Personalization.

Personalization has long been a buzzword on the Internet. With the glut of information on the Web circa 2009, personalization in this era means providing effective filters and recommendations. Ultimately personalization is about websites and services giving you what you want, when you want it. That's the long-standing dream anyway. Let's see if the products of 2009 are fulfilling it.

BlueKai is an online marketing firm that provides data to marketers, ad networks and publishers. The main purpose of this data, held in a repository called the BlueKai Data Exchange, is to target ads to consumers. BlueKai claims to have now aggregated "intent data" from over 160 million unique users on e-commerce, online travel agency and auto comparison sites.

What is "intent data"? Broadly speaking, it's data that purports to show the intent of Web users when they browse a website. For example, a recent report from BlueKai collected and analyzed online shopping data over Black Friday week. In this post we look at that report's findings and then ask some questions about the validity of the data.

My6sense just announced a new version of its iPhone application that can automatically highlight the most relevant tweets from the users you follow. The mytweetsense feature learns from the user's implicit and explicit actions and builds a model of what is interesting to the individual user. Mytweetsense works best for tweets that include links. The app's features are clearly geared towards these kind of tweets and include previews for links, videos and images.

Over the past decade, Amazon.com and eBay have continued to dominate the online retail market in the United States. However, there have been signs that more social and distributed forms of online shopping are gaining traction. eBay, in particular, is beginning to lose ground.

In this post, we review the past decade of e-commerce and the key trends. Advances in recommendations technology, together with the emergence of social media and mobile commerce, have combined to change the way e-commerce is transacted. In a follow-up post, we look at current statistics for online retail.

Shazam, the music discovery iPhone application which gained widespread adoption thanks to its appearance in an iPhone TV commercial, is now getting a ton of new features thanks to the launch of a premium application called Shazam Encore. This new application adds music recommendations, trend charts, music searches and more to its core set of features already made available in the free version of Shazam.

Does this mean Shazam is about to give Pandora and the like a run for their money?

This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the 5 biggest Web trends of 2009. Our first post was about Structured Data, our second about The Real-Time Web. The third part of our series is on Personalization.

Personalization has long been a buzzword on the Internet. With the glut of information on the Web circa 2009, personalization in this era means providing effective filters and recommendations. Ultimately personalization is about web sites and services giving you what you want, when you want it. That's the long-standing dream anyway. Let's see if the products of 2009 are fulfilling it.

Looking for new iPhone apps? With a marketplace filled with over 65,000 applications (give or take), finding the best ones via iTunes has become an exercise in futility. With the next big Apple announcement a little over a week away, we still have high hopes that Apple will introduce a version of their iTunes software that makes it easier to find new apps which appeal to you. In the meantime however, we turn to the various startups addressing this issue in their own unique ways. The latest company among them to debut an app discovery service is Appolicious, a new social network and app sharing site which reminds us of the social bookmarking mainstay Delicious.

Updated at 1pm PST with quote from Pandora founder Tim Westergren below. Updated August 4th with comment from Clear Channel PR.

Streaming music service Pandora has entered into an ad sales partnership with a subsidiary of media conglomerate Clear Channel, a move that should help ensure the service's long-term financial viability but will likely lead to more ads in the stream and criticism of the independent company for getting in bed with the widely disliked mega-firm.

AdAge provided in-depth coverage of the partnership in a report this morning. A zoom out to look at the criticism that Clear Channel has faced and how this impacts music fans is worthwhile as well.

Google Reader offers a nifty mobile interface, and apps like Byline (iTunes link) and NetNewsWire (iTunes link) are well-designed native apps that allow iPhone users to keep up with their feeds. But slogging through a few hundred subscriptions on the iPhone's small screen can quickly turn into a frustrating experience. My6Sense, which launched the first beta of its web-based mobile feed reader last December, is now finally ready to release its native iPhone app. Thanks to the app's ability to organize your feeds according to a personalized recommendation system that automatically learns from your preferences as you browse through your feeds, keeping up with hundreds of feeds on the iPhone is now easier than ever before.