It also positions MyStrands well as the leading force in recommendations technologies. While big guns like Amazon, Netflix and last.fm (owned by CBS) are all using recommendations, none has it as their primary focus. MyStrands describes itself, broadly, as a company that "develops technologies to better understand people's taste and help them discover things they like and didn't know about already."

In addition to the competition, MyStrands is also a leading force in a conference called the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. MyStrands organized the first such Conference in 2006; and now it is organized under the umbrella of the ACM, last year in the US and this year in Europe.

As we noted in our previous coverage of MyStrands, we'd also love to see this company take a leading position in implementing open data standards. Although it seems to have lost the services of Scott Kveton, current Chair of the OpenID Foundation and formally MyStrands' Director of Open Platforms. Kveton is now at open identity start-up Vidoop, but back in December he was quoted as saying that MyStrands is "looking closely at APML, as well as working on some other 'open formats' for describing user taste data. The gist is, the users own this data and we want to give them as much control over it as possible."

Let's hope that the loss of Kveton hasn't deterred MyStrands from utilizing open standards in its goal to be the leading recommendations company.

It's applications like this that make me love my job reviewing what's new on the web.

I don't know why more sites don't take some stab at accepting inbound APML and offering personalization of content, but I sure am glad to see this site doing so. The APML page on Idiomag could use some explanation and I don't see that it's linked to elsewhere on the site - but there's not a whole lot of demand yet either. What's important is that this service is in the game.

The degree of personalization is really impressive. The video below demonstrates how Idiomag pulls in syndicated content from all over the web and assembles it seamlessly. The automated integration of text and media is particularly striking.

Just like Pandora or Last.fm, your recommendations get increasingly fine tuned by voting for each "article" you like or dislike. My APML file doesn't have much music in it but I plugged my Pandora profile into Idiomag and am already discovering some cool new music. It's an awesome product that is best experienced by trying it out.

The biggest problem with the service is probably its limited content. It's only useful for some musical genres and is far from unlimited in what it offers even in those. For a quick, personalized, daily read with some videos and videos, though, I'm really impressed.

Check out this video below to see how it works.