{"id":652863,"date":"2013-04-17T10:30:25","date_gmt":"2013-04-17T14:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paidcontent.org\/?p=227812"},"modified":"2013-04-17T10:30:25","modified_gmt":"2013-04-17T14:30:25","slug":"content-personalization-still-has-a-long-way-to-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/652863","title":{"rendered":"Content personalization still has a long way to go"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two companies who are leading the way on personalized digital magazines agree that we haven\u2019t yet come close to unlocking the power of true personalized content yet.<\/p>\n

At paidContent Live 2013<\/a> Wednesday, Prismatic co-founder and CTO Aria\u00a0Haghighi said those in the business of helping readers discover new content can\u2019t even agree on a definition yet. \u201cWe\u00a0don\u2019t all agree on what personalization means. I agree (that it means pointing you to) stuff you care about \u2026 some people think it\u2019s only getting signal from noise,\u201d he said. \u201cI think we\u2019re really early. I don\u2019t think we\u2019ve matured to point where we (the industry) have philosophical differences yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mark Johnson, who is CEO of competing product Zite, agreed that there\u2019s so much more to do. \u201cWe\u2019re good at finding stuff, but we can be so much better. We haven\u2019t had that Google moment yet that\u2019s, \u2018Aha! That\u2019s what personalization is.\u2019\u201d He compared it to when AltaVista users turned to early Google search and said, \u201cSo that\u2019s what search is!\u201d<\/p>\n

That point of personalizing reading content for users is also the challenge: everyone\u2019s feed will always be different because no one likes the same stuff. Improving that capability will depend on big factors that haven\u2019t quite been figured out yet either: the social aspect and helping people understand why content is recommended to them.<\/p>\n

Both Prismatic and Zite agree that helping users understand why you\u2019re showing them content is key: \u201cEven if you do world\u2019s best job recommending an article or content to people, if they don\u2019t have an explanation of why, people feel uneasy,\u201d said Haghighi. \u201cYou have surface parts of the system to give information to people. That\u2019s where user response intersects with AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of recommendation is social \u2014 what your friends or people with your same interests liked \u2014 but no one has done a good job of that in their industry yet, Johnson thinks. Social \u201csharing is the tip of the iceberg,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s\u00a0something deeper you can do in these applications that no one has nailed yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here<\/a>, and a video embed of the session follows below:<\/p>\n