Describing the Descriptors

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by: Gary Hayes

I have had a few separate emails asking exactly what I mean by personalization. I believe the area is broad (deliberately so I find it hard to be constrained by narrow topics), portentous and covers the cross-over between life, media and virtuality. I spent three years as Chair of the Business Models working group with an international team developing a really cool standard TV-Anytime that became a way to personalize content and map content to viewers – but went beyond just TV or Radio very quickly.

A tired old presentation at NAB 2003 – I had had a hard night in Vegas, as you do – still the last slide part begins the journey.

In lay mans terms though personalization means to me:
1 – the filters through which we have services and media tailored to us and
2 – the design of services and content that are flexible enough to resonate with others on a one to one, or one to few level.

Ummm – not really lay mans descriptors, how about

automatically getting stuff (out of too much) that you will likely want or need and how to make stuff that will reach and resonate with others through the same mechanism – agents of choice use your preferences to point out stuff you will like.

This is way beyond search not a world hoping that Google or other search engines will pick up all those lovely keywords or have crawled your latest video or audio track then having pulled them out of the broadbandosphere, display them for all to see – no this is – you can see I am struggling here! not totally happy with these descriptors; how about a structured little summary of the key alternate perspectives on personalizing media:

Personal journeys, services are responsive and tailored to you as individual when you are:

    – On narrative paths across devices or through media types
    – On routes through one media type (the ‘you’ cut) and the non-linear narrative variations around that
    – Immersed in interactive services

Your profile, creating the digital you, the thing that represents you as entity and interoperable dynamic soul, extended into the digital space, enabling:

    – Control – over this digital personality you decide who you are, or not, or if you want and trust the system to learn you most effectively
    – Interface – whatever you are interacting with, car controls, a games interface, broadband TV portal, ePaper etc: it adapts for you or is set for you to use it most efficiently
    – Changing profiles – growing and changing as you travel across interoperable cross-media systems such as taking the "mini me digital you" from home to mobile to work to social, learning about you as it travels
    – Tailored services – that alter themselves based on your characteristics and carry on learning about you in the service
    – Media match – having audio, video, books, interactive content or other merchanidise linked to you
    – People match – having other profiles, people matched to you for collaborative creative, project or life goals

Content creation and customization – media that you create and share that reaches others: AV, text, image, re-edits, mashes, sampling, blogs, vblogs, wikis all richly meta-tagged to allow personalization engines to draw your media and match it.

"The media altered to fit your match users stated needs as well as needs perceived by the system based on the available user information, for the purpose of better serving the user by anticipating needs, making the interaction efficient and satisfying for both parties and building a relationship that encourages the user to return for more."

Life digitised, non-visual proxies of you in the virtual space, a quest and goal of merging all those proxies into the most effective representation that creates the least resistance between analogue and digital. Hold it getting a little too sci-fi now’ back to the real world, now where did I put that cd.

Original Post: http://www.personalizemedia.com/index.php/2005/09/16/describing-the-descriptors/