So there may have been a glass or two of wine taken, but you know that when you get two or more digital marketers gathered, even over cheap pizza, there’s going to be a discussion on a) ideas for niche cool start ups b) latest virals on youtube etc or c) search. Last night was all three, but the conversation about personalised search is the one that stays with me during this slightly out of focus day.
So web 2.0 has been all about user generated content, web 3.0 is all about personalisation. Digital is getting to grips with some amazing behavioural and preference based opportunities. But with the convenience of personalisation comes a darker possible reality.
Take your profiling music engine. You like Tom Waits and based on this preference you get to hear Mr Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat. You continue to review the content and based on your choices and the neural networking of the choices of other users, you continue to be fed music in one genre. But what about your penchant for latent 80’s, blue eyeshadow and big hair power ballads… should it remains buried somewhere deep in you subconscious. The problem is that you’re being fed content which is already part of your ken and experience, the randomness of life and musical exploration is dampened. (or is this the onset of middle age?).
But from a marketing/commercial side, this thinking is almost the antipothesis to the Long Tail i.e. supplying to the infrequent niche to large populations can be more lucrative in the digital sphere than following traditional demand and supply models.
So it’s similar with personalised search. Great; you can turn it on and off. Fantastic; getting results which have a higher probability of being what you are actually looking for is no bad thing! Search is already taking us through the back door of sites to what is perceived as being content relevant to our needs, but is there a danger that we’ll loose all that colour that an engine can bring to daily searching and all that will be on offer will be vanilla.
