Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul, put his finger on a problem we have here at Daily Commercial News and the Journal of Commerce. Speaking at Georgetown University on April 2, 2008, he said:

Unlike traditional media, choices in the future will be generated from the bottom up, not top-down. A 13-year-old girl in Delhi is not going to want the same news and entertainment as a 50-year-old executive in Chicago.

In Canadian construction industry terms, the general contractor in Edmonton, Alberta, is not going to want the same news as the architect in Toronto, Ontario. However, Murdoch's solution has a problem. He says:

Our challenge is to personalize the experience for these people so we can reach them both.

According to a Harris poll released April 10, "a majority of U.S. adults are skeptical about the practice of websites using information about a person’s online activity to customize website content." A Reuters story about the survey refers to customization as the "creepy factor". To some people, customizing content to their interest reminds them of the way the eyes in a portrait appear to follow you as you walk past it.

The Harris poll offers a solution that is almost ignored in the Reuters story.

After being presented with the privacy/security policies, all generations level of comfort increase. Echo Boomers increase to 62 percent from 49 percent. Gen X’ers increase to 56 percent from 45 percent. Baby Boomers’ comfort increases to a majority (52%) from 34 percent

The Canadian Web sites, like most Web sites, bury the privacy policy in the most obscure place on the Web page. Its positioning fulfills the legal and corporate requirements. The Harris poll suggests that if the site uses visitor behavior to customize the content, the provisions of the privacy policy should be given much more prominence.

Only 5% of visitors to DCN and JOC visit the site once a week or more. With an average page view per visit of three, a typical visitor is completely unaware of 98% of the recent content on the site. He would benefit enormously if he saw stories that relate to his interest rather than just the stories that were published the day of his visit.

However, what he sees on the site might be very different from what someone else sees. I can imagine how it might seem creepy and even presumptuous. You don't have to be paranoid to start wondering if a site knows a little about your interests, what else does it know and what is it doing with that information.

The facts are that we know next to nothing about individual visitors to the site and we don't share even that small amount of information with anyone else. The Harris poll suggests it would be useful to emphasize those facts to our visitors before they start to wonder.

But the fact also is that we would like to know more. Explaining to the visitors that the more we know about them, the better we can serve them will be a lot more complicated.

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