Creating Content for Personalization

What is it that makes personalized content different from other content? How can the same content be used for all users and also in a personalized view? The key to supporting personalization is to create content with the necessary data or metadata that allows it to be dovetailed with user preferences. For instance, many web sites offer weather information. This data is linked to a specific geographic area and to a time period. To allow personalization of weather forecasts, you would need to ensure that the user profile could be matched to those forecasts, such as by associating a set of postal codes with a weather map. Similarly, if you wanted to allow personalization of photographs, you would need to apply the appropriate metadata when the photographs were filed (for example, golf, environment, or state government).

The portal taxonomy is a natural place to turn as you start to map users to content. You can use the taxonomy to categorize content and also link the taxonomy to the user profile. For instance, you could ask users to prioritize the top three taxonomy entries in which they are interested. The site could send email notification when new content is posted in any of these three areas.