Personalized

Personalization is tailoring specifically to one individual.

Adaptation of a consumer product, electronic or written medium, based on personal details or characteristics provided by a user or consumer.

On the World Wide Web, personalization (or personalisation) means changing web pages based on the interests of an individual. Personalization implies that the changes are based on implicit data, such as items purchased or pages viewed. The term customization often is used instead when the site only uses explicit data such as ratings or preferences.

In written media, be it magazines or promotional publications, personalization is implemented based on databases of information which can also use the technique of mail merge for direct marketing. Not only does the written document address itself by name directly to the reader, but the contents (the articles or even the publicity) are more precisely aimed at the reader according to their characteristics.

The same principals of personalization are implemented in the promotional items industry (cups, t-shirts, key-chains etc) as well as in video games (for example the Sims- [1]) and even in children's literature which offers personalized books- be it Create-a-book [2]) a company which started personalizing children’s books in the beginning of the 1980's or Printakid [3], which personalizes the illustrations in its books.

There are two categories of personalizations:

1. rule-based
2. content-based

See also

• Collaborative filtering
• Recommendation system