Q.15 This week your assignment is about web personalisation. I want you to take a stand on personalisation – either for it or against it. Then write 250-300 words explaining your position, providing objective evidence to back up your opinion. Ensure that you use your own arguments and thinking. As usual there are extra marks when you illustrate your points with images, and extra marks when you give appropriate examples of what is good or bad about personalisation with links to web sites showing good and/or bad practice.
This is the final assessment in this module, where you post to your blog. Please keep your blog live until July 2010, in case the external examiners need to view it.
Personalisation:
I would have to be for personalisation, after using Facebook and now iGoogle as my homepage. Lets look into more detail, starting by looking at iGoogle personalised for myself on my computer. The image below is the screenshot of my iGoogle:
iGoogle allows personalisation, with themes and gadgets based around your google search box. This is really only the start of personalisation, as there are many more forms of it used on the web. Web personalisation is one of the most popular web intelligence techniques used by E-commerce business’ to help them improve a user’s experience and increase the business’ profit margins. Web personalisation can be known as a way to tailor, the end users experience over the web to suit their needs. Company like Amazon personalise the end user’s amazon page to illustrate things they might like to buy based on previous purchased items. I think this is a very effective way of using the facillities open to companies on the web. I like when purchasing items on amazon that I am shown related products, that sometimes are actually worth while recomendations. It helps to make the end user of products that are out their, that they may not be aware of, but would purchase if they knew. Below shows my amazon page, with recomendations after items I have purchased:
Another reason for being all for personalisation on the web is due to sites like Facebook and Twitter. Facebook allows a user to have multiple friends along with a wall where comments can be placed from friends. Facebook also allows you to select whose posts you would like and not like to see shown on your live feed. This is a great example of personalisation, where you can see what you want to see, and hide the rest from sight. I personally think that this dynamically enchances an end users connection with web technologies. Why? You might ask? That was just my opinion but say there was no personalisation to suit your needs, using facebook for illustration, I would have to see friends make status updstes every 10 minutes, that would drive me to get rid of facebook! That is a key mistake for companies that make such sites, as they will lose an audience and revenue. I think that shows why I am for personalisation on the web, or it could be because I like things to be personal to me instead of a wide audience. I feel that it means more and relates better to your situation.
