Transparency is the great buzzword of the year, both in politics and online media, although hard evidence of it is less apparent than the rhetoric. The newly re-launched DailyMe.com is bringing the
notion of transparency in a new direction by letting readers of its aggregated news service see how the behavioral tracking models work. This approach has positive implications both for content and
advertising.
Once you register for the site and start tooling around articles, your recent behaviors are outline and categorized by news entities in the new Newstogram feature. The DailyMe
system extracts from the articles news categories (economy, construction, politics, etc.), people, companies, organizations and more to present a set of bar charts illustrating your relative
interests. The user then can click on any of the granular sub-segments and choose to track that topic in a My News box in the upper right of every screen.
"We let you view how the system views
you," says founder and CEO Eduardo Hauser. The model lets you use your own recent behaviors to act as a navigation tool and to shape your own profile. In the Newstogram graph, the entities reflect
inferred interests according to your recent travels; users can tell the system to "Track It" and elevate the segment or topics into a declared interest.
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The user can click on any of these My News
categories and get a dynamically created page around that segment. Ultimately, all behaviors and interest also morph in the front page of the site. Beneath a set of features all users see, the rest of
the page is occupied by "Headlines for You," which reflect your interests based on behaviors.
The interesting part about DailyMe is that the underlying technology is being offered as a set of
tools that third -party publishers can productize in a number of ways.
Sites can use the same behavioral tracking and content extraction engine to get an abstracted Newstogram view of all the
activity on their own site. Partners who install DailyMe's Javascript tracking code on their pages will be able to access a Newstogram site that visualizes in bar graphs the aggregate behaviors on
their sites and the trending of specific news entities relative to an earlier period.
The publisher gets a real time view on the specific topics, people, companies, in their content that are most
popular at a given moment and trending. "For partners, we are advocating as a first step installing the code and seeing if the data that comes out of that code is of any value," says Hauser. "Then we
can show you derivative products from that data."
The Newstogram profiler can be used at another site or the data simply can be used to create various related news, recommended news and
dynamically created topic focus pages for an individual. While others offer similar services, Hauser says that the DailyMe approach is tuned specifically for news and information sites, as opposed to
e-commerce. As well, he highlights this unique combination of entity extraction from articles layered in with behavioral tracking and relevance ranking.
As a tool for ad targeting, DailyMe
offers partners an API that can be woven into calls to the ad server. The publisher can pass along to its ad server either the contextual information about that page or the behavioral information
about that user. The publisher pays a 2-cent fee per API call. Otherwise, a partner can elect to let DailyMe run targeted ads into recommendation or Newstogram modules that run on site and split the
revenue.
It remains to be seen how much more effectively the DailyMe engine works to target ads or content than existing approaches. News content can be difficult to target ads into aside for
broadly defined categories. Issues of sensitivity abound, and the content of a news article can be so far-reaching, the possibility of false or inappropriate ad targeting arises. It isn't clear to me
whether advertisers will be able to leverage at scale the kind of granularity of news segmentation that an engine like this makes possible. Several large scale news publishers are testing the
technology, Hauser says.
From a consumer's perspective, the most interesting piece of this effort is the Newstogram tool, although the naming convention (a play on "histogram") is too clever by
halves. Nevertheless, it is one of the best executed instances of surfacing for the user the ways in which a behavioral tracking system is seeing his activities. Perhaps he or she won't want to tinker
with his profile. Perhaps we don't want this level of control over our online profile. What is important is that it is there and visible.
If users have this kind of access to how the machine is
viewing them for content and ad targeting purposes, it peels one more layer of mystery and suspicion away. What is interesting about marrying the ad and content targeting approach is that the benefit:
In a unified system of content and ad targeting, marketers and technologist no longer have to make the strained argument that BT improves their online experience solely by reducing irrelevant ads. I
have to wonder if users would be more amenable to ad targeting if they see the same technology clearly benefiting their overall content experience.
Transparency alone is not the right answer to
the quandary over privacy and targeting. The users must not only feel in control but be able to see a real benefit from the technology. DailyMe's approach is among the more promising examples of being
both transparent and communicative.