The Foafingmusic2

Site URL: http://foafing-the-music.iua.upf.edu

To make my music list, I have visited last.fm several time and listed some musics. After that, I returned to the Foafing music site and updated the my music profile. The Foafing music site connected to the last.fm and retrieved the music list that I have listen in last.fm and generate the following information.

From the my listening habits, the system detected the two artists (Jessica Simpson, Rhapsody) and it provides related menu on left site.

The left menu provides information that related this two singer who was found in my listing list in last.fm.
I will explore left site menu next time.

An Effective Approach for Periodic Web Personalization

Resource type: paper
Resource url: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1248823.1249113&coll=&dl=

According to the paper, periodic web personalization aims to recommend the most relevant resources to a user during a specific time period by analyzing the periodic access patterns of the user from web usage logs. To support effective periodic web personalization, the author construct a user behavior model, called Personal Web Usage Lattice, from the web usage logs using the Fuzzy Formal Concept Analysis Technique. And then, the author deduces the resource that the user is most probably interested in during a given period. In the experimental, the author generates personalized resource for a set of predefined period conditions and measure the performance based on the applicability and satisfaction measures with respect to the different durations of period conditions and the different number of personalized resource (from 1 to 6). The experimental results shows that the proposed approach has achieved very effective web personalization evaluated by the applicability and satisfaction measures for predefined period conditions.

The Foafingmusic

Site URL: http://foafing-the-music.iua.upf.edu

The Foafing the music is a music recommender system based on user's profile

Based on your FOAF profile and your listening habits, foafing the music recommends the following things:

-similar artists to the ones you like
-new music releases from iTunes, Amazon, Yahoo, etc
-Album reviews from your artists and from recommended artists
-MP3-blogs to download music
-Postcast sessions to stream/download
-Automatic creation of playlist based on (only!) audio similarity
-Incoming concerts near to where you live!

When I create a new account, the system asked for my username or URL of three websites (Livejounal or Bloger, last.fm, and Webjay). From these three sites, they grab some music related information from my profiles.

Before I provide the URL of my blog profile page, I inputed "Dance, R&B, Latin" in favorite music and then saved the profile which is save in FOAF (the Friend of a Friend). From the FOAF profile in the blog site, the site get my favorite music information .

The site also request the user ID in Last.fm site. Last.fm builds a profile of my musical taste using a plugin for my media player. From this site the system gets noticed of music that I recently played.

At last, the site request the user ID in WebJay which is a tool that helps user listen to and publish web playlists. But currently, this service is closed by Yahoo.com

After I finish to create the account, the site took a time to retrieve my profile information from blogger.com site and last.fm site and showed my interests that retrieve from my profile.

The site provides three pages based on the my profile like below

- my artists page contains all the artists detected in my FOAF profile
- my music pages contains all the artists detected from my listening habits (from Audioscrobbler)
- my playlist page contains all the playlists that you have in Webjay (It is not working since the Webjay site is close)

In the artists page , the site showed that artist detected in my FOAF profile is "Dance". It seems the site recognize "Dance" as an artist name and showed one related artist "Shannon", so I added "Michael Jackson", "Elvis Presley" in my favorite music in blogger site and regenerated the my artists information in recommendation site. After that, the site showed that artists detected in my FOAF profile: Dance, Michel Jackson, Elvis Presley and provides following menu:
-related artists
-new releases
-reviews
-MP3-blogs
-Podcasts
-similar music

In the related artists menu, it show more than 30 related artists but I'm not sure what relationship are between them. I guess their music genre(Rock/pop) is same. If I click one of them, the site forward to MP3.com site and show the artist information.

New Contextual Advertising Solution

Resource type: news article
Resource url: http://www.centredaily.com/business/technology/story/393225.html

Openwave Systems Inc. announced the Openwave Contextual Advertising solution, a modular, end-to end advertising and content recommendation system that is designed to allow operators to capture value from targeted advertising by leveraging their existing subscriber relationships and unique network assets.
Their new personalization driven advertising solution reflects the multi-channel (mobile, PC and TV media) and user-based approach. This solution allows operators to offer subscribers the opportunity to receive only highly targeted and relevant advertisements, offers and recommendations, based on their immediate context, interests, location or demographic. Openwave's solution uses real-time context, user behavioral history, location information and voluntarily data to determine and recommend relevant ads and offers.

Openwave's modular Contextual Advertising solution including the following;

• Personalization system: it is a targeting engine that leverages key subscriber data
• historical behavior/transactions
• expressed preferences
• demographic information
• other data to infer user preferences
• Advertising broker
• delivery application modules
• ecosystem management
• advertising APIS

"About Openwave

Openwave Systems Inc. (Nasdaq:OPWV) is one of the world's leading innovators of software applications and infrastructure designed to enable revenue-generating, personalized services, including merchandising and advertising, which converge the mobile and broadband experience across all of a user's devices.

As the communications industry intersects with the Internet, Openwave software enables service providers to converge services, increasing the value of their networks by accelerating time to market and reducing the cost and complexity associated with new service deployment. Openwave's unique product portfolio provides a complete range of service management, messaging, location and client technologies. Openwave is a global company headquartered in Redwood City, California. For more information please visit www.openwave.com."

The exploration of Buy.com recommend system

I choose Buy.com which is my target recommend system that I'm going to explore during this semester. By interacting with the site, I will figure out how they reflect the knowledge and technique of recommend system into the site.

When I visited the Buy.com site, the site showed many items in main page to lead the customer's interest. The first curiosity is whether they provide different personalized main page to visitors or not. So, I visit the main page from two computers. From one computer I visited site anonymously and then I visited the main page of the site after I finished the login from another computer. The site showed the same main page to my anonymous visiting and authenticated visiting.
The site doesn't provide a personalized main page to their visitors.

In the main page, they showed many recommend items to visitor under the different subtitle like below;

-What's shakin': they shows the products with the highest change in sales rank over the past 24 hours.

- Deal of the week: they show one special items with a special price and free shopping. They compare the list price with our price, so it hook in customers.

- Featured Products: they show some featured products that are made by a specific company

- Most popular : they show popular items in their site.

- What's hot: it link to the What's shakin' page

- What's the buzz.. : they show the items that related with buzz at that time. Today buzz are tax, blu-Ray DVD player, Oscar nominees, grammys, and so on

- Featured promotions : they show all promotions items in this week.

- What there's more : they show the top-selling CDs from today's hottest artists at great low prices. They show how much customer can save money for each item.

This is all I have found recommend features in main page of Buy.com site. Next week, I will explore more deep pages in Buy.com site.

Target site: http://www.buy.com
Spend time: over 1 hours

A New Social Advertising Model

Source type: News article
URL:http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/1/prweb663244.htm
The online marketing company TellAPal is launching a revolutionary system of advertising to enable advertisers to reach the hundreds of millions of users of social networks. Based on "referral marketing," TellAPal is the first recommendation based ad network optimized for social media and advertiser ROI. TellAPal's new system is completely user driven and it enables advertisers to empower their existing customers to recommend their product or service to their friends. Recommendations are made through personalized emails, IM, blogs, or social networking site and allow their friends to sign up for a special offer. If their friend sign up for the special offer, the recommender can earn rewards. This system shows how effectively advertisers can reach potential customers using recommend model

Simply say, this social adverting platform bring the word of mouth marketing, incentive marketing, and social media together and it works like below;

Step 1. An advertiser joins the TellAPal network and launches the program to their existing customers.

Step 2. Customers write a recommendation of the product or service combined with a special offer (ex. 30 day free trial).

Step 3. They user TellAPal's viral distribution platform to tell their friends.

Step 4. For each valid new customer, the referring customer gets a reward.

Resource: TellAPal.com