There is a very fine line between tailoring to our needs and monitoring our every action. This week the Economist features an article on Behavioral Targeting and it raises the point that the business model for advertising has to change and that this is an evolutionary step in the right direction. With over 80% of the browsing public use Google for search, we are flooded with irrelevant advertising and more importantly irrelevant content.

(Reminder… I just want to thank you Sante for the market research he sent me on Italy)

What people are worried about is the ‘Big Brother’ effect and this is where behavioral targeting titters on that fine line. The danger here is that some companies no doubt will taint this valuable transition by capturing data that should not be stored. Strict regulations need to be put in place that details the types of data and amount of time allowed period to which this data can be held. If this can be done, without inherently limiting the technology then we are definitely heading in the right direction. The next step will be to totally overhaul the search industry to make it more relevant. It is not good having 7M+ websites relating to your search if 99.99% of them are totally not what you’re looking for. There are some companies that are working on developing semantic web search and these are really when things can start to get exciting again. Imagine a world were a Search Engine brings you valuable results!

(…sounds like online utopia to me)