What is Personalization?

According to Wikipedia, personalization is "tailoring a consumer product, electronic or written medium to a user based on personal details or characteristics they provide." Personalization allows you to create a Web site that is specific to those who access the site.

Web personalization models include rules-based filtering, based on "if this, then that" rules processing, and collaborative filtering, which serves relevant material to customers by combining their own personal preferences with the preferences of like-minded others.

Rules-based filtering is "programming that makes use of pattern-directed invocation of procedures from assertions and goals."Rules-based filtering seems extremely hard to explain because a lot of it has to do with mathematical equations. I am assuming that this is primarily the type of personalization that Pandora uses because the site looks for patterns in each individual song's sound, and base their recommendations on these patterns.

On the other hand, collaborative filtering (CF) is the method of making automatic predictions (filtering) about the interests of a user by collecting taste information from many users (collaborating). The underlying assumption of CF approach is that: Those who agreed in the past tend to agree again in the future. For example, a collaborative filtering or recommendation system for music tastes could make predictions about which music a user should like given a partial list of that user's tastes (likes or dislikes).

Pandora does not base its recommendations on other user's likes and dislikes, but rather bases them on the employee's analysis of each song. However, Last.fm does use collaborative filtering because all of their recommendations are bases on what other users are listening to.