Taste profiling...
Audioscrobbler/last.fm finally calculated my "musical neighbors" (people with similar taste to me, as judged by the tracks they play), and now my profile radio is running. It's pretty good at guessing songs I'd like, even though I'd never seek them out on my own. (Of course, it also plays a lot of tracks I already have, but for someone without a large music collection, it'd be a godsend.)
There are other systems similar to Audioscrobbler's for news and movies, but none seem very polished yet. But the day is fast approaching when everything - Flickr pictures, Web links, TV shows - is retrieved for you automatically based on what you've downloaded in the past. You'll just flip on your set-top box, and something you (probably) want to see/hear will be there waiting for you.
Of course, spam could easily prove a problem. Audioscrobbler already had to set up throttling to stop people from artificially inflating the rank of their favorite artist. One could imagine a spammer building a profile identical to yours (hey, look how similar our tastes are! you should listen to some of my music!), then inserting a link to their own Viagra ad. We'll need trust networks to go along with these recommendation networks...
There are other systems similar to Audioscrobbler's for news and movies, but none seem very polished yet. But the day is fast approaching when everything - Flickr pictures, Web links, TV shows - is retrieved for you automatically based on what you've downloaded in the past. You'll just flip on your set-top box, and something you (probably) want to see/hear will be there waiting for you.
Of course, spam could easily prove a problem. Audioscrobbler already had to set up throttling to stop people from artificially inflating the rank of their favorite artist. One could imagine a spammer building a profile identical to yours (hey, look how similar our tastes are! you should listen to some of my music!), then inserting a link to their own Viagra ad. We'll need trust networks to go along with these recommendation networks...