Resurgence of interest in personalized information

There has been a lot of news about personalization and recommendations of information in the last week.

Google News launched additional implicit personalization of news based on your clickstream, bringing it yet another step closer to the Findory of seven years ago.

Yahoo reversed an earlier policy to keep data only for 90 days, now upping it to three years, because tossing data away was hurting their efforts to improve relevance and personalize their search, news, and advertising.

Hank Nothhaft writes at Mashable that the Facebook News Feed really needs to be personalized implicitly based on what you consume and surface news from across the web. He says it should not only deliver "the best and most relevant news and blog posts on my favorite topics and interests, but it also recommends deals and product information, things to do and even media like videos and podcasts, all picked just for me" (which, if implemented as described, might also make Facebook News Feed similar to Findory).

Finally, Mark Milian at CNN points to all the efforts at newspapers and startups on personalized news. What strikes me about these is how few focus on advertising, which is the core business of newspapers, and improving the usefulness and revenue of ads on news sites. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt had some useful thoughts on that some time ago that are still worth reading for those working on personalizing information today.