Several people internal and external to NextStage sent me The Economist's article Watching while you surf. This article's subheading is "Online advertising: New ad-targeting systems, which determine users' interests by monitoring which websites they visit, are proving controversial".
People sent me this article because they wonder if NextStage does anything like that.
A) No, we don't. At least not as described in the article and
B) I'm Shocked -- Shocked, I tell you -- that this kind of monitoring is going on.
(A) above is truth and (B) above is sarcasm. You might not have noticed.
Reading through the article, it's (to me) another example of the RBFH approach to solving a problem. The mystery to me is that so many people/organizations seem to live and die by the factum "Your strength is your weakness and your weakness is your strength" without ever exploring the second part of that statement.Companies install software on ISP networks that monitor words on pages people download. The words (I'm guessing) are determined by some business rules/models. The pages that are monitored ditto. Tritto and Quarttro for all the other things technology hides in the above.
Maybe this makes sense with excessively large data sets. How large must the data set be before the method begins to make sense, though? I can understand looking for miniscule variations in data sets of the EM spectrum, does the same or similar concepts apply to internet surfing? Do these companies expect to discover ET?
(Believe or not, there was no pun intended)
Quoting the article "Behavioural-targeting firms are doing the rounds in Europe and America offering the prospect of working out what web surfers are thinking, perhaps even before they know themselves."
For the record (and because I'll be answering this question in more detail elsewhere), that's what NextStage does. Or our technology, anyway. It knows how people think and yes, often before they're aware of what they're thinking. We don't use the method defined in the article. Just a little javascript on a webpage. No, we don't collect personal information.
What's most amusing to me is that other groups are contacting me to evaluate the claims of companies doing this kind of work.
Who knows? I might have a future... Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
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