Section 2: The new information environment

Personalised services: iGoogle, Pageflakes and Intute

Personalising a particular search engine can have the added benefit of bringing in snippets of useful information as a search is done. Here's an example of an iGoogle page:

It includes feeds, links to Google Docs and additional tabs for specific projects/teams that are being worked with.

Activity Try this out for yourself. Go to one of the major search engines (Yahoo, Google, Live Search), or a tool such as Pageflakes or netvibes, and customise the opening screen. Add your local weather forecast. Experiment to find the modules that will enable you to keep up to date. You will have to register to use these services. These services also often offer feed readers, so you can access everything in one place. Try adding some feeds from your favourite newspaper or from a blog. Register for MyIntute and select your areas of interest from 'Subjects'. Select 'New journal entry' in MyStuff (opens in new window) and make a note of your experiences.

To what extent do your information services support personalisation? Does your OPAC (Online Public Access Catalogue) - or whatever it is that your service uses to afford access to the collection - provide recommender services? Does it allow users to personalise it in any way? Compare the personalisation services offered by your services with the one you have just set up in the activity. Do they 'build loyalty and a meaningful one-to-one relationship', as Riecken (2000) suggests?

There is a downside to personalisation - information is being collected about each individual who registers to use the system. Individuals have to make a decision about the extent to which they wish to protect their privacy versus the benefits of a personalised service. Philipp Lenssen raises this very point in his humorous blog posting 'A notice from the Bureau of Public Anomaly Screenings'.