What information have companies collected about you? Your attention data, behaviors, demographics, clickstream patterns, etc… and more.

Which companies have personal data about you?
Where is it stored? Who has control of it?
Or rather.. who have they sold it to? And what will they do with it?

MANY companies now maintain a large array of personal info about anyone who uses their website or other services. Most companies use personal data to target products, advertisements and other offers to consumers.

Pierre-Guillaume Wielezynski of the World Bank, posted about a future model of user-centric ad-serving where corporations partner with individuals to access their personal information.

At this point, I strongly believe that social media spam prevention must occur at the social network software level. Social media sites can fight social spam by create algorithms that individualize user experience by interpreting relevancy through user relationships. Relationship data can come from what & how a user votes for, views, reads, recommends, bookmarks, or includes in his or her personal social network.

Utilizing OpenID Systems

Hopefullly, OpenID systems will allow social media sites to share user reputation, relevance, preference, and trust data with other social sites. More user data leads to the creation of more effective social media spam prevention tools, as well as increasingly relevant user experiences that give you exactly what you want.

Many bloggers already currently optimize their RSS feed to encourage feed discovery, post reading, or click-throughs back to site. But contextual feed readers like BlogRovr open up completely new possibilities for feed reader optimization.

What is Contextual Feed Reader Optimization?

I would define contextual feed reader optimization as optimizing your blog, RSS feed, and blog posts, so that your blog posts display to BlogRovr users when they browse contextually-relevant web pages.

Just to recap, BlogRovr is a feed reader that analyzes the webpage you are currently viewing, and then displays a list of relevant blog posts from feeds that you already subscribe to.

It just got a lot easier for you to build powerful user accounts at social sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Reddit. Check out the social media Firefox extension by 97thfloor.

With this extension, you can easily check the webpages you are viewing to see if they have already been submitted to social media sites. Find great content while browsing, and be the first to submit it.

You can even browse the social sites to find popular content that hasn’t found it’s way to other social sites!

I’m installing it right now.

Send thanks to the guys at 97thfloor.com.

When did feed reading become such a burden? I recently thought back to when RSS and syndication were brand new buzz words. When feed syndication was first introduced, supporters raved that RSS would save you time, right? Instead of navigating to 20 different websites to keep current on important news, RSS enabled important news to be syndicated directly to us.

And yes, subscribing to feeds increased my productivity - back when I only had 15 - 20 feed subscriptions. Now I have 87.

How many do you currently subscribe to? 50? 100? 200? Most people don’t have time to keep current with many more than that, right?