"We tell you what you want, what you really really want"

Maybe you don’t like Girly Pop Music from the 90s, not everyone does. But how should we have known without knowing you, our audience?

This question is at the core of a new project we have just started: CPN – Content Personalisation Network. Together with eight other European partners (media-, tech- and research- companies/ institutions such as VRT, WAN-IFRA, ATC or ENGINEERING), the DW Innovation team sets out on a quest to explore the ongoing trend of news personalization and automated content recommendation.

Content personalisation is already omnipresent in the current media landscape and we all experience it every day. Whether it is the order of our friends’ posts on Facebook, Twitter’s suggestions on what you might have missed, Spotify’s new music recommendations (maybe not the Spice Girls this time) or just the “you might also be interested in” section on your favorite shopping or news website.

With CPN, we want to address this development and create a toolset which will help media publishers to provide content to users that takes into account the different location, context, and knowledge about certain topics while preserving a pluralistic European media landscape which stresses cultural diversity, transparency, and journalistic professionalism.

The main goal of the project will be an innovative approach to content personalization which can be applied to various platforms and outputs and used by small and large media companies alike. We will explore existing ways of personalization and find new solutions to offering personalized content. While always keeping a strong focus on ethical implications of personalization in the times of the infamous filter bubble and privacy concerns.

Project CPN started in September 2017 and will run until February 2020. DW Innovation’s role is to lead the requirements process and to pilot and validate the system. To keep up to date with the progress of CPN, please have a look at our website and our twitter channel (both still under contruction as we’re writing this).

(Olga Kisselmann, Tilman Wagner)

Photo by Annie Theby/Unsplash.

Find the original article here.