Personalization of Blogs - Your Take

I can't help thinking that as blogs mature more and more they will grow into sophisticated web applications. At least for those of us pushing the limits all the time. Personalization is important. It adds diversity to blog's offerings and makes its existence of more use to the visitor.

Here and there I see some cool features people implement on their own. I admire their ingenuity. I like it when I can leave a comment and request that responses be emailed to me. I also like it when a site tracks which posts I've read and, perhaps, even suggests which ones seem to be along the same avenue. How about a weather report? How about presenting different graphics based on the visitor's language? I suspect this list can grow on and on.

Issues With Maintaining Identity

To offer personalization you need to think of a way to track each visitor's identity. This is the purpose of the whole undertaking—to deliver content customized to each person according to his/her liking. Two approaches come to mind: cookies (client-side) and registration (server-side).

Cookies won't cut it for those who disable them. There are a thousand reasons to disable them and many people do so. Luckily, in ASP.NET you can authenticate users even if they disable cookies.

Registration, on the other hand, is a sticky point. For example, how many news sites out there demand you give out your email address to sign up, so they can "personalize" it for you? To those who code those news sites I have one word: "Stupid." Is there anyone who wants to receive more spam? Is there anyone who is interested in divulging his/her identity to obnoxious "third parties", "partners" and "affiliates"? Sure, a salesman is your best friend.

With this said, what options are left? I can think of "light-weight" registration where all you have to do it pick a unique user name (even if it's only a word you can easily remember). No emails, no passwords.

Food For Thought

I know it's the middle of summer. I don't know many people are reading this, but to those who are I'd like to pose two questions:

1. What kind of personalized content, in your opinion, can a blog offer to make the experience more enjoyable?
2. What kind of registration would you want offered?

Let's pretend from the technology standpoint we can do just about anything. Comments are on. ;)

Sorry for the late comments on this one Milan.

1) I am not so sure I'd come to a blog for any kind of personalized content. But that is just me. I don't really go to any site for personalized content, and even the sites that offer it I usually don't do anything other than whatever defaults it might present me. There are some exceptions to that. For example, on CodeProject, I choose C# as my "preference" so when I go to CodeProject it defaults to C# items on the start page. Another exception might be selecting which content interests me for a newsletter so I don't get the junk I don't care about. It be nice to "turn off" things I know I won't read. Back to the CodeProject site, if I could turn off any VB or old-school ASP sections I likely would.

For a blog this becomes even tougher. Maybe someone might find settings to personalize the content they get in the RSS feed in some way. Then they subscribe to that personalized feed - a step further than subscribing to a category, but maybe even using keywords or something. But really, I read blogs I read (like yours) because I see value in the content. So I wouldn't want to have a personalized feed because I want to see it all anyway. I try to make the content of my blog be the pull, not any extra bells and whistles (but if the bells and whistles are good enough like the tools on your site then that's a different story)

2) IMO, if the content is good enough I'd register. If I had to register to post comments or see the entire article of posts on your blog, I would. But I recognize the value in the content you offer. Someone coming from a google search would likely just say "screw it" and move on. I think the registration idea might keep some from seeing your content, but really probably not that much.

Thank you for your thoughts, Ryan.