This is pretty cool and a little big brotherish as well. Network World originally posted this article a couple days ago, but it caught my eye and looks to be an interesting concept. Check it out and send us your thoughts.

Credit: NetworkWorld.com

Web sites that automatically customize themselves for each visitor so they come across as more appealing or simply less annoying can boost sales for online businesses by close to 20%, MIT research says.

These sites adapt to display information so everyone who visits sees a version best suited to their preferred style of absorbing information, say the four researchers who write about such sites in "Website Morphing", a paper being published this month in Marketing Science .

So the site might play an audio file and present graphics to one visitor, but present the same information as text to the next depending on each person's cognitive style. Morphing sites deduce that style from the decisions visitors make as they click through pages on the site.

"You need five to 10 clicks before you can really get a pretty good idea of who they are," says John Hauser, the lead author of the paper and a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management. He says over the past decade statistics have evolved to allow broader conclusions from less data.

"You can infer a lot more from a lot less data by borrowing data from other respondents," he says. "When I first heard it I thought this couldn't possibly work."

But it does. By using a sample set of users navigating a test Web site, individual businesses can set the baseline for what click choices on that site mean about the visitor. Over time with real potential customers visiting a live site, the morphing engine fine tunes itself to draw better conclusions about visitors' preferences and to serve up what pages most likely lead to a sale, Hauser says.

The software is open source and available at MIT's Web site, but so far no one has created a commercial business to apply it to individual customers, he says.

Such auto-customizing Web sites are less intrusive than the alternative - sites that visitors can manually customize, a time-consuming process that many visitors won't bother with, the researchers say. And they create the right Web site for maximum sales much quicker, Hauser says.

Check out the rest of the article here.

Cloud computing is all the rage these days, you've even seen articles about it on this site. But can you provide the true definition of cloud computing? Can anybody!?!? Well, Joyent hosting got together with some of the big boys in technology and tried to define cloud computing. Interviewees include Tim O’Reilly, Dan Farber, Rafe Needleman, Brian Solis, and Stowe Boyd. Check out the video below and let us know what you think of the cloud computing phenomenon.

Credit: NetworkWorld.com

Credit: FoxNews.com

The Internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.