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September 4, 2007
Note to self, read this biography when it comes out. Today
I read a piece in the New York Times by Nicholas Wade about
the race to decode the human genome. In
the Genome Race the Sequence is Personal. It
featured the biologist Dr. J. Craig Venter and his battle
to decipher the human genome and how he lost the first leg
of the contest to a government backed academic consortium.
But today, Dr Venter is announcing that he may have caught
up and may have a better version of the human genome because
it consists of the DNA of both parents. This is called a full
or5 diploid genome. To achieve this, he led his institute
(J.
Craig Venter Institute) spending $10 million analyzing
his own DNA. "The Venter Genome" showed there were
significantly more differences than expected in a human genome.
Some regard his work as vain, because of his methods and
the fact that his genetic code was the focus. Next month,
Venter's Autobiography, A Life Decoded will be published.
It chronicles his journey from rebel to Vietnam War medic,
to medical researcher.
Learning about Dr. Venter made me want to read his upcoming
book and it made me think about that technology blueprint
that we are leaving behind. Whether it is the multiple Google
searches or the log files for a companies website, or combined
purchases and habits and preferences we have stored at multiple
sites.
The potential for our Search DNA to be exploited is huge
on both the marketing and privacy fronts. If the ability exists
to develop and capture information in aggregate and then have
that information understood and shared across multiple platforms
across multiple organizations then corporations could have
a shared data set about what we have done and what we might
do. This has obvious privacy implications.
Most everything that we do, is captured now, but I don't
see that anyone has used this information in a cohesive way
to personalize search results, or to create a personalized
search experience, or to understand that what a searcher's
or customer's behavior is and could be.
For example, since language drives so much of search now,
a company might be able to build a vocabulary on each user
and reference that to sites they visit, and segment that user
for related products. Publishers might be able to use that
technology to offer advertisers a deeper relationship with
its visitors. For example the online travel section of a Newspaper
or Travel Magazine, might be able to offer repeat visitors
who have searched for specific articles about places, ads
about cameras, or tours and later might be able to sell access
to this user with uniquely identifiable information. This
information about users could be accessed upon return vists.
Google may be doing this already, but I don't know that they
are doing it in a sophisticated format or offering. Maybe
its the next version of Analytics. Maybe if we could them
give them a copy of our Search DNA they could anticpate everything
we would search for, for the rest of our lives. (Only kidding)
Let me know what you think.
Francis McGovern
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