When looking at personalization, there are a couple of concepts that most people assume -

(1) This is primarily of interest in eCommerce Sites

(2) To perform personalization, a site either needs a transaction history (from which to draw inferences/make recommendations) or requires a user to manually fill out a profile.

The reality is that personalization is valuabe across industry verticals, and now with information cards, you have the ability to easily provide personalization on a persons first visit.

Rather than use the expected eCommerce Site example for personalization, I decided to go a different route.  Instead, I dedicated a chapter to building a project I named "Personal Government". Using a self issued  information card, the Personal Government web site can take a single claim - postal code- and retrieve data across multiple data stores for a personalized expereince. The chapter has the user build this public sector mashup with free web services from StrikeIron. If you actually wer ea public sector website, you can imagine how you could extend this with real data - everything from municipal schedules (what day is trash pickup?) to legislation (which legislation tha tis underconsideration would affect my neighborhood?)

The video can be found at the link below, or by clicking on the image below.

http://www.marcmercuri.com/book/cardspace/informationcardsandpersonalizationinPublicSector/InformationCardsAndPersonalizationInPublicSector_media/InformationCardsAndPersonalizationInPublicSector.wmv