I’ve discovered during this holiday season that my interests are fairly easy to define.
Every year, people ask me "what I want" for Christmas so this year I decided to create an Amazon.com wish/gift list. During that time, several things have been added, other things have been cut, but the end result has been a very clear definition of what my interests are.
- Books about Dogs & Dog Adoptions
- Books about Las Vegas & Blackjack Strategy
- Books about Japanese Sake
- Any good HD-DVDs
- Various electronics (Zune, Slingbox, Xbox 360 peripherals and games)
- A few select Alternative/Modern rock Music CDs
- Non-fiction Audiobook CDs
While this might not seem like a clear list, it really is. Nothing on my rather long list falls outside of this set of categories.
In fact, this Christmas, I knocked out about half my "wishlist" but I also noticed that people that accessed my list, ABSOLUTELY NEVER actually bought the items directly from Amazon.com. I’m sure a big part of this was the fact that it requires a delivery charge (something I don’t have to deal with since I’m an Amazon Prime member) and the fact that many people I know still haven’t gotten used to purchasing gifts online instead of at brick & mortar stores during the holidays. In contrast, I bought virtually everything online for my family and friends this year.
In any case, I found this all very interesting. It’s very rare that I’m able to look at a collected list of my’s wants and derive an aggregate set of personal interests through it. I wonder what this list will look like in 10 years.
Even more interesting… I wonder how Amazon consumes this information into it’s neural network to derive what kind of other things I’d be interested in.
Spooky!
Kurt's Thoughts 