Spinfield: Web marketing trends today, tomorrow, and beyond…

The other day I was driving to work, getting ready for the day by listening to my favorite 80’s station, and the DJ was discussing that Peter Gabriel founded a Web site, called The Filter. The Web site is designed to offer you entertainment suggestions by sorting through your likes and dislikes. As explained on their Web site:

The Filter, the vision of Peter Gabriel, the Grammy award-winning artist and digital media pioneer, is an online discovery experience that filters the world of online entertainment and information, personalising it for each individual user.

The site is currently in beta, and you can view their blog for the latest news as well as watch a video of Peter Gabriel discussing The Filter. In addition to creating an online account, you can also import your preferences from Last.fm and Flixster, and download The Filter to your Mac or PC to improve your daily recommendations.

I decided to see how well it works, and according to their homepage they can give me personalized recommendations in less than a minute. I created an account, and started making music and movie selections of things I like. As far as suggestions, it came up with some pretty relevant ones, including movies and music that I already owned.

Other things that I like are:

• The suggestions are split up by genre, so if you are in the mood for something specific, you don’t have to dig through all the suggestions.
• You can add a feed to your RSS reader of your daily recommendations.
• There is a player at the bottom of the site, and you can listen to clips of suggested music, or watch trailers of suggested movies, to see if you are really interested.
• When you click through to a specific album you get additional information such as artist info and album reviews, as well as a place to post comments. This is similar for movies, giving you movie reviews, cast information and additional “movies like this” suggestions.

They also have a link for TV suggestions, but they are still working on this section and don’t have anything there yet. The site is a little slow, and a few times I have clicked on different links and have had to sign in again, but hopefully these issues will be worked out as they move forward. Overall I think it is organized well, and it is helpful in finding new artists or movies that I may have otherwise missed. I would love to hear what you think, so please send me a comment with your review!

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