Adventures in Email Marketing

I enjoyed the content of Chris Marriot’s (of Axciom) Social Semantic Web. It was a nice demonstration of an area that we are slowly learning about, and I don’t think it’s presumptuous to say it will be the future of email, and the user’s experience online.

He introduced to us Google’s Social Graph API, the Linking Open Data Project by W3C, and Freebase.

OK, yes, those are a lot of random names that may be coming to you from nowhere. Suffice to say they’re worth a link, and if I tried to summarize what they did I’d be here all day, except to say that they are various systems of open data accessible by APIs and other methods.

The insight into email is that it will make deeper and more comprehensive content, quickly personalized, from a seemingly infinite array of types of interest data, making it a far richer experience for the recipient.

Questions after the session revolved around personal information, and whether the data would be somehow “owned” or copy writ by any individual or organization. Dylan Boyd of eROI mentioned that OpenID was already a way of users managing their own personal information across data resources.