Ultimately, the question is whether you think a human can do a better job of optimizing a commerce web site than a machine can - the standard personalization, customization, people who bought that also bought this stuff. Blah..

I think people will discover over the longer run the “display management” stuff above is just the tip of the iceberg. You can have all that, but it’s low level, almost background noise stuff compared to what a skilled “daypart manager” could do with a real time system:

1. Screen showing a “most popular searches” stream of what people are searching for in real time across the engines. This would be the equivalent of us monitoring all the TV Networks at HSN.

2. Aggregated traffic display - where are people “bunching” on the site? This would be the equivalent of network / call center monitoring at HSN.

3. Content management - the ability to push certain content to specific visitor segments, based either on behavior or location. This would be the equivalent of the show manager at HSN talking to the host and the product display people about trying different words or lighting, etc.

4. An unbelivably cool “heads up” type of cockpit to run it from

5. A back end that tracked what the pilot did and what the machines did, so there could be “post show” analysis - did the human beat the machines?

FYI - at HSN we found out a human, on average, can take only about 3 hours of real time merchandizing optimization before they needed to take at least 3 hours off. There were an exceptional few that could pull double shifts…

Rather like a gigantic video game with real money on the line, no?

Seriously, these folks would come out of the war room absolutely exhausted - and then start going over the post-stats for the show, looking for ways to improve.

Heh. You’ve mentioned HSN a few times over the many months of my reading but it was only a few posts back that I finally … realised(?) what it was. Shoulda googled. Didn’t. :-)

But this also explains a much older discussion we’ve had Jim where you referenced to Real Time Web Analytics. Hmmm. Perhaps there is a case for the bigger type of shopping site (a la the Amazons) to do Real Time. I’d guess it all gets down to ROI in some way shape or form. Hmmm x 3.

We don’t really have an HSN here. The 2am period (the joys of having a baby few years back introduced me to ‘em) is when they seem to come on.

Fascinating stuff! Very!

Cheers!
- Steve