Personalization moving into screening spotlight

Consumers are increasingly relying on humans to help them sift through the huge amounts of news, video, music and other media online, as social networking and old-fashioned editorial filtering promise ever more personalized results. It's the Internet equivalent of a friend's referral, adding more of a human touch to a medium long dominated by crawlers and algorithms. Sophisticated surfers are seeking out the highly specialized sites that create or aggregate the content that most appeals to them, like reviews or samples of a little known genre of music, and are looking for better social tools to help them narrow results, said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Experian Hitwise. "These early adopters are starting to demand this editorial layer," he said, during the opening presentation at the Digital Media Conference. "They need human input to sift through what's truly valuable."