The idea of distributed personalization is to leverage the browsers' capability to compose a page from different sources using either the script tag, frames, or iframes. The concept is simple - since the piece of the page can be brought from any where, bring it in from a machine dedicated to that piece of functionality. For example, you could set up a weather server. All that it does is manage weather data. It has a web app that gives and reads cookies, or takes the arguments in the form of cgi query string. The app returns the appropriate html and javascript to render the personalized data. The query string/cookie could just be the user's id. In which case it is up to the app server to remember that user's preferences. In this manner the main server serves simple templates. Or the main server could get the users' preferences itself from a central repository and pass the descrete preferences to the app servers. In other words www.com could look up glenn's prefs, and display a template with script src="weatherserver.com/forecast?user=glenn" and script src="stockserver.com/quotes?user=glenn" which is lightweight for the main server, or it could look up the preferences and pass those to the appservers like so: script src="weatherserver.com/forecast?zip=37931" and script src="stockserver.com/quotes?stocks=SSP,QQQ,VIGN" Since we're talking about plain old web methods, existing load balancing and clustering solutions can be employed to scale weatherserver and stockserver. Further, the mechanism for selecting the personalized data could be via cookies, which would allow static sites to take advantage of the personalization system. I have patched Knoxnews.com's classifieds to do just this. By adding 3 lines of code, no less. It's not perfect, but try it. '''It requires a pre P3P browser.''' * go to knoxnews classifieds * perform a search against a specific subcategory ( it doesn't work yet for 'all' ) and enter a search word ( I know, it sounds a litle contrived ). * then goto http://www.scripps.com/Glenn/testpzn.html to see a static html page that can display the top 5 results from your last classifieds search. ''Presentation Ideas'' Separation not only of code from content, but service from content management: * Content Management ( FastForward ) * Personalization Services ( DistributedPzn ) * Commerce Services ( WebMerc, AdTaker, `CCPKI` ) * AdManagment ( NetG, `Classifieds`, TopAds, etc ) Need a presentation with graphic respresentation and graphic live demo to show FollowupPurchase concept. '''Additional / Peripheral Benefit''' - as we integrate valuable content and services using these types of technologies, we encourage the users to use browser configurations that are 'advertising friendly', which should improve our ability to manage and deliver on our banner ad flight promises. PznAgentFramework