Really personalized advertising

Greg Elin had the best idea at the LazyWeb as Competitive Sport BOF last night. He wants a way to dump calendar items, tasks, and the like out of his calendaring system (iCal, Outlook, etc.) and have those items display as ads on the web sites that he visits. So, when he goes to Slashdot, a banner ad tells him to stop for orange juice on the way home. When he goes to news.com, there’s an ad telling him that his mother’s birthday is coming up.

In a later conversation, Matt Haughey outlined a proof-of-concept approach to the problem. He’d use Mozilla to override the stylesheet, strip out the current ads, and plug in his own ads, which would be created by pulling them out of iCal and using a Perl or PHP graphics program in conjunction with a local web server to serve them on the fly.

Greg said he would be willing to pay a small amount for this service, and I bet quite a few other people would as well.