Schrage, Michael: Recommendation Engines.

Schrage then covers various "recommender approaches" (120), including simple ones like "Most Popular" (an easy way to deal with the "cold start" problem: how to draw in new users for whom the system has insufficient data [120]). Whether you find these ubiquitous suggestions helpful, benign, annoying, or worse, I Recommendation Engines i , by innovation researcher Michael Schrage, makes an interesting read for anyone who wants to understand how companies use data about you in order to fuel such predictions. [Extracted from the article]