Today, there are various web sites on the internet that try to target content according to the locality of the site visitor. However, web sites that are wishing to tap into the local content market do not have a way of knowing the origin and the consumer characteristics of their visitors in any detail and certainty. So they end up serving up content that is completely useless most of the time.

The crux of the problem lies in todays.practices. Under current practices, content is embedded in the source of a web site. It is obvious that if the source is in California, USA, and the content is delivered to Bologna, Italy, the content that was included in California would be totally irrelevant for the person in Bologna who sees it.

The practice of embedding content at source is certainly not effective, and should be viewed as a “child disease” of the internet, set to overcome. In any other media, content is inserted at the point of delivery.

The system under development permits the insertion of content at the ISP level (the point of delivery). The advantage of this system is that it can have accurate and detailed information on the geographic origin of users and thus adapt content that is displayed to them based on this information.

The process of inserting content at the ISP level seems rational and easy to implement, but there are certainly many technical issues to resolve. We have been working on these issues for the last year, and are currently in the process of developing a prototype solution, depicted below:

System Architecture

Quick explanation:

• The user connects to the system via a Squid authentication
• The HTTP request made along with the Username is sent to an ICAP server
• The ICAP server checks if the page code allows us to add locally targeted content, if so, it ads a script to the source of the page.
• The script talks to the DB and if it has any suitable content (based on user location and profile) it returns it for inclusion in the page being viewed by the user.
• If the page is not modified (either because the page did not allow it, or because there was no suitable content in the DB), the original page is displayed.

Please don't hesitate to contact us and request more information about the system.