A column regularly featuring new developments on World Wide Web Technology.
Every music publisher is familiar with the problem of building and maintaining a mailing list.
Publishers typically maintain large mailing lists, but often lack the tools to segment and select groups of customers by musical interests. Tools such as surveys, postcards, and membership clubs provide ways to hone in on potential customers for particular products, but may not be practical for large mailing lists. Intelligent Agents are a fairly new World Wide Web technology which provides an interesting new approach to reach customers. The product Firefly, recently featured in a New York Times Magazine article, exemplifies this new technology. Firefly uses techniques of artificial intelligence to attempt to project what a user would like, based on what the user does like.