Notes from Neville Brody's talk at Microsoft. (He is a renowned graphic and brand designer)

The new information system [Internet, mail, blogs, etc] is forcing to act as data processing nodes. We process information and forward it to other nodes. The trend is toward faster and faster information generation and processing. However this information processing is fairly exhausting for our body and mind. At the end of the day we go home and we are exhausted. But then, when we look back at a day's worth of activity we don't see what we have accomplished with all the mental work.

Personalization is all about making us into more efficient information processing nodes.