Publisher’s Lunch reported yesterday that Eli Pariser, the board president of MoveOn.org and its former Executive Director, has sold a book about the personalization of the web to Penguin Press.
GalleyCat caught up with Pariser this afternoon for a few words about the project. “I got onto this topic somewhat by accident,” he told us. “I noticed that even though I’d sought out conservative friends and added them on Facebook, I wasn’t seeing their updates and links. It turned out that Facebook was noticing that I was still clicking more on progressive-leaning links and dropping the conservative ones from my news feed. And that got me thinking.” Watch Pariser talk about this concept here.
Pariser says that the name isn’t final yet, but the title of the proposal was Don’t Be Evil: Filter Bubbles, Click Signals, And Why It Matters That the Net Knows Your Name. Clearly it will focus a little on Google, but it will also touch on sites like Amazon and Facebook. He added that the book will “show how many popular sites are already invisibly personalized, and then talk about what that’ll mean for politics, culture, and news.”
Pariser’s agent is Elyse Cheney; Laura Stickney will be his editor at Penguin Press. Pariser says he’ll be blogging about it as he writes it, so check in with his twitter for updates. The book is due out May 2011.