A fraternity brother contacted me through LinkedIn, and told me about a tool his cousin is working on called "Semanticator". I checked it out, and it seems like it could be a powerful marketing tool for websites.

In a nutshell, Semanticator helps you profile your website visitors based on other sites they've hit recently. That allows you to target the content you display to them, with the aim of increasing conversion and decreasing bounce. Their online demo shows a car dealer showing targetted ads based on which of thier competitor's sites they had seen (if they were looking at trucks, they'd see a comparison of trucks on the home page). Pretty neat stuff -- check out the demo for yourself.

I can see this having some real value for a few of our clients. For example, we're working on a Commerce Server implementation for a publishing company. If they knew in advance what the client was interested in, they could tie in to the Commerce Server marketing system and pop up highly-focused discounts and offers, and likely clear more sales.