While researching a column to be published next month, I stumbled across a New Zealand-based company called VortexDNA. It believes that it can boil your driving characteristics down to a ten digit code. This code can then be used to assess whether the web pages or people you encounter online are likely to be of interest to you.

Imagine doing a Google search and then having the best results highlighted in some way. The PageRank method is astonishingly good, but it knows nothing about you and your life purpose and values. Unless you are a totally brilliant search term creator, you can still end up wading through masses of pointless (to you) results.

The interesting thing about VortexDNA is that it doesn't need to keep any information about you. Although you answer a short questionnaire (some of it badly worded, sadly), your answers aren't retained. Your DNA is calculated and that's all the company needs to know. Best, though, to tell the company who you are and where to find you when new software releases come out.

You can download a Firefox extension right now and start experimenting with the software. Somehow, it overlays the web pages you're viewing with little orange highlights for stuff it thinks might interest you.

Your code could be attached to web pages that you visit thus giving people an idea of the type of people who like this kind of page. The seven digit number will be repeatedly averaged as new people arrive. (Don't ask me for the mathematics, you'd have to grill  chief boffin Branton Kenton-Dau on that one.)

Your code could be used to refine the ads that get displayed in the sidebar or the books that Amazon recommends to you. All without knowing a shred of personal information.

So the VortexDNA techniques can be applied to personal benefit and business benefit. 'Click throughs' are very important to online advertisers and one way that Vortex hopes to make money is by selling its technology to providers of online services, so they can increase their ad revenues and continue to give us the stuff we want for free.