Ask HN: Curiosity advertising

This is an idea that has been doing the rounds in my mind for years and I'm hoping I can develop it and possibly take it further by putting it on HN. I have the firm belief that Education is about encouraging curiosity and providing the tools to deal with the unforeseen outcomes of said curiosity. I also have this (possibly crazy) idea that advertising, while I personally often dislike its general commercial use, will eventually be but a step in the intelligent distribution of information.

The idea would be to create a form of knowledge advertising network that arouses curiosity. In very much the same way usual online ads work, it would show users banners (as an example) containing a snippet of information relevant to the page they're visiting, their general activity and so on. Weight would be added where people take interest and as they encounter and use those "ads" more and more the ads would become more targetted. For instance, your first ad could be about "Metals", then if you seem interested, the next ones could revolve around, say, the physics involved with metals, and so on.

While I'm talking about advertising, I'd like to be clear that in no way would I want this to be commercial. I'm thinking the information could be extracted from Wikipedia, and as far as the advertising algorithms go, I'm hoping someone more qualified in the subject might be able to point to some good libraries out there, ideally open-source. The whole thing would also ideally be on an opt-in basis, with websites using the system hopefully sharing the load of this advertising network.

I highly respect the opinion of many here on HN and I'd like to know your thoughts.