BrandBrains

The USPTO allowd Crystal Semantics (”the leader of contextual Internet search solutions and developer of the world’s first Sense Engine technology”) to patent the technology related to the relevance of search results, both delivered by the search engine itself and the advertising associated with the results.

The technological process of Crystal Semantics’ patent covers the following development areas:

• Databases of keywords to motivate which advertisements should be placed on a page, similar to Google’s Adsense and Adword products.
• Word sense disambiguation, using contextual data rather than computer algorithms to determine the correct sense of a word.
• Web spidering techniques to extract keywords & concepts from web-pages, enabling search queries to find the most appropriate website results.
• Search engine optimization techniques, analyzing documents or web pages to extract specific documents to enhance future navigation.
• Document classification techniques to enable categorization and navigation of large bodies of textual content.
• Semantic pattern analysis to detect potential fraud or pedophile activity within Internet interactions.

(via MarketingVox)

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The BBC tells us about a research report that indicates mobile content is a means of escaping our current situation, taking us to another place in our minds. (Go to your happy place?)

“It reconnects us with another space, be that a friend that we want to talk to, or actually the opportunity to reconnect with a games space that takes us out of where we are.”

(via MocoNews)

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Here’s some more from Nick Wreden on the Hotttest Branding Trends for 2005:

1. Performance-based compensation
2. Enhanced customer connectivity
3. Social branding
4. Universe is the brand
5. Blogs, wikis and RSS

Also of note from his post, for 2006 and beyond:

Fast-forward to the future: Keep an eye on podcasting, mososo and immersive communications. These won’t have much of an impact in 2005, but could drive branding in 2006 and beyond. Podcasting involves using the iPod as a personal or group “radio station;” Mososo stands for mobile social software that connects people through mobile phones using location-based services; and immersive communications will leverage 64-bit processing, high-definition displays and such emerging technologies as Blu-ray that will make virtual reality less virtual and more real.

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The gang over at SearchViews (Reprise Media) will be blogging the Search Engine Strategies Conference in NYC this week.

My friend Dana Katz, a Product Marketing Manager at Audible, will be speaking on a panel on Monday entitled Hiring An SEM Firm:

Looking to outsource your search engine marketing needs? This session examines the types of services that search engine marketing firms offer, pricing models, ways to locate firms and tips on making an informed decision on selecting an agency.

Maybe SearchViews will blog her session? Randy?

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From a post by Nick Wreden (via Steve Rubel):

1. Never pitch, personalize
2. Respect a blogger’s time and intelligence
3. “A blog is not about you, it is about me”
4. Quality, not quantity
5. Feed the food chain
6. It’s no longer just about the media
7. Keep learning

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It looks like Audible has teamed up with MSNBC to deliver the backstage interviews with the Oscar winners as a digital audio download.

The page is only a mock-up at the moment, but I would expect it to go live on or before The Academy Awards.

Update: Scratch that. From the time I wrote the original post (this morning) until now, the page has been pushed live. I also found this article on Reuters.com.

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Audible has an audio archive of a presentation by David Weinberger (of Cluetrain Manifesto fame, among many other things) on blogs, taxonomy and the nature of information storage, retrieval and relevance in a networked world. REALLY interesting.

Well, at least the first half.

In the second half of the presentation, Weinberger’s fellow panelists contribute to the discussion. None of them add much to the conversation and frankly, they’re no where near as exciting and dynamic as Weinberger. (Read: they’re boring as hell…)

That said, the dynamism and enlightenment of the first half easily makes up for the second. Go get it.

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Seth Godin turned me on to Photon from daikini software. From the Photon product page:

Smart, intuitive, and highly configurable, Daikini Photon gives you the power to manage your Movable Type™, TypePad™, Blojsom and WordPress photo-blogs in the familiar surrounds of Apple iPhoto.

Very cool. You’ll find more pictures here, soon.

But that’s not the really interesting part. The interesting part is his point about your relevance, particularly as blogs enter the equation:

Which leads to the same question we’ve always faced, and the one that makes so many knowledge workers nervous. “Are you saying anything worth listening to?”

When we strip away all the infrastructure and branding and organizational nonsense, it seems as though there are people who actually have something provocative or interesting or useful to say, and then there are those that want to be told what to do. The parallel publishing power of the web and blogs is making the division between these two groups ever more clear.

Which camp would you rather be in?

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For all you CPG marketers and those nostalgic for the products of their youth, there’s the American Package Museum. Location: the web. (This is not a traditional museum.)

(via Cool Hunting)

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Jeff Jarvis was interviewed on MSNBC’s Connected yesterday. But that’s not the interesting part - Jeff makes the media rounds all the time.

What’s interesting is that he did it from BuzzMachine World Headquarters (his home office) via his Blogcam:

Who needs a multimillion-dollar studio? What you see above is the blogcast studio: A Logitech laptop camera atop my screen; the screen atop a box to get it to eye-level; notes for the spiels taped to the screen; MSM Messenger to show the video; a phone to get the audio back; a very long ethernet cable to get to the router so we didn’t rely on wireless; lots of lamps … et voila: TV.

…

What’s neat about this is that anybody can broadcast from anywhere. Sure, the quality of the image is still iffy (but it’s better than an Ollie North satphone call). But the possibilities are endless.

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