I covered the first part of Collarity Relevance Engine deep dive here.  I played a little more with the Collarity Relevance Engine to see what residents who visited myfox.com affiliates in NYC, Washington DC, Tampa Bay and St Louis thought about the Iraq war, specifically using the query "Iraq War president democrats iran iraqi" which I got by the selections in the Collarity Relevance Engine.

And what I found was the order of the results (bottom of each Collarity Compass Box) varied even when most of the results were the same.

I found the story about Gates: U.S. Not Winning War in Iraq was still a concern in Washington DC where it did not appear in the other 3 localities.  The stories that the dominant audience is interested in are ordered based which stories they actually viewed.

In New York City, the audience who visited the local MyFox.com affiliate was also interested in the White House Vetoing the Pullout Plan - White House Hangs Veto Over Pullout Plan which implies visitors to MyFox.com see the White House as part of the Iraq Problem …. at least that's the way it looks to me - but those visitors in Tampa Bay did not find that story as important.

So that's how I think you can use Collarity as a political forecasting tool.  But the best way to set that up would be to have Collarity running on a number of candidates and political sites and do this kind of research on issue after issue.

Read/WriteWeb had a good writeup on Collarity showing the backend of Collarity if your a publisher running Collarity Relevance Engine on your site.

On the left is the Communities that Collarity found on the publishers site and in the right is the specific pages of your site each community went to (you need to select the community in the left first).

The entire technology for Collarity Relevance Engine was developed by Collarity chief engineer / programmer, Emil Ismalon; I met him at dinner earlier this week, described in Part 1 of this post.

One of the areas where Collarity Relevance Engine can also excel over Google and Yahoo is with Advertising - each community that Collarity identifies can be shown advertising spots and banner ads that are ranked by the Collarity Engine as interesting to that community.

In fact, if you think about it, you can substitute "community" with "audience" and suddenly the whole context of Collarity changes.  Right now it's a tool to help the visitor refine their search query on the internal search engine of the customer.  But the most interesting parts of Collarity Relevance Engine are the parts you can't see. 

My wish is to see the Collarity Relevance Engine provide feeds into Omniture, Coremetrics, Google Analytics, ClickTracks, etc; we need to pull all the data into Web Analytics. 

If I'm elected to the Board of the Web Analytics Association, I'll take this on as one of my projects, along with Political Campaign Metrics and getting all Web Analysts paid what they deserve - which is more than they generally get - and hopefully, a Seat at The Table and all that goes with it.

As the dinner went on, and I was on my third glass of Red Wine - I recounted my interaction at last Ad-Tech in November with John Young of Digitas. John had this to say to my post on Touching your consumer in all the right places:

"….Anyhow, if you got the feeling that web analysts are the rock stars of the future, YOU ARE ONE HUNDRED PERCENT RIGHT."

Corporate hasn't figured it out yet … but it's the Web Analysts and the Web Analytics Platforms where the real intelligence of corporations and businesses lie - and it's future.

Of course, I'll also work on whatever goals and Committees the WAA wants me to work on.

I think there's a lot to Collarity and I was interested in  Deborah Richman's role as Senior Vice President of Marketing and Development for Collarity.  Deborah has had a lot of history in Internet Marketing, having also worked at LookSmart, grew their marketshare before coming over to Collarity; she also writes for DMNews; she also has an extensive background with Site Search and wrote about Does Site Search Matter For The Mags?

Of course, that plays right into Collarity's strength - as Collarity can help most magazines increase their Site Search Effectiveness.

"…Community participation is lagging when compared to non-magazine sites. Only a handful offer user-generated tools, so there isn't much to search. Popular Science leads the way with search based on overall visitor and site interests. Prevention offers searching within its forums. The magazines have rolled out blogs to keep things more current, including postings from editors and reporters. Not much searching is available across blog information yet."

I spent a great deal of time interacting with Deborah last Wednesday at Dinner with Collarity tonight at The Blue Fin.  Hopefully, my 3 glasses of Red Wine and the stimulating talks with Levy Cohen, Deborah Richman and the chief engineer / programmer, Emil Ismalon did not get the better of me.

It's also true that DeveloperWorks at IBM uses part of the Collarity Relevance Engine - you don't actually have to show the Collarity Compass to categorize your content by communities but if you don't have the Compass active you won't get the result of Successful Searches, based on Collarity (much of why people get Collarity in the first place) - which can use most internal Search Engines and sits on top of them.

AlwaysON is also using Collarity Relevance Engine as are more and more sites. In fact, I hope
to get some of my own SEO/SEM/Web Analytics client sites like www.Chaacreek.com, www.mascord.com, www.dooleyvacations.com , www.avatarNewYork.com, etc, to run versions of Collarity Relevance Engine.

In Particular, I see advantages to Collarity in Architectural House Plans sites, like Alan Mascord, who is my one remaining Architectural House Plan client.  The Architects, in general, have low conversion rates (it typically takes about 2500 visits to a house plans site to sell a Architectural House Plan).  I'd like to see if the Collarity Relevance Engine would bring that number down to say…. 500 or 600 visitors per house plan sold.  No doubt, market conditions and the soft real estate market complicates issues - but the real issue for many Architects is Branding.

People buy House Plans like they'd buy a 1000 dollar bottle of Wine…. would you use PPC to find out about the Wine?  Probably not…you already know the wine you want …. but a 1000 dollar Wine, or a 1000 dollar House Plan you'd want to buy from a dealer you know and can trust.

So…can the Collarity Relevance Engine help there?  I don't know for sure - but I'm betting it will.  Maybe it will also help Chaa Creek get more visitors to find the vacation package in Belize more effective.  there again, it's Branding that's the real issue…people want to experience the Brand first. 

And Collarity's ability to categorize content by community - in the right hands - can make any site it runs on much more effective to it's audiences.  So I'd have to say…depending on what your willing to do..and how open you are to change - Collarity Relevance Engine just might be the technology that enables conversion rates to go up.

BTW, it was also great speaking with Levy Cohen, who used to live in NYC.  I'm hoping we'll all meet again next month at SES.

We'll see. ..   and thanks again Levy Cohen, Deborah Richman and Emil Ismalon for a wonderful dinner last Wednesday at the Blue Fin.