As my final post for April 2006 (it’s April 30th after all) there’s yet another gem from Microsoft called the Content Categorization Engine.

Looking at one of my clients’ site I can now see what catagories Microsoft thinks it’s in based on all it’s semantic analysis:

This information is useful in both search term matching AND search term advertising - but how to best use that information is going to vary somewhat.  

When we look at the leading competition, coolhouseplans.com - the catagorization is different

URL  Go    See Categories

Categories                                Confidence     Work & Money\Companies 0.914 Personal\Home 0.032 Shopping\Buying Guides 0.016 Work & Money\Industries 0.007 Work & Money\Personal Finance 0.004 Lifestyle\Hobbies 0.001 Library\Humanities 0.001 Work & Money\Business 0.001 Library\Society 0.001 Lifestyle\Gardening 0.001

I don’t know if that has anything to do with why the site tends to rank highly or not - and maybe I’m not the best judge of how to apply that information but I’m pointing to the tools are available to start using and testing and thinking.

Think about new ways to use these tools, new ways to compare sites and see if the search engines actually use any of these as ranking factors.

Another Microsoft innovation - the Keyword Catagorization Engine!

Keyword  Go    See Categories

Categories                                Confidence     Personal\Home 0.50 Shopping\Buying Guides 0.316 Work & Money\Companies 0.102 Work & Money\Industries 0.051 Lifestyle\Pets & Animals 0.010 Lifestyle\Hobbies 0.010 Library\Humanities 0.010

The strongest catagory for house plans (and place to advertise!!!!!!!) is in the Shopping and Buying Guides.

But if we take a particular style of plan, like craftsman house plans

Keyword  Go    See Categories

Categories                                Confidence     Personal\Home 0.683 Work & Money\Companies 0.224 Shopping\Buying Guides 0.051 Work & Money\Industries 0.040

You’d go after Personal and Home catagories, not shopping guides.   On the other hand, if you want to go after "Ranch House Plans" your back in the Shopping Guides more

I may need help in talking with my architect clients to understand how to use this information.

Microsoft’s Search Funnel Demo is a truly interesting concept for anyone interested in how people search.  I did a output Search Funnel on the word "house" and look what it showed!

You can see the progression of queries that start with "house" and end with "realestate", "houseforsale" and "house tv show".

There’s additional information that explains the chart when you hover over each box above (not shown in my graphic representation). 

You can reverse the funnel and get the words that most commonly end with a search on "home"

It’s going to take me a little time to digest these new demos and what they can do for your search term reseach and copywriting effectiveness.  I think the main issue now is most terms you’d use for targeting are not yet part of this demo, so it’s really more for concept analysis at this point.

But this is where search is going in the future - this is the beginning of the second wave of search tools (away from WordTracker and tools like that which were useful 5 years ago but need to notch it up because Seach is becoming much more sophisticated and mainstream).

The Search Volume Seasonality Forcaster needs more work but it’s an interesting idea that I hope Microsoft makes fully functional.

I put in a term (i’m limited in what I can enter) like "fall wallpaper" I can see some interesting patterns.  It’s pretty clear that Fall Wallpaper is going to be in demand in the Fall months, yet what is interesting is the demand starts in July of each month, a full season before the actual peak time to sell that kind of wallpaper; the actual peak times for fall wallpaper are in September, dropping slightly in October and Novemeber.

If we look at Six Flags Great Adventure (below) we can also see the demand is greatest during the summer months.

six flags great adventure

But what’s intriquing is the demand really starts ramping up in February and March.

Again, we’d like to see the trending on any term, not just those that Microsoft has provided, but it’s proof of concept.  HitWise…watch out, these tools were to be part of your more exclusive offerings, but Microsoft is moving in and if I can get the data from them for free, I’m not going to fork over many thousands of dollars for your data.

Similarly, a seller of Pablo Picasso’s art (maybe his prints is more like it) would see this kind of seasonal demand

In all of the charts the red line is actual demand while the blue line is the forcasted demand.

pablo picasso

It would appear the summer months are actually the worse time to try to sell Pablo Picasso prints (I can’t imagine his auctioned paintings are being affected by these cycles).

The actual demand for Pablo Picassos (prints?) was lower than the forcasted demand, especially during the summer months.

Great stuff - still needs work but it’s the right direction.  Thank You again Microsoft for listening to what people want.

Watch out Google!  Microsoft is doing some serious stuff with it’s new demo of the Demographics Prediction Tool!  I feel Microsoft is in this to win, and if they keep this up, they will ultimately win over online marketers from Google and Yahoo.   Never mind the acccuracy of the results (that will come later) - just look at the concept and your staring into the future of search and online marketing.

Demographics Prediction
Predict a user’s demographic information such as age and gender based on online behavior (query searched or Web page viewed).
	URL:http://www.thehousedesigners.com   Gender: Female Oriented with following Confidence:
	:0.09   :0.91   Age: 25~34 Oriented with following distribution:

The Microsoft tool determined the main audinece of my client’s site, www.thehousedesigners.com was female!  That’s right!  However it also showed that they should be attracting more young people in the 25-24% than they are (predicted distribution was 60.72% while the tool says they’re only getting 27.2% of that demograhic).  On the other hand, the tool showes the probably get more of the 18-24 and 35-49 years of age demographic than on average.

How about a competitor like coolhouseplans.com?

URL:http://www.coolhouseplans.com   Gender: Female Oriented with following Confidence:

:0.23   :0.77   Age: 25~34 Oriented with following distribution:

Cool gets most of the 25-34 year old age braket and the 25-49 year old bracket, and the mixture is still mostly female, but males are much stronger part of the audince.

What about Eplans?

URL:http://www.eplans.com   Gender: Female Oriented with following Confidence:

:0.25   :0.75   Age: 25~34 Oriented with following distribution:

I hope my ideas, via the Tattoo presentations for Bullseyetattoos.com reached the MSN Lab in China - I sorta think they did because they’re begining to give me what I asked for - the tools to do the job of audience profiling.

Next step is usability - what about the site makes it appeal to one audience more than another?  Man, is this field of online marketing going to heat up!!!!!!

And it goes back to my earlier post today about Ad-Tech, SES and WMW, it’s time for a new wave of ideas because the current crop of speakers have matured, new blood, new ideas are needed, like this one.

And what about an actual query like "craftsman house plans"?  You can do that too.

Query :craftsman house plans   Gender: Female Oriented with following Confidence:

:0.36   :0.64   Age: 35~49 Oriented with following distribution:

URL:http://www.mascord.com/craftsman-home-plans.asp   Gender: Female Oriented with following Confidence:

:0.24   :0.76   Age: 25~34 Oriented with following distribution:

One of my clients sells Craftsman House Plans and he’s getting the right mix of audience but not the right ages!  According to this demo he needs to go after the 25-34 year old braket.  

Thank You Microsoft! Thank You Microsoft!  Thank You Microsoft for listening!

Thanks to Easton Ellsworth for the 10 Places to Find Reviews of Web 2.0 Tools and Services including one I’ve never heard of before called the Museum of Modern Betas .

The Museum of Modern Betas catches many new Web 2.0 fish small and large and serves their info up to you.  Another slick list is found at the Web 2.0 Awards site.  One more: Emily Chang’s eHub.

I’m always looking for new semantic mapping tools, anything to help me with search engine analysis and web page analysis.  

AdTech is now the biggest show in the online marketing community, bigger than Search Engine Strategies.  Mike Grehan said there were over 10,000 people in attendance.  

There’s also another Bill Hunt - Mike Grehan picture below - I think they’re now taking a photo together at every conference (which is most of the big one’s); they are both established players in the Search Engine and Internet Marketing field.

BTW, I saw that stick at the hotel bar in Boston when I went to Webmasterworld. 

In a recent post I covered a story that showed there is not one Blogosphere; there are now at least 4 Blogospheres.  Why is that?   Simply, interests are diversifying and new communities are forming. 

I see the same thing happening with AD-Tech, Search Engine Strategies and Webmasterworld because the field needs some new people and new ideas.

Everyone wants to do viral marketing, as Seth Godin points out, using free videos.  The problem is most ideas don’t spread and it viral marketing using free online videos works only when your ideas are picked up using YouTube and GoogleVideo.   He thinks the next step is advocacy shorts  like the one about the evolution of the human eye.

So if the next battleground is using online videos to spread your ideas, then who are the players?   I think anyone can do this but I see advocacy shorts becoming political in this years election (we’ll see it heat up over the summer) and move right up past election day. 

I walked over to the Metropolitan Museum  after spending a few hours at the Whitney Museum on Friday.  I spent more time in the European Painting section and I was happy to see Manet’s Woman with a Parrot was back on display.  I then realized that Courbet’s painting of the same name was on the other side of the room.

The two paintings were very different though both were painted around the same time.  I did not realize that Manet died of a whasting disease when he was but 51 years of age and that his last paintings were of flower vases as that is all he could handle, it was sad but I never made that connection.

I was also struck by a painting by Richard Parkes Bonnington, a young British artist who died at the age of 28 and was a friend of Delacroix’s.  The particular landscape is shown below but the black and white photo does not capture the power of that painting which pulled me from across the room.

Also, the painting by Jules Bastien-Lepage of Joan of Arc has always been a powerful experience.  I did not realize why Joan of Arc was part of this painting.

After the province of Lorraine was lost to Germany following the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, Frenchmen saw in Joan of Arc a new and powerful symbol and Lepage was from Lorraine.  Unfortunately, Lepage died young also and so he never fully matured as an artist and perhaps, is not as famous as he should be, given his work.

Personally, I’d think the painting would have be better without Joan of Arc in it, as there’s quite enough going on without having the voice of God and and the image of a ghostly night floating in the upper left.

And while I don’t usually like this type of work - I think Regnault’s Salome does represent and fix in my mind what Salome looked like.

I looked at my favorite Cezanne still life and I was reminded that there’s something new I find in the painting everytime I look at it.  Every brushstroke was deliberate.

But I had another thought as I viewed this painting…I was reminded that the  arrangement of apples in clustered groups also mirrors my use of Geodemographic targeting using various search engine tools like MSN AdCenter and in my mind I connected the two, probably the first time anyone whould have made that connection.

Then I looked at a couple of Van Gogh paintings and I compared, mentally, the idea that Cezanne’s still lifes took up to 100 sittings to get to where he might feel they were "finished" while Van Gogh would paint his paintings in one or two sittings.

Today, it seems totally unimportant that Cezanne spent years on a some paintings while Van Gogh spent hours and the paintings of both artist are satisfying though they appeal to different parts of me.  Van Gogh paints pure life energy - the electric power of life while Cezanne’s work is much more measured.  I have always wanted to be like Cezanne, but my actual impulses run much closer to Van Gogh and my best work was impulsive - both in art and in Search Engine work. 

That reminds me that as a teenager I was an art assistant for William Beckman, when he tought art at Staten Island Community Collage (now called the Collage at Staten Island) where I scheduled models and occasionally modeled myself.  When I visited his studio in Brooklyn, at the time, I wanted to very much paint like him.  His works were mostly nudes of his wife or himself, all done photorealistic and tooks several months to complete.   He did not encourage me to try anything like that but I wanted to anyway.  I found that I could not paint like that - no matter how much I tried to follow through on a consistant approach - I’d get board, frustrated and attack the canvas and then go through some kind of cathartic state which occasionally yielded a brakethrough.

One day he told me about the Herman Hesse  novel Narcissus and Goldmund, which I then read.  Beckman compared himself to Narcissus and me to Goldman; he thought my talent would  explode out of me one day whereas Beckman(Narcissus) was able to work steadly towards his goal.   I can’t honestly say I see it that way today (maybe I need to go back and re-read the book). 

Sometimes I just want to explode out but I’m afraid it won’t be good enough.  But Van Gogh did not worry about it - he just exploded out and the work itself was it’s own justification.

I find that when I go with my impulses and intuition - I’m usually ok unless my feelings get involved, then my judgement is off.  I view the metrics work as an extension of the painting work I used to do, and is mainly intuitive and I use data to support my intuitive flashes.  That leaves me with a somewhat Ad-Hoc approach, where I often forget some details.  I try to make up for it with a discipled approach, but that approach is more of support to allow me to be free to make those intuitive jumps.

I also looked at the Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David while a class of teenagers was listening to their teacher.

David rejected the French rococo style which was about Woman, Fun, Beauty and focused on Male values (as it was seen in Revolutionary France) of exact contours, hardness, fitness, a willing to die for your beliefs, very much what many who wanted to depose King Louis XVI felt they needed to do.  Socrates was convicted of corrupting youths with his teachings and sentanced to death unless he renouced his beliefs, and he chose death.

Next to this painting was a man who actually died due to the French Revolution (David avoided this morbid fate) the famous scientist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794) and his wife, painted by David.

I took a brake and went and had a glass of Wine and Duck Pate in the upstairs Great Hall Balcony Bar cafe at the Met, as I listed to two classical musicians play a sonnata, I drank the dark red wine, my favorite type, reflected on the day which started with two IBM calls, and a meeting with client.

Near the end of the night I thought what it would be like if some of my works were hanging in the museum.  Would my Still Lifes hold up next to a Cezzane?  I’d like to think they would.

 Cezzane Still Life (above)

                                                                                    Mine - Homage to Manet

I painted this large, ambitious, painting before and after a trip to Paris in 1988 and it was painted in an underground studio/living space with no natural light on Avenue B and 2nd Street.  I had since repainted part of the top of the painting but I’m sorry I did as I quite like the effects I’m seeing now as I look at the photo of the painting.

The chart in the background of this painting came from a dream I had, a few years earlier, where i was shown a chart of planets in the solar system and the colors they correspond to, next to each one.  Each color, when properly charged with heart energy, captures the planetary energy it corresponds to which is transmitted through the hands and eye movements into the paint, becoming one with the painting; at least, that was my reasoning at the time.  Examples of how to apply the colors to draw planetary energies was in the vertial sections below the planets and colors.

Today I take the chart much less literaly and the energy will come through on it’s own as long its not blocked.

I was also thinking about a conversation I had with a guard at the museum; the guard is an artist but did not know anything much about the internet.  In a way, it’s hard for me to imagine not using the Internet and newer applications being built into the web (Web 2.0) as part of art.   For example, if you want to sell anything you need to have it online-it’s much easier to tell people to look at it if you can send them a hyperlink to it.  I hope I gave him something useful.

The other lesson is to be here, now, in this timeframe; the art in the museums though wonderful, is of former time(s).  When I occasionaly pass by the Art Student’s League I see examples of artists trying to emulate Rembrant using the same, dull, earthy colors.  Rembrants colors, though they are earthy to begin with, were actually much cleaner than they appear today.  But even besides that….why bother to emulate the past?  Why not do something that hasen’t yet been done than repeat what Rembrant did?   It’s like trying to redo Elvis, people try all the time but can anyone sing Elvis better than Elvis?  Maybe Clay Aiken (well, he does sound good, but he’s not really singing Elvis, he’s stays himself).

After the Museum I slowly made my way home realizing just how much I walked and when I got home, I was exhausted, but felt I had really looked at a lot of good work and was able to enjoy it for once, without having to hurry through it.

This Friday I took most of the day off from IBM and my other SEO work and spent it at two museums, the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum.  I spent a couple of hours looking at the Whitney Biennial’s Day for Night.

I like the Whitney as a building and feel comfortable in it - even as I’ve often had mixed feelings about the art.  I grew up as an artist in the 1970’s and that was the time the new Whitney Museum came to be (at least, that’s how I recall it) and many of the artists I studied with at the School of Visual Arts and who I interfaced with later at the Vermont Studio Center, where I spent a summer in 1987, came to exhibit at the Whitney Museum.   In a way, the Vermont experience colored my life and I am fond of my memories in Vermont and my time there. 

I responded to to Vermont’s unique beauty and I still have many studies from the period.  But getting back to the Whitney show…..

One of things I’ve noticed while in musuems is how I look at people who are in the museum.  In modern museums like the Whitney and the Modern, I look more at the people in the museum and less at the art.  It seems to me that woman look more sexual, more human, against a white, empty wall.  We all look and feel like the human creatures we are and that’s what much of modern art evokes for me.   And as I’ve gotten older i have taken it less seriously and appreciated it for what it can offer.  Here’s what I liked:

Anne Collier’s photos were very powerful, particularly the one of the the spliced casette tape (it’s a personal metaphor.as feelings can be visualized as threads or ribbons and tape is a ribbon).  While the Whitney’s Biennial website is created in Flash, and very clumbersome to navigate (and copy pictures from - because they’re flash movies) it does offer mini-podcasts of each artist’s work which is really cool idea.  Personally, I’d wish for some similar functionality on many of The House Designers’s house plans (ie: I would wish Alan Mascord would annotate his plans - and explain why he designed it as he did).  I would find that kind of use of rich media very compelling - but no one does it yet; maybe THD will be the first, who knows?  It would make sense as, in this case, The House Designers are selling themselves, as architects, along with the plans and in order to sell the plans, you sell the architect’s firm who created them.

I did not understand Rodney Graham’s movies of chandlier’s but found them visually arresting.  Adam Mcewn’s newspaper tabloid obituaries of famous living people were annoying enough to stick out.  The first one I saw I actually fell for (Rod Stewart) and I started reading it and than I said to myself …but I know Rod Stewart is still alive…fooled again.  After that I saw a couple more, Bill Clinton, Jeff Koons (why bother with him?) and Nicole Kidman.  I stopped reading them once I knew what they were - modern art can be annoying and honestly, I don’t see the point of this kind of thing, unless the point is to get me to think about how my own life might read if it appeared on a newspaper headline, first page.  If that were the case, there’d not be much to say, I think.

Angela Strassheim’s photo of Father and Son seemed almost too real and when I listened to the Podcast I understood why, it’s actually profound. 

Billy Sullivan’s photos on naked woman drew me in (they’d draw anyone’s eyes) and allow you to project into the photos (he had photos of other people, not just naked woman) but what I got out of it - and also listening ot the Podcast, is that he hanged out at all the important NY art establishments in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s and his photos are about the people he met. Because I lived in NYC at that time, I find that kind of thing meaningful even if I did not go to those places and hang with those people.

Francesco’s Vezzoli’s parody on Gore Vidal’s Caligula was actually quite funny, if overdone and well described in the NYTimes Review of the trailer (Caligula’ Gives a Toga Party (but No One’s Really Invited) .  The movie trailer tried to be a parody of the original movie that was also a parody of history.  I know all about Caligula as I read Roman History, read Suetonius’s Lives of the 12 Casears and Robert Graves "I Claudius", and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,  and Gore Vidal’s Caligula was nothing like the real story of Caligula.   Sex sells and Gore Vidal played that up in the original movie and Vezzoli has Gore Vidal play a part in the Parody which is shown as movie trailer at the Whitney Biennial.  

Also that pretty model and actress who played in the Fifth Element, Mila J….played Caligula’s sister  ( he slept with all three of his sisters according to Suetonius). It shows me that modern art is also tied up with modern cinema and for an artist such as Francesco Vezzoli to go to the length he did, and parody Gore Videl, was truly ambitious.  He had me fooled for a couple of minutes.  I suppose that’s art.  I used to think it wasen’t but modern art does tend to focus on the perverse, the sexual and the morbid - and yet it’s a layer of reality, not the only layer, but it does exist, so I don’t reject it, I just look at it for what it is, a parody of film that was pretty funny.

As i listened to the Podcast of Francesco Vezzoli discussing - i remembered that much of the theme of the Biennal was the corruption of our goverment and if you look at much of the work in that light, it’s much easier to take and even to be sympathic.  It past Whitney shows, the work I saw did not touch me and I judged it, but in this case, I don’t.  I just accept it as a statement of how some people feel and view the world today.

As far as painting, I did not see that much I liked (that’s to be expected); I did not want to spend the time to try to understand Troy Brauntuch’s dim works while I was in the musueum; I suppose there’s something in there, but do I want to take the time to understand what that is?  I don’t think so, but that’s just me.  Yet, when I listened to the the Podcast for this artist the works did make sense, esp the 3 for World Trade Center - a nightmare I lived through.

Monica Majoli’s paintings do deplict sexual fetishism and they reminded me of much of the art I saw in trendy New York galleries when I often went to them in the 1970’s, again, listening to the Podcast gave me a lot more information, these paintings are really like meditations of the state of the victim and coming to terms with it.  Personally, I would not chose this kind of subject matter - as there’s always the chance people will take it as another way to get attension.  But in this case, I accept it and I look at the quality of the brushstroke, of the texture - if there work has enough quality in then the work justifies itself, regardless of what it deplicts.

JP Murro had some of the strongest paintings, as paintings, in the Whitney Biennial; I suppose if he likes Delacroix he can’t be all bad.  When I listened to the Podcast, it made a lot more sense - he tried to understand old art, old masters, and coulden’t because the cultures of the past are too different than how we live today - (at least, JP Murro feels that way) yet he’s still impressed by the artist as creator, as manipulator, and so he picks imagery today that evokes the same strangeness he feels when he looks at old art.

First of all, I don’t feel the same strangeness when I look at work at the Metropolitian or the Lourve, but it’s not about what I feel, it’s about how authentic the artist feels, and how they convey it, and I think he succeeded on a painting level to convey those feelings.

Ed Pakche’s work was also good in it’s own way - not something I’d want to live with but I can relate to it.  Again, the Podcast really helps to understand what the artist is doing - what he wants to accomplish.   And as well known an artist as Richard Serra with his Stop Bush painting brings the show home and finishes my commentary on the Whitney show and I was happy he spoke out. 

The best thing I can say about the show is the website, for once, complimented the Biennial. Here is an example of using rich media the way my architect clients need to do - they need to sell themselves as a brand just as each artist at the Whitney show, is a brand.   

In fact, if we want to underline what Modern Art is, it would be "The Artist as his or her own Brand". Modern Art is it’s own justification and the Artist is, at the end of the day, a Brand. 

Art has not been about anything else since the days of Van Gogh.   For better or worse, the only true validity for art today, is, in my opinion, how true an artist is to their own brand and how well they can sell the art establishment on it (whom ever they are at any moment in time).