The folks at Amazon will probably never forget Easter Weekend 2009.  For reasons still not entirely known, thousands of books lost their sales rank over the weekend -- costing those book authors critical visibility and sales.  Problem was, a seemingly disproportionate number of those books were gay and lesbian titles.

Both Google and Twitter trends lit up last night with the meme now being dubbed AmazonFail. And by this morning, the story was all over the mainstream media.

In an attempt to further elucidate Amazon's mode of operation, I decided to run a simple search query at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders and The Strand for the term 'homosexuality'.  Hard not to notice that there's a significant difference in organic search results at each of these book stores, especially Amazon's (results after the jump).  That said, I leave the final analysis to you...

As it turns out, the concept of search is particularly interesting to those of us in the public relations space.  Consider the search query, which might ultimately prove to be the most hyper form of public relations; it represents a moment in time when a person - a customer, prospective customer, blogger or journalist - is telegraphing to the world what it is they want or need. And so, for us, the question that looms is how best to position our clients in ways that directly address or answer those queries (aka helping clients relate to their publics).

In an effort to begin fulfilling the one and only guarantee we've made to you thus far, you'll find on your left a compilation of the 2009 Search Matters calendars. Each Search Matters link takes you to a predictive calendar of recurring events that have strong search histories. Meaning, you and your clients can now know in advance what consumers will be searching for online in the upcoming months.  It's a very easy way to help your clients stay ahead of important market trends. 

Thank god for the interwebs! Without them, so many wonderful, delightful, mysterious things would be lost forever...or we'd just never know that they ever existed in the first place. For example, back in 1982, a guy named Daniel took a tape recorder into video game arcades up and down the east coast, recording without ceremony what it sounded like if you stood three feet away from some of the most popular games of the day for a few hours. Whether he knew it or not, he was engaging in an journalism in its purest form—completely un-distilled, unbiased observation. Even more remarkable is that after a few years of doing this, he simply abandoned the project without taking any further action, leaving the tapes in storage until 1997, when he accidentally discovered them while cleaning.

Stephen Wolfram made a post on his blog last week that sent hearts in the geekier corners of the Internet a-flutter. If Steve Jobs is the prototypical rock star geek, known the world over for his genius and one-dimensional wardrobe, then Mr. Wolfram is the influential indie rock act, influential in all the right places if not quite a household name. Wolfram's post unveiled his latest project: a search engine called Wolfram Alpha.

Within a couple of days, news of Wolfram's announcement started to spill over into the mainstream media. "British scientist developing 'Google killer' search engine" exclaimed the Telegraph. Fox News reported that Wolfram Alpha was positioned to "challenge Google". A ZDNet blogger asked if Wolfram Alpha was just "lots of hype".

There's really no simple place to start when launching a blog, except perhaps to just say: welcome!  We are glad you've somehow made your way over -- and now know, put simply, that the onus is on us to continuously earn your interest and trust.  So, without further adieu, here's a bit about what you can expect to find here:

The Crowd Source, officially, is as the blog's subtitle states: 'a running conversation about the webs we weave'. Meaning, not just a listening post to the daily machinations of the interwebs, but a sincere hat-tip to the reality that online marketing done well and right must be rooted in those conversations in which the "crowds" are already immersed.  Towards that end, The Crowd Source will frequently use the lens of search to assess these realities.