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. 

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.