Baynote is a finalist in the Mashable 2nd Annual Open Web Awards — an international online voting competition that honors major innovations in web technology.

Now we need your help! By voting for Baynote, you are helping to put our brand in front of the most tech-savvy early adopters, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, influencers, Web 2.0 enthusiasts and technology journalists.

Please cast your vote for Baynote in the “Social Search” category — voting ends November 30th.

We appreciate your support!

Our latest 90 second  webcast “trailer” as created by our Creative Czar Brian, is now available.  This is about the quickest way to “get” what Baynote means by Social Search and why it’s different.  And if you don’t believe us, listen to our customer Bill Skeet from Juniper Networks tell it like it is from his perspective.

One of the interesting things that happened at Juniper after overlaying Baynote on top of their existing search engine  (you all know this right, no rip and replace, we’re SAAS, we’re very nice that way) is that the mix of search results shifted significantly in two main ways:

First of all, the Mob of Juniper site users found documents relevant to queries that the search engine couldn’t.  Humans just get things, make connections that machines can’t.  Period.

Second, the items that percolated to the top were more often the more technical documents that the majority of the site viewers were interested in, not necessarily all the various product pages that marketing felt they needed to create.  The Mob, of course, knew what it needed and put these items on top.  Simple.  Voilà.

So sometimes what the Mob, via Baynote, delivers is more results (i.e. stuff an algorithm can’t find like pdfs) or sometimes fewer results (just the stuff people want) either way, the Mob delivers better results.

Yesterday at Baynote we had the privilege of a visit by a delegation from China’s Consulate General office in San Francisco including the Consul General himself Gao Zhansheng.

We initially discussed Baynote’s platform and why its peer-driven recommendations are particularly important to business and society at large. This lead to a more philosophical conversation regarding crowd-wisdom and how out of touch both big business and big government can be. We discussed how so many of the specific problems which have lead up to today’s financial problems were matters of disconnect. You’ve heard me say it before but people want the connection they used to have with “mom & pop” businesses. Likewise, they probably also want the connection they get in “town hall” interaction with government leaders. The Chinese officials teased with an old saying in China: “connect the crowd and serve the people.” Except that we all want to do this online now.

Despite the difference in our economic systems and the fact that these weren’t technologists, the concept of “the crowd is free” really resonated with them. They understood the limits of experts. Someone on their team asked about the applicability of crowd-wisdom to government sites as a means to be more responsive. Except for NASA.gov, there are few U.S. government websites doing this….yet. It’s coming, it has to.

When I was telling them we had Baynote on roughly 180 sites, the Consul General joked “That’s too bad, I wish it were more, I have trouble finding what I need on the web, you need to get out onto more sites.” “We will, they are coming,” I responded.

“You know Chairman Mao understood this,” someone commented. “He said ‘Crowds have infinite power.’”

While we didn’t explicitly talk about the massive bailout announced this Sunday, it was clear to me by the tone of our conversations that the team from the consulate were looking at today’s climate as a global issue. They wanted to know what it would take for a business to make it in this climate, not just in China but here in the U.S, and what kind of governmental policy or innovative technology they can help to push.

I explained that it’s never easy, but that starting a business in this environment is incredibly tough right now. It’s winner take all — you would have to be #1 to make it here. The upside is that there are a lot of great lessons to learn from the wave of “nice to have” Web 2.0 technologies that can’t demonstrate ROI. Be innovative, address a real market problem, and be able to demonstrate ROI quickly with very little risk and you could thrive. Baynote is fortunate to be in the position we are in today, and much of our success comes from following these rules.

At parting, they presented us a nice set of gifts — a scale-down Terracotta soldier, a couple of DVDs for the Beijing Olympics… The Baynote team was truly impressed by the officials. They were smart, very knowledgeable, curious and extremely passionate about innovations and technologies — not normal traits of any diplomats. We wish them well!

As a web guy, I spend quite a bit of time surfing the tubes. Today I found this interesting bit over at compete.com:

According to their website, compete.com “triangulates multiple data sources, including ISP, Panel & Toolbar to estimate U.S. traffic.” Basically, they follow network traffic to provide usage reports.

The “Visits” chart above shows a steady climb in Baynote’s traffic over the past year — a 2290% increase, while other recommendation vendors’ traffic has remained static or even dipped. (Note: this isn’t the main baynote.com website, but rather the data we deliver to our customers’ sites. Our product model is SaaS, so each search result or recommendation gets tallied in this chart.)

This steady climb can be attributed to the increase in Baynote’s customer-base. Even though the global economy continues to melt, businesses are finding that the conversion increase and revenue life Baynote provides is still justified in their budget.

The New York Times had a great article today expressing the importance of not being “penny wise, and pound foolish” with your marketing expenditures. Now, more than ever, is definitely the time to be critical and performance driven when executing your marketing campaigns. Throwing money away at Adwords, PR, and other marketing channels without first optimizing these efforts has come to an end, and rightfully so.

Over the last few months, we have had some of our best successes, and this is greatly due to the cost savings and campaign optimization gained by our customers. While our service isn’t free, the fuel that powers it is, your website community.

Why spend lots of money driving people to your website when there are search and navigation pitfalls? If your car was leaking oil, would you just fill it backup up with oil, or fix the leak first?

Check out our Mob Marketing Webinar to learn how to plug the leaks in your website.

Hats off to Brian for producing this cool trailer to our webinar Mob Marketing:  Manual Website Optimization FUGETABOUTIT!  If you’ve only got a minute, you’ll get the gist of the whole thesis of the webinar.

As we worked with Suresh Vittal of Forrester Research to put together the content, Jack, Suresh and I frequently hearkened back to a similar “sea change” that happened in the early days of content management.  In 1998, we spent much of our time talking to journalist, analysts and customers about unlocking the so-called webmaster bottleneck.  If you could only put web publishing in the hands of the internal content experts, then you could eliminate this delay created by having a “webmaster.”  By 1999 when we went public, everyone got it.

But unlocking this bottleneck created a new bottleneck - people finding the information they needed.  Now we suffered from content overload — because organizations kept producing more and more content and there was no efficient means to make sure that the content you showed was the content people needed or the products people wanted.  Organizations tried to fix it by investing in complex search engines or analytics or profile-based personalization.  None of this fixed the fundamental problem.

It’s time to get rid of the expert bottleneck.  In this economy, the timing is perfect.  There are some task that will always be manual but there are others that can and should be automated.   Automate for a better user experience.  Automate for efficiency. Turn what people see on your site over to the Mob.  It might make you feel a little uncomfortble now, but so was the idea of eliminating the webmaster bottleneck in 1999.  I say FUGETABOUTIT.

is scary. I was watching Minority Report last night, the futuristic action packed Tom Cruise movie from a few years back. You know, the one with that super sleek Lexus, and the computers with multitouch-on-steroids interfaces. If that movie is indicative of the future of product recommendations, we need to seriously rethink our trajectory. In case you might not remember the scenes I’m referring to, here they are below.

If you aren’t slightly disturbed yet, here is one more.

Think more about the context your users are currently in, and less about the identity of your users. If they are anything like me at all, trying to advertise to them based on some user profile created by a computer, “expert,” or their long history of purchases isn’t going to be as effective as discovering their current context. It also just might freak them out. Our identities, retina, and fingerprints are quite private and need to stay that way. Brian made a funny cartoon a few weeks ago describing an experience you might be able to relate to.

At Online Marketing World, we’ve been speaking to many potential clients and partners and one thing that has really resonated is the move from demographic based behavioral targeting to contextual targeting. At Baynote, we’ve been championing contextual targeting for product and content recommendations over the last 3 years. Initially, this wasn’t a popular position, likely due to a lack of technologies on the market being able to distinguish one context of a user from another. However, over the last year, the success of contextual targeting and the failure of demographic based targeting has ushered in a new era, one where Context is King.

Yesterday, one of the conference attendees that visited our booth created a blog post explaining her take on targeting technologies, but on a personal level.

My favorite part of Baynote’s technology: it ignores demographics. Yes! When are people going to figure out that this is an individualistic age? Advertisers, you are wasting your dollars on serving me with endless weight-loss and dating ads. Not all 27-year old females are the same!

I’d have to agree with this point, not all 27 year old females are the same. Not simply because I’ve seen our technology benchmarked against demographic or profile based targeting technologies(which I have), but also because my 27-year old wife would have me sleeping on the couch if I said otherwise.

If you are a new reader, or would like more background on our contextual targeting approach, check out our whitepaper “In Search of The Human Element.”

This little doodle gives some insight into the inherent problems of using visitor profiles to target recommendations. We’ve all been at a site or two where the recommendations just don’t make much sense–what would happen in a real store using that same profile-based targeting system?

Driving the right people to the right places is a hot topic at the TechCrunch 50 conference. Mobile technologies has improved to facilitate the advancement of location based product recommendations. Companies like GoodRecs are allowing users to explicitly rate restaurants, books, and nightlife by giving a thumbs up-thumbs down type rating indicator.

Survey Bias. I can see how location based recommendations would be extremely useful, but explicit recommendations introduces survey bias and the only people praising or condemning the products are the loud users. Studies often show that users that dislike or disapprove are more likely to rate a product then those enjoying the product.

Contextual Differences. Additionally, its often unclear what context the person is in when the recommendation is given. For example, I may rate a product poorly because its not what I was expecting. However, it could be great for someone with different expectations. In order to discover these expectations, we’d need to know what is the higher level intent of the user. Accurate recommendations must take into account the context of the user voting for the product. While Baynote is able to uncover a user’s context on a website, this information is difficult to extract offline.