Hi Folks,

Hopefully by now everyone has become fully aware of the book and audio book called "The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine.

If you have not read this book . . .  please do so now. It may be the most mind expanding book you could read all year.

Theme Zoom 1.5 is released and we want everyone who is not a member to understand that 1.5 is only scratching the surface of what will soon be released.

In response to Keith Baxter's comments about Theme Zoom's less than stellar "secondary" keyword lists, his comment only applies to the older Theme Zoom versions and is not altogether accurate. Below we will discuss why.

Our current "long tail" implementation is changing the face of both market research and keyword research. We will leave the affiliate marketing keyword research tools in the dust . . . never forgetting our affiliate market of course! ; - )

We look forward to taking our members to the next level of expert content creation and long tail market success.

Theme Zoom is not merely a keyword research tool.

It is also a market research tool.

As a result the current version requires a learning curve on how to extract and deal with secondary "long tail" keywords.

Our purpose is NOT to bring back gigantic lists of keywords and give the user the impression that they are somehow useful.

The purpose of the Theme Zoom application is to assist you in determining the market value of a specific theme or phrases by comparing several kinds of data. Furthermore you should be able to follow the long keyword phrase up to its original root keyword (short tail) knowing more about the general market interests and content topics than any of your competitors.

Once you have a deep understanding of the "short tail" or "blockbuster" markets and keywords, you can properly use Theme Zoom to apply secondary or "long tail" keywords. Newer point releases will make this more obvious.

No other keyword tools deal directly with Theme Relevance/TRI ™ and content interest as it compares to an overall market. That is really "market research" not "keyword research". This is also text summarization and data mining . . . topics that your average affiliate is still learning about. ; - )

Our focus up to this point has been to give you a massive overview of general themes. (short tail keywords or headwords). It has been an incredibly sophisticated programming requirement to make sure that we are not just "blowing smoke" when we help you build your top-tier keyword silos. (Thank you Sue aka "The Brains" and Conan "I just write the code" the Barbarian).

Now that we have stabilized these headword lists (theme value), we are ready to throw in the longer keywords which tend to be so much trouble for people.

Why are people confused about "long tail" keywords and markets?

This is because "long tail" keywords usually do not come up as having cost and traffic associated with them via most keyword tools, including Theme Zoom. Wordtracker pulls up a lot of 3, 4, and 5 keyword phrases that DO have traffic data drawn from their meta-search engines. Some of our users import these keywords into Theme Zoom under their APPROPRIATE parent themes in order to compare TRI (theme relevance index) data as well as other kinds of parallel long tail relationships. This is not necessary but sometimes people find it useful.

It is unlikely that our users will still do this when we complete future TZ point releases that focus on long tail markets!

Because of the long tail "ambiguity" issue, nobody has ever created a value system that indicates the value of a "long tail" keyword. This would be incredibly expensive and would involve a combination of data mining, text summarization, and authentic latent semantic indexing technology. Furthermore, without an understanding of silo architecture and search behavior, there has been no visual map for the average user to grasp the concept of "long tail keywords".

Until now.

Did I mention that Theme Zoom is setting out to grant you EXACTLY this sort of "long tail" decision making power in upcoming versions of the software- including an "instant blueprint" of your website infrastructure?

An entirely new system of relevance:

With long tail keywords, we will have to invent a TRI scale (theme relevance index) and a MRI (market relevance index) that exceeds anything ever considered by anyone . . . except perhaps by the boys behind the firewall at Google and their geeks at Applied Semantics Inc.

So while we admit that Theme Zoom version 1.5 is in the introductory phases of applied latent semantic indexing, we are finalizing our them recognition system and are establishing a "long tail" framework for secondary keywords that will exceed the imagination of most niche marketers.

In the meantime, you may filter your keywords, including the terms pulled from Keith Baxter's "Keyword Domination" tool- by the category called "expert verbiage" or "likely expert verbiage".

Be sure to run a TRI for these terms against the APPROPRIATE Parent Theme.

There is a learning curve for the Theme Zoom tool. This is probably because of the sophistication of the data. We will not reduce our data to merely meet the needs of the affiliate marketplace, we will drive the keyword market by creating new definitions of relevance . . . and transforming todays struggling affiliate into tomorrows successful web professional.

Here is a recent document that should help you understand the problem of polysemey and latent semantic indexing. Some of this will be obsolete in upcoming point releases. We want you to be able to think for yourself and to prepare for the more advanced functions of Theme Zoom as they are released.

How to deal with Polysemey

- Russell Wright and the Theme Zoom Staff