ResearchBuzz

Woo hoo, I love finding weird search engines. And I like fairs too, so this is even better. The Minnesota State Fair, which starts later this week, has launched a “Merch Search” for its Fair vendors, available at http://www.mnstatefair.org/find/merchants/.

You can search the engine by merchant category or by keyword. Because this is a Fair search engine I did a search for fried and got one result — a cheese curds booth. The search results provide the name of the merchant, other items they sell, and a note about where they’re located on the MN Fairgrounds map. (The map is downloadable as a PDF.) Some sites note coupons that they take, or what free giveaways are provided. A couple of the listings I saw had photographs.

I did another search for farm and found about a dozen results, including a winery, a photographer, and the MN Elk Breeders Association. (The worry of where to find a good reliable source of elk jerky is now off my mind.) It looks like more general searches are better, but I still found I had to do a lot of different kinds of searches to get anywhere. (One really good general search term? stick. I have no idea why.)

This search engine is a useful tool, but you know what I’d really love to do if I had permission, a camera, and about two weeks? Use a site like MapWing and go through a Fairgrounds, laying out the whole thing onto an interactive map with photographs. (Probably several interactive maps with photographs.) With the North Carolina State Fair, you’d have to do a big push of initial work but then it would only be incremental updates each year as there’s very little vendor turnover. With the NC State Fair you also have very delineated areas of the Fairgrounds so it would be easy to create maps for each one (map the different buildings, map the new Midway, map the Grandstand area, etc.)

Each mapped location could contribute a highlight menu (of things expected to be served every year) along with any offline information and social media contacts. For the craft vendors and demonstrators you might even want to link to video or news stories about their work. You could leave the tour up on an official Fair Web site during the whole year both as a draw for potential visitors (the NC State Fair is pretty big) and as a contact tool/additional marketing resource for your vendors. Maybe Fred’s Hot Dogs wouldn’t find that so useful but any exhibitor in the Village of Yesteryear would!

I spend a lot of time thinking about how online interactive experiences can help the fortunes of offline companies. I can’t help but imagine a Fairgrounds — a controlled area, with clear boundaries and regular usage, at least partially focused on commerce — as a wonderful test lab for experimenting with these kinds of experiences.

What’s that in the air? Why, it’s a breeze wafting towards me the scent of The Fragrance Foundation’s Fragrance Directory, which contains information on hundreds of different perfumes and such and information on fragrances in general. You can get it at http://www.fragrancedirectory.info/usadirectory/ .

Did you know there was a “Fragrance Wheel”, that divides smells into Floral Notes, Oriental Notes, Woody Notes, and Fresh Notes? And each section has subsections; the woody notes has “dry woods”, and “mossy woods”? I clicked on the Fragrance Wheel first when I got to this site to get educated on smells. Mousing over each section on the wheel gives you details about that aspect of fragrance; its history and how it’s used.

Once I was a little more acquainted with the lingo I went on to the directory. I’m not sure how many fragrances are listed here; I would guess thousands as just the 2008 releases section has over 200 listings. That’s just one of the ways you can browse the directory. You can look for scents for men or women, look at niche fragrances, or even browse the hall of fame scents (which includes things like Chanel No. 5, Polo, Obsession, and, hey, Old Spice.) Fragrances are listed by year, by country, and by family (the fragrance wheel again.)

I took a look at the limited edition fragrances, which numbered something over 200. The overview page for the fragrances has a picture of the item, an icon indicating whether it’s for males, females, or unisex, and a note indicating the fragrance type (floral, woody — that wheel of fragrances again.) When you click on the picture of a fragrance the page refreshes and, on the right side of the overview page, you’ll get information about the company which makes the fragrance as well as a description. For example, the description of David Beckham’s Intense Instinct (brought to you by Coty Beauty US) is as follows: “A powerful take on the iconic David Beckham Instinct fragrance: Intense Instinct. An intense, vibrant and unforgettable Limited Edition. Seize the moment, because it’s now or never!”

You can do keyword searching in this directory but I found it a little difficult. It seemed like I always had to enter the keyword twice before I got any results listed or the “No Fragrances Found” message. I don’t know if this was weird page design or what.

This directory was so out of my sphere that I found it fascinating. Go visit, and read the fragrance descriptions. They’re awesome.

I was wandering through the mall, gawking at all the empty spaces. So many places had gone, filing for Chapter 11! The liquidation sales were over and all I could see were the shadowed hollows and the remains of slatwall fixtures.

Up ahead I saw a couple of workmen taking down the logo of one of the stores. Idly I wondered if anybody would recall that chain in 20 years. Then I thought of the Flickr Commons. Were there any people making sure that these places would be remembered, grabbing store shots and corporate identity before it all ended up in a 95% off bin?

I got out my (paper) notebook and started writing down the names of all the empty stores around me, vowing to check on the Internet for photo groups. My list got longer and longer, my notebook started running out of paper…

… the phone rang and I woke up.

Annoyed as I was to be awakened, I was glad to remember my dream because it was a good question. Are there Flickr groups or any other photo groups designed to retain the retail memories that will be dismantled this year? Some searches of Flickr revealed companies in tag names and photographs of store fronts, but are there any efforts being made to group and organize it?

Perhaps the Commons could add a function to help us retain the history we are living as well as the long-past history.