I stopped by my friend Sophie Wegat’s blog to check on my buddy and saw she had taken the Nerd Test. I decided to try it too. Sexy women nerds are so hot, right?

Turns out I’m just enough nerd to be able to handle myself in public and not sound too stupid. According to the test results, I’m nerdier than half of the test takers so far.

I kinda like the “Lightly Nerdy” label.

It’s sorta like ice cream with a light dash of hot fudge on the top. Just enough to make an impression but not overwhelm the whole dessert.

Added>> My dear Australian buddy Mike has found these Header Earrings for tech women. I’ve typed 3 sentences of witty comments on this, but deleted them all. Click at your own risk.

FutureNow’s Holly Buchanan asked a great question and there was no way I was going to pass this one up. She writes about an ad for women’s wear that features two male bodies in suits with balloons for heads and one female body with no head at all. She has a steel rod or needle for a head, followed by a body wearing an outfit that seriously offers no clue as to how the breasts stay in place.

Holly presents this image in her blog post, Images that Appeal to Women? and then asked,

This was an ad targeting women? So, I looked closer and realized the woman didn’t have a steel rod jutting through her body, she had a pin coming out of her body. (You simply cannot make this stuff up)

OK - I’m dying to ask - what is the message of this ad? What is the ad saying to women?

I decided to try my hand at this. It reminds me of poetry classes in college, where we analyzed the symbology and tried to figure out what the poet was really saying.

The two male bodies aren’t facing the female body. They’re facing away from her. The female headless body is walking as if entering the room, ready to pop some eyeballs (the balloon headed men?) when they see her mini-skirt, legs, breasts screaming to fall out any second and tiny waist.

Like, if I wore this pretty little number to work, do you honestly believe I’d get ANY work done?

Is that the point? That if women would wear this sexy blue piece, they don’t need any brains, and therefore, have no need for a head? The only part of them worth noting is whatever skin the material doesn’t cover?

I’m so stuck on the missing head and furious, that I can’t imagine being persuaded to inquire further about the women’s wear line being advertised.

So, I asked my husband to look at it and he quite logically points out that the needle headed woman is about to pop the balloon headed men’s heads. I was close, but he saw it immediately, whereas I was fussing over how unfair it was to not have a head.

What Will Naked Bodies Sell?

Not long ago someone at Cre8asiteforums started a thread about a site that sells skincare products. He was curious about a video presentation on the site where all the people were completely nude. He wondered why advertisers would want to try and sell skin care products by showing naked people? Would this work?

So, of course we all ran to see the naked people.

Turns out the video featured men and women. There were far more naked women of course, but the naked guy was quite welcome, considering I’m all for equality in naked people. One woman was pregnant. That impressed me because it’s a normal condition for some women and why hide it? There was one hysterical close up of a woman’s breasts and several pretty close shots of other parts of women’s anatomy. We weren’t sure the purpose of all that was. The whole thing was intended to make you believe that if you use their skin products, you will look as perfect and flawless as they all did.

You might even be brave enough to walk around naked to show off your healthy, glowing skin.

They were models. Of course they were flawless.

As charming as the video was, in no way was I convinced to try the product because none of the models could prove they actually used the product and none of them looked like me.

Marketing to women is not my area of expertise. But as a woman, I know when an advertising company has no idea who I am or what matters to me. For starters, there are a lot of things about me that no headless, breast escapee model could ever compete with.

If I EVER have to hide my head and throw my breasts out for a ride in public just to get noticed when I walk into a room, somebody please shoot me. As Holly says, “I lost my will to live.” Why do advertisers want to do this to women?

How is this selling products to us?

One of the perks of my exposure to readers in the user centered design and search engine marketing industries is that I’ll receive emails from people who feel they have something I may want to see. It could be a book to review, a new website, new Internet application or new service.

While I don’t get around to writing or linking out to all of them, I try to hang on to some items that you may not have seen or heard about yet. Such as:

Wild Apricot - Membership and Events Management services and software. As more and more people are gathering together in smaller groups and networking locally in their industries, this could come in handy. The professionally delivered blog entry written by Soha El-Borno and warm email from her helped bring this site to my attention. Nicely executed.

The Information Architecture Institute - This site is loaded with information, resources, tools, news and much more.

Virtual project management requires software. Anything that helps with organizing, communication and management is worth exploring to see if there’s a good fit. Meet the new Protonotes.com. It’s free. “Protonotes is also a great tool for recording your findings in usability tests and heuristic reviews.” (Thanks the tip Mike!)

Anne Day introduced me to Blogstrings.com. It connects bloggers and readers who share similiar interests. It’s another way of driving traffic to your blog. Ann tells me, “Instead of your blog being pigeon-holed into one category in a traditional blog directory, BlogStrings has profiles and searches with multiple fields to allow for multiple interests.”

These are the sites that survived my DELETE button. Most of the time I hear from people who just want a link for the sake of getting a link. The other day I was harrassed by someone who threatened to remove their sacred link to my site because I hadn’t linked back to their totally unrelated to my topic website.

How dare I refuse to link back?

I’m such a radical.

There’s a bit of news to report, so I’ll dig in. Firstly, one of my most cherished friends, Bill Slawski, has accepted a position with Commerce 360, a company not too far from where I live. He is able to continue his role as my co-Administrator at Cre8asiteforums and keep his own SEObytheSea alive and kicking. He joins Liana Evans, Greg Meyers and Matt LeVeque, to make a powerful search team for Commerce 360. Best wishes Bill on your new journey. (Cre8asiteforums discussion: Congratulations Bill!)

I’ve remained silent on his news for weeks and have been resisting the urge (so far) to consider working for someone else myself. Bill’s new job was all the talk at our Philly SEO SEM gathering not long ago. Admittedly, the idea of working with a team again has been on my mind for a long time, but not in SEO/M. If a company is looking at usability and SEO, (how progressive thinking is that!), there aren’t that many SEO turned usability folks out there to choose from. A few companies are starting to look for us and dangle the carrot of opportunities with them.

Happenings Elsewhere

I used to bump into Ralph Tegtmeier, aka”Fantomaster”, in usenet discussions a hundred years back (or so it feels like now.) He was one of the hard core early SEO’s out there helping people understand search engines and volunteering hours and hours of his time to anyone who asked questions. Famous for software development and what I call, “black hat techniques with class”, he’s bringing back his blog and launching new sites. (Thanks for the tip: Peter and John)

Congratulations to Barry and Yisha on surviving year one of marriage. May you have a lifetime journey filled with the love and devotion you now share.

Welcome home Rand Fishkin and David Temple and many other lucky folks from the search marketing industry who experienced Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo 2007, Xiamen, China. Rand has been writing as much as he can while there about his visit and I’m sure he has a lot more to share once he settles back in Seattle. David may want to sleep for a few months, since he was Chairman of the China Search Marketing Tour. As for Chris Sherman, who handled programming for this, and many other huge conferences, I’ve concluded that Chris is an SEO Zenmaster. Gord Hotchkiss has been blogging about China SES consistently too, with stories galore (thanks Gord!).

Birthdays are cool. From the sound of it, Rae’s friends showed her a great time for her 30th birthday on the 28th. I celebrated my 49th at the beach over the weekend with just hubby and me and can totally swear that life is better, in all ways, than it was when I was 21, 30 and 40. Maybe I’m a new breed of female or something, but I have to say that I feel more alive now…like all the wiring has finally been turned on. Thank you to Cre8asiteforum members who began a Happy Birthday thread (members only access) at the forums. I loved celebrating with my “family” there.

Change is good and this year begins my own personal cycle for a change in my Journey. I experienced life path altering changes in 1968, 1978, 1988 and 1998. Each of them is remarkable because they required risk, courage and not having any idea in advance what the outcome would be. As I head for 2008, I can already feel the next Big One coming.

I’m getting pretty darned curious about it too.

Since so many of my readers are young and cute, I get to tell them about the horrors of growing old and grumpy. It’s fun to scare them. It’s a rite of passage to ruin everyone’s surprise. When I was pregnant with my first child, one of the senior citizen co-workers where I worked told me, “You’ll never sleep again.” I hated that she was right.

I am about to turn 49 years old (on Sunday). Like some of my beloved women friends I’ve met online over the years who are my age or older, none of us feels “old”. In fact, truth be told, the fact that these women are so incredibly sexy, held together, fiesty, smart as whips and hysterically funny let’s me know I’m at least in the right club.

Admittedly, as this particular birthday grows closer, I’ve been up one minute and down the next. Mixed into that is a growing desire to do something worthy. I haven’t felt productive or like I’ve contributed anything special to the physical Universe. These feelings can be drastic and live with me for weeks. I told my friend, Christine Churchill, while at a conference, that I dreamt of opening up a small bookstore in my little town. I wanted to stop living online and be with humans who hug and have voices.

Companies want to hire me, but my last 3 jobs working for someone else lived and died by the Internet. Why do I want to return to making another web development company rise to the top, only to be kicked out when they crash and burn? At my age, there’s been so many break ups. Whether love or work, they always hurt the same way.

By the time I turned 40, Cre8pc already existed and I was freelancing at night in SEO. I was single, and ready to be that way to the end of my days (Ask Eric. He only got to marry me because he’s known me as a friend for 17 years. He got points for tolerance.) I was married to my work and a determined single mom. A night on the town, for me, was going to Borders and reading.

You’d be amazed at how easy it is to flirt in Borders.

Which is another reason why owning my own shop appeals to me.

I’d be delightfully dangerous.

Don’t tell Eric.

See you next week.