This is an historic day for many obvious reasons, and especially worthy of observation for any company in the communications business.

Regardless of your political leanings, every inauguration of a U.S. president is a miracle—a testimony to the remarkable wisdom of the Founders, the durability of the Constitution and the celebration of the peaceful transfer of power for the 43rd time in our nation’s history, something no other nation on earth can claim.

This particular inauguration is a broad cultural experience like no other before it. The entire campaign, and its media coverage, is a lesson in marketing, branding and PR, and will go down in history as the first fully managed brand launch to impact the poilitcal structure of the country, and the first truly successful online political machine.

What’s more, in just the last few years, we’ve seen how news and information has moved even more decidedly online than off. Every magazine I received this month was thinner than the same month’s issue last year. CNN is now getting 1.7 billion visits a month. (MSNBC, number two in the rankings, gets 1.2 billion per month).

So we experienced not only a revolution in how a national political candidate gets elected, but also in how the world observes the process.

No, this isn’t a call for revolution.

Disambiguation is the process by which paid search on the Internet tries to get smarter by understanding semantics, context and the intentions of the person doing the searching.

For example, if you type “bugs“ into Google, are you looking for information on insects, Volkswagens, audio surveillance technology or annoying co-workers?

The semantic search experts are supposed to be working on this, but it appears disambiguation is still a ways off.

Take these two examples:

1. While reading about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict in Gaza on a news website, I noticed a banner ad promoting a peaceful vacation in sunny Israel. While that sounds like a lovely holiday to consider, the context was distasteful while reading, as I was, about the devastating military conflict.
2. While reading on another news site about the U.S. admission of torture at Guantanamo Bay, an ad showed up offering hotel discounts in Guantanamo. The ad-serving tool obviously had been programmed to read text in the article, find any geographical location mentioned, and insert it into a hyperlinked sentence about hotel discounts. Being curious, I clicked the link, which went to a generic page that then led to Expedia and several other travel sites. Not surprisingly, there were no actual hotel discounts in Guantanamo, Cuba.

This all goes to show that Internet advertising has substantial room for improvement. No doubt, someone paid for all those ads and click-throughs, and those impressions and clicks will show up on some report to validate how successful the campaign is—when, in fact, it was all money down the drain.

As with all media buying, it’s easier to throw money at something than apply intelligence to it. It reminds me of the careless television, radio and print media buying that had characterized the ad agency business for decades. That’s why mass media has always been a suspect marketing tool, while trade media advertising is often a very smart, targeted marketing buy.

It’s all about precision and having confidence that the right people are seeing the right message at the right time. That’s a tall order, and the robots at Google still have a ways to go. They need to work a little harder at disambiguation. Maybe they need a few more humans.

One hundred and twenty seven years ago this week, Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, upon emigrating to the U.S., docked in New York City, whereupon he was asked by a customs agent if he had anything to declare. “Nothing but my genius,” he replied.

It’s with that same spirit that we embark upon what appears to be a challenging and eventful 2009. It is the hope of many—myself included—that the turn of the new year, the inauguration of a new president and the self interest of capitalism will right the ship that has recently run aground on the current recession.

Like losing weight and getting out of debt, it will take longer to get out of this mess than we would like. But taking our cue from Oscar Wilde, we might begin with the confidence that all we have to declare is our genius–the creativity, energy and resourcefulness to be able to extricate our businesses and our country from the economic mess we’re in.

In an earlier blog, I suggested that we have moved from the creative economy to the idea economy. That we have entered into an era that acknowledges that political and businss leaders don’t have all the answers right now, but we will find new ways to do everything better. Our new president-elect embodies that reality. He sure wasn’t elected on his experience. He was elected on people’s belief that he had a bright, inquiring mind and the ability to seek out good advice and innovative ideas, even from his rivals, rather than surrounding himself with yes-men. The situation reminds me of the Old Testament proverb:

Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.

In this regard, I am an incurable optimist. While keenly aware that greed, stupidity, secrecy and sloth led the nation into the current recession, it is our genius, creativity, collaboration and hard work that will bring better ideas, and hopefully better days, to our companies and our country.