Local Developments

The irrepressible Kevin Ryan has a column all about local today (roundup of recent developments).

LiveDeal.ca (a joint venture with Canada's Torstar, which owns book publishing and newspaper properties) went live this week. The site is being integrated into Torstar's various newspaper sites.

PremierGuide, one of the early local search platforms, has quiety built an impressive portfolio of clients: 130 newspaper, TV station and city portal Web sites, according to today's release. Here's a map of its customers across the U.S.

In other Canadian Internet news, Search Engine Watch points to a Toronto Star report that Google has signed a multiyear deal with Canada.com:

The multiyear partnership will provide Canada.com users with content and search related advertising, while offering Google's advertisers access to Canada.com's extensive reach across the country, the companies said.

There were no disclosed terms. Many newspaper sites (and some TV and radio sites) are part of the Canada.com network. Yellow Pages Group supplies the content for Google Local in Canada.

News Corp., which has been pushing aggressively into online in the U.S., said it will launch a local listings site to challenge Sensis in Australia:

The website will pull together the hundreds of thousands of business listings collected by News's network of 100 community newspapers, along with ALS's 700,000 listings.

The News Corp.-owned papers will also feature the listings data on their respective sites.