In September, ConsumerReports.org announced it had passed the 2 millionth subscriber milestone, which is quite impressive considering that consumers still resist paying for content online. CR's online success goes to the power of its trusted brand, its relatively unique content,…
Google has introduced tagging (bookmarks) to its personalized/search history functionality, which can also now be added as a content module to the personalized home page (Fusion). This new tagging capability allows users to create a directory of sites, which can…
The WSJ and others are reporting that Wednesday Yahoo! and MSN will announce consumer IM "interoperability." The conventional wisdom being widely repeated is: This now puts pressure on AOL, the IM leader, which has twice the market share of either…
A new report from Bank of America Securities (summarized by Editor and Publisher) reflects that national advertisers have not in fact abandoned newspapers and are shifting ad dollars to the Internet more slowly than widely perceived: The report found that,…
Here's Yahoo!'s new and improved news search with a dash of blog search. (This is probably not a full-blown Yahoo! blog-search offering.) In this example for "local search," see the right column. Yahoo is also integrating Flickr content and audio/video…
After having Google Reader for the past 72 hours, my initial "hands-on" reaction is very positive. (Critiques: "Labels" aren't working for me, and there's no way to search within the reader -- yet.) But overall it's very easy to use…
This was posted on MSN's Search Blog: From: Yusuf Mehdi As you know, we launched MSN adCenter --our next generation advertising platform -- in France and Singapore last month. This was an important first step to delivering our global vision…
OK, so podcasting isn't yet part of the seemingly ever-expanding realm of things I find myself tracking these days. I'm just going to mention in passing that it's significant in the following ways: Podcasts are another species of user-generated content…
In the first quarter of 2001, Verizon Information Services rolled out SuperPages as the new brand identity for its print directory products. At the time, the concept of applying an Internet brand name to an offline directory was unusual, and…
The Journal goes on to predict that Carlyle won't be the largest buy-out fund for long. At least three other companies "are expected to be as big or larger." Michael Klein, head of global banking at Citigroup said, "the capital…
Google launched Google Reader earlier today. It joins an already crowded field of RSS readers (and Google's personalized home page and sidebar apps have RSS/feed readers embedded in them; over time integration will be key). RSS readers have implications for…
Newspaper-owned news aggregation site Topix, which has a number of third-party, local news distribution deals with the likes of AOL and Citysearch, among others, launched a very interesting offering recently. Unfortunately, I don't have a great deal of time right…
In my briefings with companies I hear about a lot of business "process" or "method" patents. Some of them strike me as overly broad, some are interesting and important, and some are just stupid (that the U.S. government would allow…
AP's Mike Liedtke, covering Web 2.0 in San Francisco this week, wrote a piece in which he quoted Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel who reportedly said the following about Google at the show: "So far they don't seem to have a…
Google has brought Local out of beta and combined it with the surprisingly popular Google Maps in a single "map-centric" interface. Here's a search for "wine shops in Greenwich Village New York." Brett Taylor, who's the new product manager at…
Thanks to Marty Himmelstein for alerting me about Ning, a social-media tool that covers a bunch of topics but has a local content area. Here's a fairly extensive discussion from SiliconBeat. It's time to throw away skepticism about user-generated content…
Yahoo! announced that it had acquired upcoming.org (a Flickr-like events calendar that is user-driven). This is going to bolster Yahoo!'s already very strong Local product by adding more user-generated content in the events area. The events RSS feed in Yahoo!…
WhitePages.com announced a deal with SuperPages.com to feature WhitePages.com's residential listings on its site. WhitePages.com already has similar deals with MSN, SMARTPages (SBC) and RealPages.com (BellSouth). The latter two will merge in the next several months into the single YellowPages.com…
This just in, R.H. Donnelley has acquired Dex Media for equity of $4.2 billion and debt assumption of $5.3 billion, for a total value of $9.5 billion, a multiple of roughly 10 times Dex's 2004 EBITDA. Current RHD CEO Dave…
As indicated by my colleague, Charles Laughlin, R.H. Donnelley (RHD) announced that it will acquire Dex Media for approximately $9 billion in debt assumption and equity. See the release below and Charles' post for more details. RHD has a substantial…
