News Survey

There are a number of interesting things I ran across today. Given my schedule this morning, here's an abbreviated roundup:

• Fast Search & Transfer's Stephen Baker points me to a results page on the Denver Post site to show FAST's aggregation of content from disparate sources in a single page—my search was for "Home Improvement." FAST doesn't do UI design (they should). This is getting there …
• New mapping and transit site Hopstop (per MediaPost) takes geotargeting down to the block level (using Yahoo! Maps).
• A new report argues that consumers don't want to pay for content (iTunes notwithstanding) but would rather have ad-supported video. (There will undoutedly be both in the marketplace going forward.)
• Local TV Web sites want to be taken seriously as ad vehicles and so commissioned a Borrell report to validate and promote that opportunity to the larger marketplace. (PremierGuide is providing local search and directory content to many of those local TV sites.) The bottom line for local TV sites is that they need to be part of a network (one way or another) to realize this ad revenue potential.
• EU search engine and Google/Yahoo! challenger Quaero is announced. Billing itself as a next-generation multimedia search provider, it will have to be good and won't be able to rely on anti-American hostility or pan-EU nationalism for traffic. We'll see …