Now Yahoo! has apparently gotten into the game of bidding for a piece of AOL. Whether AOL first approached MSN or vice-versa, I believe that AOL has very shrewdly played this whole minority stake investment. TimeWarner has billions and billions…
Everybody's doing it: Google, Yahoo! and, apparently, now America Online will add blogs to its search tool kit (on the heels of its Weblogs purchase). Reportedly, the underlying engine will be Intelliseek's BlogPulse tool. BlogPulse hasn't received the attention of…
I received a note from Google today indicating that Google Desktop 2 is coming out of beta with several enhancements. As part of that, there's a Maps plug-in for Sidebar: This new Sidebar panel rotates through maps relevant to the…
This is a short post about a complex subject 'cause I'm technically not working. But Google getting into offline on behalf of advertisers is radical. I had been quite skeptical of the Trader Classifieds rumor for several reasons. But this…
Thanks to Chris Sherman for pointing this out . . . As they promised earlier in the year, Verizon has added reviews/ratings to its SuperPages directory. Kudos to SuperPages for taking yet another risk.
In the spirit of the season (Halloween), the people at Consumer Reports WebWatch published a scary report about fear online: "Leap of Faith: Using the Internet Despite the Dangers." The report, based on a telephone survey of roughly 1,500 adult…
Powered by Ask, IAC beats analysts' expectations (wish I could do that), while newspapers are having a tough time, (reg. req'd) which analysts ( in this case Goldman Sachs) predict will continue: The weak ad environment for newspapers has caused…
Local content aggregator and affiliate network AreaGuides.net has been acquired by Denver-based Local Matters. This is the first consumer-facing property in the Local Matters portfolio, and CEO Perry Evans expects to substantially enhance the interface and user experience of the…
Verizon, BellSouth and SBC are madly developing IPTV to, among other things, compete with cable companies, whose bundled Internet, phone and TV "triple play" is siphoning away telephony and potential DSL customers. While most IPTV services have been delayed or…
Everyone in the local search biz has said something like, "Once there's a laptop in the kitchen, then . . ." (fill in the blank with your own traditional media doomsday scenario). Most people don't know how to set up…
Here's the U.S. Census Department's 2003 data on household computer and Internet adoption by state. The numbers are going to be larger now. But it's interesting to see the breakdown. More data here.
In a very interesting bid to revive its fortunes and its consumer brand, LookSmart has launched 160 vertical sites on everything from sports to city guides (here's New York, for example). The content comes from Furl, Web crawling and LookSmart's…
Here's the long tail (sort of) in action: Yahoo! Autos Custom. It's an enthusiast site (hence the LT reference) but it also features classifieds and display advertising. This is an interesting marriage of content + community in a highly specialized…
Here's a piece in The N.Y. Times that says SBC will take the venerable name AT&T once the acquisition is approved. One response: Will the AT&T brand support the kinds of Internet-age services that SBC is offering and wants to…
According to an article that appeared in Editor & Publisher, Tribune Co.'s Newsday has abandoned AdSense in favor of an "in-house" contextual product powered by Quigo: As more and more newspapers are embracing Google AdSense and other third-party context-based advertising,…
Thanks to SiliconBeat for pointing out Social Media + Maps site Frappr. It's fun; take a look. Also John Battelle discusses a new button from Yahoo! intended to get more content into social search content repository MyWeb.
A raft of competitors using the label "pay per call" is about to enter the marketplace and compete for business in this up-and-coming arena. The first of these new would-be competitors for Ingenio making a public push is ZiffTalk. Another…
LocalLaunch's CEO Justin Sanger several months ago wrote a column that was strongly critical of IYPs ("Internet Yellow Pages Are Dead") as destination sites. So it's very interesting that his most recent ClickZ column is extremely bullish on YellowPages.com. What…
There are three dimensions to local: "where I am," "where I'm going" and "where can I buy it?" The new Yahoo! Trip Planner seeks to leverage a number of Yahoo!'s locally oriented applications and information, including search, maps and user-generated…
