Author: Mike Boland

As we wrote about here, some local advertisers have begun to use social networks (MySpace mostly) to push promotional messages. The Lost Remote blog picked up a story yesterday that revisited the topic.

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that Washingtonpost.com will provide links to stories that relate to its own. This goes beyond columnists linking to various articles around the Web when they apply to a topic and represents an…

This morning I had the chance to talk to Julie Mason, general manager of Kellysearch. The site is a B2B vertical search engine and directory that mostly focuses on industrial products, services and equipment. Basic listings are free with the…

Fast moving classified aggregator LiveDeal announced yesterday that it will partner with classified transaction engine AdStar. The deal will allow LiveDeal to offer its online classified advertisers a print upsell in the 40-plus newspapers AdStar works with, which include the…

Google announced earlier this week that it will infuse live traffic data in its mapping application that can be accessed from Web-enabled mobile devices. Live traffic data is available on Yahoo! Local and in the newest release of Windows Live…

Prolific journalist and blogger Mark Glaser takes a detailed look at social media and community-edited news. More specifically, he asks whether the users who do the tagging, reviewing and in some cases editing that fuel some news sites' notable success…

Yahoo! announced today that it will partner with BT to bring 120,000 UK business listings to Yahoo! Local UK. The deal also positions Yahoo! to better serve UK local businesses with its YSM paid search platform, which now allows advertisers…

I'm back from vacation with little time to post, as I'm running off to meetings and digging out of the requisite backlog of e-mails. But I just saw this item that relates to our ongoing coverage of video game advertising.…

Early next week, we will publish the third and final installment of our newspaper White Paper series. It picks up where we left off in the second part by examining the performance- based advertising models that can apply to newspapers,…

This Red Herring article examines the traffic modeling technologies being baked into the navigation systems of Tele-Atlas and Navteq. These are mostly in-car nav systems, but since these two companies are the primary data providers for every major online mapping…

We reported in a recent news roundup that smartphone adoption is on the rise. This could be a boon for mobile local search adoption, given hardware features (keypad, larger screen, etc.) that are more conducive to some MoLo applications (see…

Today I had the chance to speak with Andy Halliday, CEO of recently launched OurStory — a post-launch follow-up to our initial discussion back in May. The site falls into the social networking category but has an interesting way of…

Google has long since seeped into the mainstream lexicon as a verb. Now it's official.

Ingenio has linked up with Web search engine Find.com to provide pay-per-call listings in its search results. Pay-per-call is getting more and more attention these days as a valuable source of performance-based marketing, online and off. Click-to-call (the basis of…

A few weeks ago, we had the opportunity to interview InfoSpace's senior director of emerging products, Joe Herzog, and product management director, Ron Winter. The company has an interesting strategy with parallel initiatives in online search and in mobile products,…

Social media driven news site Digg has gotten a facelift and some added functionality. John Battelle takes a closer look and speculates on possible future enhancements and plug-ins for the site. The viral success the site has enjoyed makes this…

Here are a handful of news items to round out the week:—Google is moving further down the social search path by allowing users to tag video content with comments, ratings and labels. Search Engine Watch explains. —Microsoft has come out…

Google's long-awaited online payment system launched today, which, among other things, will enable better tracking by closing the loop on search and online conversions. There is obviously a lot more to it, which we'll get the chance to explore later.…

Mobile coupon engine Cellfire launched yesterday for Cingular users. The tracking and marketing benefits that online and mobile coupons offer will make this a big area of development in the local space over the next year. As more third-party software…

Some notable happenings from around the local search and media worlds this week:—MapQuest launched the beta version of a new tool today that helps road-trippers plan routes. It includes some new Ajax functionality to drag and drop points on a…