As my colleague Neal Polachek noted in an earlier post, Local Matters this week launched a new beta version of Localguides.com, the local relocation and travel service originally known as areaguides.com that it purchased a couple of years ago, reportedly…
Centro’s Summit in Chicago this week not only featured a positive outlook on national brands buying local online media, but also dealt with the impact of user-generated content and video on the local ad marketplace, and on the agencies themselves.…
Agency reps appearing at Centro’s Local Media Publisher Summit in Chicago said they’re ready to work with local media publishers, but they’re looking for non-cookie-cutter approaches. They emphasized that they’re overwhelmed by manpower shortages and that it is generally easier…
Do user reviews for sushi restaurants and promotions for Target and Lowe's really mix? Especially when the user reviews come from a highly defined community like Judy's Book? They may not, but Judy's Book is motivated to try to ride…
They say all politics are local. But that doesn’t seem to include local online political advertising. The political pros at E-Voter Institute meeting held this morning in La Jolla said ad patterns are likely to shift in 2008 due to…
NBC-Universal has unveiled DigPhilly, a city site designed to complement WCAU 10, an owned- and-operated station (and the homebase for the president of NBC O&Os). The site is serving as a template for NBC-U's other O&Os, so the stakes are…
Most of us get a lot of e-newsletters every week. Most of them are powered by Constant Contact. But, given the alternative means that local businesses have to communicate (blogs, RSS, videos, podcasts, etc.), is the era of the e-newsletter…
Cox’s Palm Beach Post.com, fighting to stave off Craigslist and slackening ad trends for newspapers in general, has focused on creating a super site for shopping. The site is replete with free ads, new features such as video, free direct-connect…
Building the perfect template for hyper-local media has been the endgame for a number of companies BackFence, American Town Networks, Pegasus News, and Citysquares, to name a few. HyperLocal Media has been working at it as well, focusing on the…
As my colleague Mike Boland noted this morning, the new version of Citysearch is finally out, and it's a good effort that is appropriately heavy on video and personalization. The change coincides with new leadership at the company. Jay Herratti,…
New York Times Digital Chief Martin Niesenholtz, keynoting the Yellow Pages Association conference this morning in Las Vegas, called local "a huge untapped opportunity in the directories arena that no one including the portals has yet tapped." I'm not at…
HP is serious about working with small businesses and announced today that it is buying Logoworks, the disrupting producer of logos for small businesses. It will be a great acquisition for HP. When it launched in 2001, the premise behind…
Tired of using "San Francisco" as the metaphor for "all things Internet?" How about focusing on "bloggy neighborhoods"? Beth Lawton at NAA New Media Fed alerted the readership to a list of Top 10 bloggy neighborhoods compiled by Outside.in, the…
The L.A. Times today provided a sneak preview of the Frank Gehry-designed, $150 million headquarters for Barry Diller's IAC along the West Side highway in NYC. I'll look forward to visiting. Here are pictures of the building from IAC’s site,…
Why watch "American Idol" tonight? As an alternative, I recommend that you download the lawsuit filed by MediaNews Group against Par Ridder, the former publisher of St. Paul's Pioneer Press, and son of Tony Ridder, who bolted across the river…
It is not especially surprising, but media shift is being accelerated by new devices, expanding media channels, user-generated content and aggregation. IBM Global Business Services tries to make sense of all of it in a new report: "Navigating the Media…
Inside the newspaper industry, the notion of the Web as a Hail Mary pass has never been fully embraced. But last week's earning reports from the major newspaper chains is a bracing cup of cold water. An article in today's…
A few months ago, Freedom Interactive President Michael Matthieu said he was "tearing out the infrastructure" at his newspapers and TV stations and making everything Web-centric. Now we see the first tangible results. At The Shelby Star, Freedom’s 15,000 circulation…
This morning, I joined 500 or so members of the San Diego Venture Group to hear Vint Cerf, the tech legend who was instrumental in the Internet's creation in the 1960s. More recently, he's been working as a very high-profile…
For media "old-timers," the annual NAB show is synonymous for where-it-all-happens. Year after year, the masses of media professionals still come, with this year's edition attracting 108,000 people from around the world. I went yesterday, mostly to see how TV…
