Kelsey Local Media Blog
WCAU-TV, NBC's owned and operated station in Philadelphia, is launching DigPhilly, a city site, reports today's Wall Street Journal. The site isn't yet up and running, but a teaser features buttons for "learn," "do," "share," "find" and "shop." The Journal…
This morning I attended an interesting session on advertising on social networks at SES New York. Much of the subject matter here has implicit ties to local, and some explicit. The conversation around social networking in this session was, correspondingly,…
EBay's PR people seem to have tried to get some human interest stories going by citing Lumberton, New Jersey, as its No. 1 town of buyers and sellers on a per capita basis. Are you surprised? I was. I thought…
The leading evangelists for online TV station advertising WorldNow, IBS, Broadcast Interactive Media, Media Span, the station groups themselves have their work cut out for them. Some TV stations are now registering in the mid-six figures for online sales,…
Yesterday I had the chance to speak with the leadership team at BuzzLogic, which has developed a platform for tracking buzz around any topic or company. The primary venue for this buzz is the blogosphere, where there has been a…
Today I had the chance to speak with Nagaraju Bandaru, Cofounder and CTO of "meta reviews" site BooRah. The site has developed some clever algorithms that scrape, aggregate, structure and serve up third-party reviews for local search. It currently focuses…
Google today launched MyMaps, something appropriately coined by Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land as "mashups for the masses." Google Maps, like most other mapping engines has long made its API available to third-party developers, best documented by the Google…
A lingering idea from Al Gore's Information Superhighway is using grant money to jumpstart online (and wireless) community services and involvement. One year, as a judge for the U.S. Department of Commerce, I even helped dole out some of the…
Yesterday I had the chance to speak with Erron Silverstein, CEO of Solfo, the company behind recently launched (beta) local search site YellowBot. The site is built on many social features and will target the same young and tech-savvy demographic…
I was recently stunned by a conversation with a group of newspaper execs mulling over which U.S. city would be the first to rely on an online-only newspaper. The switch might be faster in one of the handful of surviving…
Following closely behind the social media trend in local search, Microsoft Live Search Maps launched a feature that will allow users to read and contribute ratings and reviews of local businesses. This is part of a new feature set it…
Every once in a while, I’ll allow myself to post something on the lighter side. Just a warning that this is one of those posts only tangentially related to local search, but having a semantic coincidence that I couldn’t…
How is one to consider Sam Zell's "purchase" of the Tribune Co.? We can be fairly certain that Zell, a "grave dancer" investor who is putting in $315 million and relying on an ESOP for the rest, didn't win the…
After its founding in 2002, Topix was definitely an "A List" Silicon Valley company, leading the way for crawling news in a million interesting and valuable ways. Its founders were extremely dedicated and smart, and the company looked like it…
Yellowpages.com today joined the ranks of local search providers that have an SMS-based mobile local search application. Similar to Google SMS and Yahoo! Mobile (and one from Starbucks), any cellphone user can send a business name or category in a…
Google is pushing hard to jumpstart its radio ad business, leveraging its $1.245 billion acquisition of the DMarc rep business in 2005. The search leader says it is working with 900 stations in 200 markets. But so far, according to…
Yesterday I had the opportunity to catch up with Elaine Kunda, CEO of newly launched (beta) Canadian local search site ZipLocal. The site currently covers Toronto and Montreal, but has 1.3 million Canadian business listings in 45 cities, which it…
Classified aggregator Oodle has offered to integrate its listings into community site iPoste. The press release doesn't mention if listings will flow in the other direction, but they should based on Oodle's aggregation model. Classified aggregation is all about in/out…
Map-centric directories from the likes of Google and Microsoft, enhanced with satellite and 3D imagery, are absolutely fascinating. They're also increasingly functional, with all kinds of searchable links. But is it really clear that they are the future of directories?…
Yahoo! this week launched a new version of its free Web site development and hosting product, through Yahoo! Small Business. Although it previously had a free tool for small businesses to establish a Web presence, this is an improvement because…
