Online/Interactive

Vertical sites carved out from broader Yellow Pages categories are one of those things that make tons of sense  although the only surefire winners at this point seem to be the lawyer sites. What most of these sites have…

Several execs involved in CareerSite wrote into my personal site to weigh in on CareerSite's demise, its apparent neglect by the newspaper owners of PowerOne Media, and what it all might mean as Yahoo! tries to work with most of…

Exactly what Rob Curley has been working on since joining The Washington Post Co. in September has been a matter of curiosity for people who've watched his thoughtful, transformative influence on interactive newspaper sites. A podcast interview with Marketwatch's Frank…

AskTheLocal.com is a new "shopping search engine" recently launched in the U.K. Started by husband-and-wife team Philip and Paula Abrahamson, along with Philip's brother Peter, AskTheLocal is similar in concept to ShopLocal in the U.S. (and to a lesser degree,…

PowerOne Media, once a major vendor for small and medium-sized newspapers, has sold off its recruitment site, CareerSite, to three of its newspaper owners: MediaNews Group, Hearst and Lee Enterprises. The companies are expected to shut down CareerSite after an…

Today I had the chance to chat with Dan Rubinstein, head of SME product initiatives at Google. Among many other things in the rapidly shifting online local marketplace, we spoke about Google's integration of click-to-call links in all its local…

To all of our U.S. readers, Happy Thanksgiving. Our offices will be open on Friday but blog posting will be light as we gear up for our ILM '06 conference next week. Hope to see you in Philadelphia.

Community networks, or "we networks," are so poorly used that they tend to really be "me networks." That's the gist of a new article in Annenberg's Online Journalism Review by Tom Grubisich, who revisits the subject a little more than…

The newspaper recruitment deal with Yahoo! first disclosed here in an Oct. 24 post has finally been confirmed, with some interesting twists. The deal puts in place a recruitment network of seven companies with 176 newspapers in 13 of the…

A favorite hobby of mine is reading the industry's tea leaves via the comings and goings of execs at different local companies. Today I am mulling over the departure of Insider Pages VP of Business Development Andrew Shotland and Merchant…

InfoSpace-owned Dogpile announced today that it will partner with video search site Blinkx. Blinkx will bring enhanced video search capabilities to Dogpile and other InfoSpace metasearch properties, including WebCrawler and Webfetch. Blinkx has indexed more than 6 million hours of…

Yahoo! Maps unveiled a host of new features today. Unlike the novel and graphically rich Microsoft Visual Earth 3-D announced last week, Yahoo!'s improvements are solely functional (although Visual Earth 3-D has a hefty balance of form and function, the…

Return on investment for advertising is generally measured by local businesses in terms of phone calls generated, call duration and/or store visits. That isn't changing soon. But for local ad sellers and their advertisers, it remains a challenge to figure…

A dirty secret in the search wars is that you can basically "buy" enough traffic via Google AdWords and other sources to jump to the top of the usage charts. In a recent ZDNet column, Donna Bogatin implied that Citysearch…

The Washington Post, following Gannett's "Information Center" approach toward the newsroom, says it will beef up several vertical sections in print and for the Web, including Health, Food and Home. A staff memo from Executive Editor Len Downie Jr., republished…

Modern Mom, a Los Angeles-based pioneer in the increasingly crowded "online moms" space, is launching 12 city guides on Wednesday (Nov. 15). Previews of L.A., San Diego, San Francisco, Chicago, New York City and Washington, D.C., are already up. These…

InfoSpace today launched Zoo.com, a search engine for kids that filters out sexually explicit content. It does this by filtering out search results that contain any of a list of 50,000 adult words or phrases. It also prioritizes search results…

There is clearly a lot of activity in the online video space, but there are still many question marks about how to effectively monetize the experience, and how local advertising could eventually come into the picture. Both of these are…

First we had Topix aggregating local news and events from thousands of sites. Now we have Outside.in trying to pull off the same idea using hyper-local blogs as a primary source. Steven Johnson co-created the site with John Geraci. He…

Very few people are as compelling as Morgan Stanely's Mary Meeker in arguing that the transition of media and commerce dollars to the Internet is under way. For sure, she understands, and anticipates, the macro. At the Web 2.0 conference…