Online/Interactive

Are most of the businesses in your address books ones that you would endorse? How about the mentions in your calendar of restaurants where you are meeting colleagues? How about the businesses in your photo software that you have bothered…

Hearst Corp. is listed as a lead investor in Jingle Networks' new US$30 million financing round, along with Goldman Sachs. Jingle is the two-year-old provider of 1-800-FREE411, an ad-supported, "free" directory assistance service. Other investors are repeaters from earlier rounds.…

Online classifieds revenue is OK. But since it typically represents just a fraction of a fraction of existing print dollars … you'd rather base your growth on display ads. Especially, targeted, premium-priced ads that represent "new dollars" for the company.That's…

I've been hearing more and more, and becoming more and more intrigued, by the multi-player game-like virtual world of Second Life. This Popular Science article literally dives into the phenomenon and alludes to some of its local advertising potential. Here…

Local online shopping site NearbyNow (which we wrote about here) is expanding. The company announced today that it will extend its service to 20 U.S. cities, including Portland, San Francisco, Virginia Beach, Tucson and Spokane. This will happen through an…

The San Diego Union-Tribune has used Citysearch as the default city guide for its SignOnSanDiego Web site since 1999. The arrangement, one of several Citysearch struck with newspapers in that time period, gave The UT exclusive rights to sell Citysearch…

Starting today, CBS is providing Yahoo! with local news clips from its 16 owned and operated stations in exchange for a big chunk of the Yahoo! local news page, links back to the local station sites and a revenue share…

GateHouse Media, a rollup of community newspapers and shoppers operating in 285 markets, has hired Melinda Gipson from the Newspaper Association of America's New Media Federation. Gipson has been a cornerstone of the New Media Federation since February 1995 —…

It is depressing for online newspapers that Yahoo! and other portals generally outpace them in their own communities. But not so fast, says Shawn Riegsecker, a founder of Centro, an ad network dedicated to localizing ad buys for national marketers,…

Being a frequent YouTube user, I just stumbled upon this. Chad and Steve, the cofounders of YouTube, have sent a message to the world about the Google acquisition in what other form but a YouTube video clip. Either these guys…

Judy's Book cofounder Andy Sack posts very candidly about the difficulties of launching a review/IYP site. Sack, who also founded Abuzz, one of the original review sites, and worked on Firefly, knows something about this subject by now. Founded in…

Citysearch has been around the local scene for so long that it often gets overlooked. But the IAC division plans a significantly higher profile in early 2007, with a relaunch of its site, a big push on local and national…

There has been no shortage of coverage and commentary on Google's acquisition of YouTube this week. Without content assets or unique technology, the acquisition has been viewed with a skeptical eye by many in the media and analyst communities. This…

Insider Pages founder Stu MacFarlane has been replaced as CEO by Mitch Galbraith, a veteran of Yahoo!'s small-business division who was recently brought in as VP of advertising. The change at the top appears to have been initiated by Insider's…

Related to last week's discussions on the challenges and opportunities of user-generated content (and somewhat related to yesterday's news of Google's acquisition of YouTube), eMarketer has some positive data on the revenue-generating potential of UGC.

And they just keep plugging away and plugging away at microsites. A new Bay Area company, Smalltown, has launched a microsite service in San Mateo and Burlingame that serves as kind of a commerce-oriented city guide/Yellow Pages. The service has…

TV station Web sites and other local media will be hosting local "best of" contests developed by CityVoter, a new company started by Forrester Research alum. The "best of" contests are using a tried-and-true format popularized by city magazines such…

Craigslist will be adding $25 fees Oct. 22 for recruitment ads in four more markets: Boston; Seattle; Washington, D.C.; and San Diego. The markets join New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco as cities where fees have been imposed…

After many days of swirling rumors about a Google acquisition of YouTube, the companies announced today that this will happen. Read the press release here, a recording of the conference call that followed the announcement here, and more to come…

Call it sour grapes. But a year after famous talking head Michael Kinsley was thrown out as the Los Angeles Times' editorial page editor, he finally lets loose on Tribune Co. and its problems "fixing" the Times. In various comments,…