Online/Interactive

Sept. 28 was an interesting day on several fronts in the local search and online ad spending business, but I'm not sure that it has gotten sufficient coverage. My colleague Michael Boland did write a brief blog titled "Local Search…

Related to my post yesterday, Hitwise has some interesting data (via Greg) on the growth of UGC directories (i.e., Yelp, Judy's Book, Insider Pages, etc.) versus that of IYPs. It's an interesting comparison that supports the notion that UGC is…

As the previous post pointed out, college towns can represent strong markets for hyper-local community sites because of the activism (conducive to user generated content), buying power (sometimes), and high turnover of apartments, furniture, books, merchandise etc. My former colleague…

Store locators, the only "local" part of many national retail sites, are an increasingly important part of both national and local retail sites, according to "Expectations of The Cross Channel Customer," a new study released by authoritative retail analyst Lauren…

Print and Internet advertising aren't perfect substitutes for each other. The way that ads are priced, it takes at least 10 Internet users to make up for a single print user. So it doesn't make too much sense to suggest…

While trying to think and type as F-16s roar past my window (it's fleet week here in San Francisco), I'm beginning to notice an uptick in the conversation surrounding user-generated content in local search. Also known as "social search" (as…

Four months after it landed on the West Coast, hyper-local Web site Backfence.com has established its first community site in the Midwest. The Evanston, Illinois, site will join Backfence's community sites in the D.C. area (the site started in Reston,…

The report on Newspaper Next, a Harvard Business School-influenced blueprint for transforming newspapers into local ad hubs, has been released by the American Press Institute — or at least a stripped-down, free version of it (i.e., very little data). Included…

Last week, I got 22 comments within a two-day timeframe on a several-month-old post regarding Merchant Circle. I took all the comments off the blog after noting irregularities among them. Basically, I saw a deliberate attempt by one or more…

Geo-tagging is becoming a significant part of the local ecosphere and is a very popular feature on Yahoo!'s Flickr service, according to Yahoo! Local GM Paul Levine, who spoke at SES Local on Sept. 28 in Denver. Levine said that…

There is vast opportunity for local niche players in a world that is otherwise dominated by the leading search engines. Moreover, the emergence of search, in all its variations, creates a wealth of local inventory for advertisers smart enough to…

Today I had the chance to sit down with Mike Hogan, CEO of online coupon platform provider ZiXXo, to follow up on a discussion we had at DDC. We previously wrote about the company here. ZiXXo is working on a…

... according to comScore. Here are the latest numbers. As we've pointed out in the past, actual local searches could be greater. Local searches are defined in this study as "searches conducted by consumers on the local or directory (Yellow…

For the past couple of days, I've been besieged by "comments" that look like they are from small businesses that are complaining about Merchant Circle's aggressive voicemail promos. Merchant Circle is a new company that is designed to generate small-business…

Spot Runner, the year-old company that uses the Internet to inexpensively produce and place local TV ads for small businesses, has revealed some new directions. While it is still pursuing ad campaigns with local businesses, which number "in the thousands,"…

Yellow Pages companies are increasingly eyeing classifieds as the final piece of a "local advertising hub." The "inevitable" convergence of classifieds and Yellow Pages was explored at Kelsey's Directory Driven Commerce conference in Los Angeles Sept. 19-20. I gave a…

The partisans have come out of the woodwork to defend the future of classifieds — and specifically, newspaper-dominated classifieds. Following are short takes from comments sent to The Local Onliner. (It is worthwhile to look up the full comments.) Jay…

There is a great promotion for Yahoo! and Yahoo! Local going on right now. Or at least the concept is great. But it doesn't work.When I signed on to Yahoo! tonight, it touted that I could print out a free…

Windows Live Expo, Microsoft's entry in the classifieds war, has upped the ante against Google Base, Yahoo! and the rest of them by signing with AdMission (formerly iPix) to use its Spotlight Ads technology.While advertisers can still post ads for…

At a time when telcos like Verizon are divesting their Yellow Pages unit to help pay for the deployment of IPTV networks, AT&T Directory President Denny Payne makes a passionate case that the parent company ought to keep its Yellow…