Online/Interactive

A new banner just appeared on the home page of John Battelle's site touting PPCall as more "cost-effective" than clicks. Here's the landing page. ______The ad appears now to be down.

I didn't listen in on the analyst call that McClatchy CEO Gary B. Pruitt held yesterday, but there must have been some chuckles when, according to The N.Y. Times, "Mr. Pruitt, tried to persuade his listeners that newspapers remained vital…

I got a chance to get a quick preview and overview of Vast.com yesterday. What is Vast? On first blush it's yet another free classifieds site, joining an already extremely crowded field. But if one looks closer it's much more…

According to this Associated Press story (reg. req'd), U.S. District Judge James Ware indicated that he is going to order Google to comply with at least part of the Bush admin's request to turn over search records. Yahoo!, AOL and…

Om Malik reports on Google's acquisition of 3-D rendering company @Last Software, which owns SketchUp. He also asks what it means for Google. In a word: maps. Here's the company's Google Earth plug in. Google Earth already does rudimentary 3-D…

A Web-hosting firm in the U.K., Fasthosts, conducted an online survey of 2,000 U.K. small businesses in January and February (as a marketing vehicle for its own services). Indeed, one must always take such surveys with a "grain of salt"…

This N.Y. Times (reg. req'd) piece summarizes the findings of a recent DoubleClick survey of paid search and user behavior trends. Here's where you can download the report. Basically it confirms DoubleClick's finding in 2004 and separate comScore findings in…

This Saul Hansell article from The N.Y. Times (reg. req'd) does a nice survey of some of the trends in online and offline video. The world of niche TV (don't say "long tail") is coming and search engines — if…

A new IM product is coming from MySpace (what isn't?). This is according to a post today from Om Malik. Here are the pages on MySpace. AOL is the IM leader, followed by Yahoo! and MSN, with Google a distant…

After much handwringing and anticipation, The N.Y. Times (reg. req'd) is reporting that "Knight Ridder, the second-largest newspaper company in the United States, agreed Sunday night to sell itself for about $4.5 billion in cash and stock to the McClatchy…

eBay (among several others) has invested in local community site Meetup.com. Here's more detail, from a recent article in BusinessWeek:Founded in 2002, Meetup first gained national attention for launching Howard Dean's brief Presidential candidacy during the 2004 elections. The site…

My colleague Mike Boland and I were up in Redmond yesterday. We were there to discuss local and various trends in the markets we cover. At lunch there was some casual discussion about project Origami, which "launched" today. Here's more…

Borrell put out its own new local search projections (covered in MediaPost here): [P]aid search spending by local businesses will continue to grow for the next several years, climbing to 1.7 billion in 2007 and reaching $4 billion by 2010…

If you're too successful then the media starts looking closely to find your warts. MySpace joins a long list of companies now feeling the real heat of negative press after a kind of Icarus climb to the sun. After many…

Making good on the promise of the acquisition, eBay is apparently now putting "Skype Me" modules on eBay to connect buyers and sellers in real time (testing in Europe). This makes eBay's local reach potentially much greater than it is…

According to this Reuters article:Interchange Corp., owner of search engine Local.com, said on Tuesday that it has retained investment banking firm Merriman Curhan Ford & Co. to assist in reviewing strategic alternatives available to the company in connection with its…

Donna Bogatin, CEO of VIPOffers.com and a speaker at last year's ILM show on "hyper-local" sites, pointed out an interesting article on a TV campaign being used (and tracked) by eBay drop-off store QuikDrop to build awareness and drive inquiries…

When we wrote our "social networking" White Paper back in late 2004, the question on everyone's minds then was, "but where's the business model?" "Social networking" is a term that has less and less meaning now that "social media" is…

Here's a MediaPost write-up (reg. req'd) of data from a piece of TNS research in the U.K. that shows people (almost all ages) are spending somewhat more time online than watching TV: The study, based on a February survey of…

One of the big benefits and differentiators of MSN's new adCenter product was to be the metrics/targeting surrounding demographics and other information on consumers that it plans to offer to advertisers. Now Google has added demographic targeting in addition to…