Kelsey Local Media Blog
Here are a few, somewhat related thoughts for Sunday: Festoon will video-enable your VoIP conversations on Google Talk or Skype. (Catch: You've got to go out and buy the camera, and so does everyone else.) While this capability is interesting…
The N.Y. Times reports on a pending announcement between Yahoo! and TiVo. Yahoo! moves off the desktop and into the living room. It's mostly about using Yahoo's TV listings to schedule TiVo, but there is a range of other Yahoo!…
Yelp, a San Francisco Bay Area local community site with directory listings -- or local directory site with community and social networking -- got some VC money last week. The site, which has national aspirations, exists in an already crowded…
Here's an interesting article from Sunday's N.Y. Times about Yahoo! and its long-term search strategy. I was at Yahoo! on Friday talking to Local GM Paul Levine about his just-added keynote at ILM:05. He and I discussed a range of…
I'm probably the last one to write about this, but news aggregator Topix.net (majority owned by the newspapers) added 15,000 blogs to its crawl. The company also organizes that information by ZIP, so you can get blogs in your local…
Here's a fairly comprehensive piece from The N.Y. Times' Saul Hansell, reviewing Google's model and history and speculating about its future: Google, the one-stop shop for all forms of advertising (TV, print, online, etc.). Traditional ad agencies don't generally like…
This is a short post about a complex subject 'cause I'm technically not working. But Google getting into offline on behalf of advertisers is radical. I had been quite skeptical of the Trader Classifieds rumor for several reasons. But this…
It is not surprising that the Yellow Pages industry has stepped up to the plate to help their employees and their customers. Dan told me that, ironically, the White Pages for New Orleans are at the printer. He said, "I…
Now Yahoo! has apparently gotten into the game of bidding for a piece of AOL. Whether AOL first approached MSN or vice-versa, I believe that AOL has very shrewdly played this whole minority stake investment. TimeWarner has billions and billions…
Everybody's doing it: Google, Yahoo! and, apparently, now America Online will add blogs to its search tool kit (on the heels of its Weblogs purchase). Reportedly, the underlying engine will be Intelliseek's BlogPulse tool. BlogPulse hasn't received the attention of…
The advent of Windows Live (a version of the pre-existing beta Start.com) confirms what we already know: the Larry Ellison vision of a "network computer" is here. (Further proof: the coming Wal-Mart US$398 laptop.) Whatever the relationship, ultimately, of these…
I received a note from Google today indicating that Google Desktop 2 is coming out of beta with several enhancements. As part of that, there's a Maps plug-in for Sidebar: This new Sidebar panel rotates through maps relevant to the…
In the spirit of the season (Halloween), the people at Consumer Reports WebWatch published a scary report about fear online: "Leap of Faith: Using the Internet Despite the Dangers." The report, based on a telephone survey of roughly 1,500 adult…
Here's a piece in The N.Y. Times that says SBC will take the venerable name AT&T once the acquisition is approved. One response: Will the AT&T brand support the kinds of Internet-age services that SBC is offering and wants to…
In a very interesting bid to revive its fortunes and its consumer brand, LookSmart has launched 160 vertical sites on everything from sports to city guides (here's New York, for example). The content comes from Furl, Web crawling and LookSmart's…
Here's the U.S. Census Department's 2003 data on household computer and Internet adoption by state. The numbers are going to be larger now. But it's interesting to see the breakdown. More data here.
Everyone in the local search biz has said something like, "Once there's a laptop in the kitchen, then . . ." (fill in the blank with your own traditional media doomsday scenario). Most people don't know how to set up…
Verizon, BellSouth and SBC are madly developing IPTV to, among other things, compete with cable companies, whose bundled Internet, phone and TV "triple play" is siphoning away telephony and potential DSL customers. While most IPTV services have been delayed or…
Local content aggregator and affiliate network AreaGuides.net has been acquired by Denver-based Local Matters. This is the first consumer-facing property in the Local Matters portfolio, and CEO Perry Evans expects to substantially enhance the interface and user experience of the…
