Online/Interactive

This was posted on MSN's Search Blog: From: Yusuf Mehdi As you know, we launched MSN adCenter --our next generation advertising platform -- in France and Singapore last month. This was an important first step to delivering our global vision…

First the rumor, then the Wi-Fi VPN, now confirmation of a bid to provide free Wi-Fi across the city of San Francisco (per Reuters): "Google has submitted a proposal to offer free, wireless Internet access (Wi-Fi) to the entire city…

As indicated by my colleague, Charles Laughlin, R.H. Donnelley (RHD) announced that it will acquire Dex Media for approximately $9 billion in debt assumption and equity. See the release below and Charles' post for more details. RHD has a substantial…

WhitePages.com announced a deal with SuperPages.com to feature WhitePages.com's residential listings on its site. WhitePages.com already has similar deals with MSN, SMARTPages (SBC) and RealPages.com (BellSouth). The latter two will merge in the next several months into the single YellowPages.com…

Yahoo! announced that it had acquired upcoming.org (a Flickr-like events calendar that is user-driven). This is going to bolster Yahoo!'s already very strong Local product by adding more user-generated content in the events area. The events RSS feed in Yahoo!…

Thanks to Marty Himmelstein for alerting me about Ning, a social-media tool that covers a bunch of topics but has a local content area. Here's a fairly extensive discussion from SiliconBeat. It's time to throw away skepticism about user-generated content…

Google has brought Local out of beta and combined it with the surprisingly popular Google Maps in a single "map-centric" interface. Here's a search for "wine shops in Greenwich Village New York." Brett Taylor, who's the new product manager at…

AP's Mike Liedtke, covering Web 2.0 in San Francisco this week, wrote a piece in which he quoted Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel who reportedly said the following about Google at the show: "So far they don't seem to have a…

In my briefings with companies I hear about a lot of business "process" or "method" patents. Some of them strike me as overly broad, some are interesting and important, and some are just stupid (that the U.S. government would allow…

Newspaper-owned news aggregation site Topix, which has a number of third-party, local news distribution deals with the likes of AOL and Citysearch, among others, launched a very interesting offering recently. Unfortunately, I don't have a great deal of time right…

Google launched Google Reader earlier today. It joins an already crowded field of RSS readers (and Google's personalized home page and sidebar apps have RSS/feed readers embedded in them; over time integration will be key). RSS readers have implications for…

According to Technorati (per the BBC), "the number of blogs is doubling every five months." I met last week with the folks (Stu MacFarlane and Andrew Shotland) at Insider Pages who told me that it took the company less than…

Silicon Beat points to a site that exactly duplicates Craigslist's look and feel and listings presentation (it actually uses Craigslist's listings). If you can't think of a better model, why not just steal one? This speaks to the power that…

In a provocative article in today's iMedia Connection newsletter Carat's Ron Belanger (with whom I shared a long table at the iMedia Summit in January) suggests that some paid-search networks adopt a cost-per-acquistion/cost-per-action model to combat click fraud. Regardless of…

The extension of Yahoo!'s content network, combined with Ask's new direct pay-per-click service (and the ramping of pay-per-call) reflects the emergence of multiple online advertising silos. (Let's not forget MSN.) The whole online advertising proposition is becoming more complex, even…

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) is a digital library effort that seems to have been set up to rival Google Print. According to the site: The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology,…

After writing about GoogleNet and San Francisco, I wanted to chime in on this story of the $100 laptop (the other side of the equation). The story has received a ton of coverage. But if this can be brought to…

The DEMO conference is happening in SoCal this week (not there, trying to get some writing done) and there are some interesting developments that concern local: Local Matters announced its next-generation local search platform. I saw a very early version…

There are lots of broadband data -- seemingly contradictory -- now running around in the market. Pew says: Growth has slowed and will be flat. Nielsen says it's up and continuing to grow: "Two out of every five Americans has…

It was a very interesting day yesterday at DDC2005, which saw keynote speeches from Dex Media's George Burnett and YellowBook's Joe Walsh (both of which seemed to elicit strong reactions) and videotaped interviews of SME advertiser interviews about their advertising…