Online/Interactive

Recently, I have had the opportunity to speak to a number of publishers of all sizes to get a sense of their perspective on this important issue. My take is that Yellow Pages executives believe there will be a major…

Again, no time to devote to this yet but Om Malik writes some very provocative stuff about Google VoIP, VoIP in general and how they might intersect with local search and PPCall. Make no mistake, all the major networks/paid search…

Verizon is heavily promoting its $60 per month wireless broadband offering. They claim to cover a population of 130 million. That is a lot more expensive than my high-speed cable connectivity I have at my office.I doubt I€™d switch from…

By and large newspapers' blog-related efforts have so far not been terribly successful. Now, according to a blurb in PaidContent.org, a Knight Ridder-owned newspaper in Columbia, S.C. has launched a separate "citizen journalism" site, TheColumbiaRecord.com. According to the site: TheColumbiaRecord.com…

Hitwise, via Reuters, reports that Wikipedia's traffic has grown 154 percent during the past year. It now threatens to surpass traffic to the New York Times site -- one of the few successful news brands online -- and other major…

According to the WSJ, eBay is reportedly in talks to buy VoIP provider Skype. News Corp. had approached Skype but apparently balked at the price. Om Malik reports: Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennstr¶m shed some light on the company€™s…

Internet service providers (ISPs) have long been frustrated by the seeming indifference of their subscribers to their content offerings. Comcast, in particular, has more recently been very aggressive in trying to beef up its content offerings so that it doesn't…

Commenting on personnel matters is outside the typical scope of this blog, but Om Malik argues that Google's announced hire of Vint Cerf from MCI indicates that GoogleNet (the national broadband wi-fi network) is real. Read more.

Rupert Murdoch has gone from lambasting newspaper publishers about their online inaction to building with several swift strokes of his checkbook pen an Internet powerhouse that, via its collection of properties, now claims to be "the fifth most trafficked presence…

Click fraud is getting more attention and media coverage lately. And now there's a cottage industry emerging around the perceived problem. My question is: Will this motivate or accelerate a move to an alternative model (e.g., cost per lead/action) that…

Last Fall general purpose (as opposed to niche) search engine Accoona launched to considerable media fanfare. Yes the name does come from the Swahili phrase "acoona matata," popularized in the U.S. by the Disney film The Lion King. Though I'm…

In the battle of the interactive maps, MSN is seeking to challenge Google's satellite mapping supremacy with a suite of mapping tools that will seek to combine the best elements of satellite mapping with A9's Yellow Pages local business photography…

Loren Baker posted some information on the search engine competition going on in China. He cited a survey which showed that Baidu.com Inc. had boosted its market share in Beijing by 10.8 percentage points to 52 percent. Google share was…

No such luck. This was simply a Forbes.com headline designed to suck readers into a brief news story. Oh, and by the way, why don€™t you respond to the question, €œWhat do you think is the best search engine?€ For…

Search-engine marketing firm TrafficLeader, whose technology supports BellSouth€™s "Real Search Engines Solutions," announced a deal with the Houston Chronicle to sell search marketing to local businesses on a similar €œflat-fee, guaranteed clicks€ basis. We had predicted €œsimplified search€ would make…

Ask Jeeves has acquired Excite Europe from Tiscali for 6.1 million euros (an apparent pittance). In March of last year, Ask Jeeves bought Excite.com in the U.S. Also today, Ask Jeeves and InfoSpace announced they had settled litigation associated with…

Danny Sullivan asks the question of whether search engines becoming portals -- in part because they're so furiously competing with each other -- implies a potential decline in quality. Google reportedly announced its "fusion" strategy because users were requesting greater…

For the better part of 15 years, TMP was the 900-pound gorilla of the national Yellow Pages market. Some time in the late 1980s with Andy McKelvey at the helm, TMP began an aggressive CMR acquisition roll-up strategy. By the…

As if the landline business hadn€™t suffered enough with wireless carriers taking share for domestic usage and VoIP taking share for international calling, now comes a slew of cheap international long distance calling plans from the cellular operators. Verizon and…

Two brief items caught my interest from opposite ends of the online spectrum, but both reflect consumer sentiment. First, there were some reports about a "grassroots" resistance among Flickrphiles to registering as Yahoo! users. Wired News has a fairly extensive…