Online/Interactive

Yell (owner of U.S. directory publisher YellowBook USA) has entered into an agreement to buy TransWestern. Here's the press release. More later.

The spin being given to a new report by Pew and marketing firm BuzzMetrics entitled, €œBuzz, Blogs and Beyond: The Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004" is that blogs have not displaced traditional media in terms…

There's a way in which the breakdown of traditional advertising (at least on TV) may result in more interesting/thoughtful ads online. Two such examples are BMW's "Respect" campaign and the parody film "Store Wars" promoting organic food. This is ad…

Here's the online moving offline -- "podcasting" on local San Francisco radio. CNET has the story.

From the AOL press release: Reuters and AOL's Singingfish announced today that the industry-leading Singingfish video and audio search engine will have access to Reuters extensive video content. Hundreds of breaking and archived news clips produced by Reuters global news…

InfoSpace launched a new version of its Dogpile metasearch engine. The new site, which is cleaner, more prominently highlights the fact that it delivers results from Google, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves and also suggests ("Different Engines, Different Results") that it…

The question is, why can€™t the big telco publishers participate in the revenue growth? If the U.S. Military Academy that trained Generals Grant and Lee can change to meet the needs of their country, surely telco publishers can change to…

I read today about a very interesting experiment that the Boston Globe, which is owned by the NY Times, is trying. According to Editor & Publisher, The Globe is going to auction the front half-page ad in its Sunday jobs…

WorldNow, a technology vendor, and a network of almost 150 local TV news sites, have formed the Local Media Network (LMN). The network claims it has a combined 20 million monthly unique visitors and will be represented in 34 of…

With apologies to Buddhism, new empirical data from Yahoo! Search Marketing suggest that search is a "middle path," between branding/awareness and direct response and probably most effective when combined with other advertising -- in particular display advertising. The study I…

Late last year Yahoo! Search Marketing (then known as Overture) conducted a study with comScore to capture, among other things, the influence of search on purchases in the Consumer Electronics/Computers category. The bottom line was that search had a powerful…

Like Yell in the U.K. two weeks ago, Dex Media becomes the latest directory publisher to provide its local advertiser database to a major search provider. In Yell's case it was Google Local U.K. In this case it's Yahoo! in…

There have been several interesting stories over the past couple of days (including in the WSJ and NY Times) about how circulation and subscriptions are declining at major print newspapers, such as the Tribune Co.'s Los Angeles Times and Chicago…

The search world is like a hydra and video is one of the heads. Yahoo!, AOL, Google and other competitors are jockeying for position in the emerging online TV/video sector. See Stefanie Olsen's write-up. Tonight Yahoo! Video Search formally launched.…

Backfence went live tonight in McLean and Reston, VA. I previously wrote about Backfence's "hyper-local" strategy. It's a very interesting strategy (comprehensive local site, relying heavily on user-generated content) and will be one to watch. There are those who will…

The Yellow Pages Association released the results of a study with comScore that supports the idea that despite lower traffic volumes, IYP users are more "ready to buy" and spend more than their Web search counterparts. We haven't independently looked…

Speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, Ruppert Murdoch faulted the industry for having been "remarkably, accountably complacent" about new technologies, including the Internet. In Frank Barnako's Internet Daily Report in MarketWatch, Murdoch is quoted as saying,…

Right on the heels of Google's My Search History, Yahoo! Launches a better, simplified version of its earlier Web search personalization tool "My Search" -- now called My Web. Here's the official release. A considerable advance over Yahoo!'s previous "My…

eBay grows 44% and its stock sees a big decline. Huh? Now InfoSpace, whose profits tripled and generally beat analysts' estimates, lost nearly 19% of its stock value. What? Google and Yahoo! have performed so well over the past several…

Reading some of the recent Kelsey Group blogs reinforces this concern. Companies declare strong earnings but plummet because their guidance does not meet Wall Street expectations. Yahoo! and Google are offering evermore sophisticated search opportunities, and only industry experts can…