Superpages.com is getting good reviews from the ad community for new directions it is taking with its redesign (clean), ad serving formats (based on relevancy, performance and bidding) and its overall effort to update itself for a Google-centric marketplace (where…
Classified aggregator Oodle has partnered with increasingly popular social network Facebook. A post on the Oodle blog last night from CEO Craig Donato goes into detail. This distribution channel for Oodle makes sense, given the classified activity that happens in…
Tangentially related to local (as far as social networking has growing ties to local search) is the unprecedented power of social networking that was shown yesterday in the much hyped Digg HD-DVD debacle. The transparency and collective will that we’ve…
We all share the grief in the tragedy at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, but it is especially gnawing on me. Over the years that I lived in Virginia, I watched with pride as the Hokies became a first-rate school and…
This morning I attended an interesting session on advertising on social networks at SES New York. Much of the subject matter here has implicit ties to local, and some explicit. The conversation around social networking in this session was, correspondingly,…
Following closely behind the social media trend in local search, Microsoft Live Search Maps launched a feature that will allow users to read and contribute ratings and reviews of local businesses. This is part of a new feature set it…
Pegasus News, the social network site based in Dallas, made a deal with Fox4 TV for a mutual content swap that would fill Pegasus' news hole, leverage its features (weather, etc.) and increase awareness about it in the community. At…
When you have access to $3 million of VC money, you are going to eventually want to spend some of it. That's what Smalltown, an IYP site with social aspects via reviews, calendars and (now) top 10 lists, is doing.…
TechCrunch published a report today that Insider Pages, the review site that has been actively shopped for some time, may have found a buyer for more than the $8.5 million it raised last March from Sequoia and Softbank Capital. I…
In a move that resembles MySpace's partnership with SimplyHired (to create MySpace Jobs), fast moving social network Facebook has partnered with career site Jobster. CareerBuilder and Monster were in the running for this deal, according to GigaOm, but Jobster won…
The online video space continues to see a lot of action. This is not to be confused with the IPTV space, talked about in the previous post, which involves telco-delivered video service packages (akin to cable). Online video is rather…
There is no better guide to how to avoid the potholes in hyper-local than Judy's Book cofounder Andy Sack, who has been writing a series of "don't do this at home" posts about Judy's Book's failed efforts building an online…
Fox Interactive Media, the home of MySpace, Fox Sports, Fox News and other sites, definitely has local on its agenda and is rolling out several new features to bring users more in touch with their communities, says Dan Strauss, VP…
Back in 1999, Microsoft sold a small business called Sidewalk because it didn't fit into its core software business at the time. In a lengthy story in Sunday's New York Times, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted: "but Sidewalk was really…
I'm at the Newspaper Association of America's annual Marketing Conference in Las Vegas this week, where there have been lots of interesting sessions that I'll break down in individual blog posts later. Most of the sessions were breakouts involving five…
Recently I had the chance to catch up with Mark Sigal, CEO of online video distribution platform provider vSocial. The company provides a platform for advertisers and video publishers to publish and brand videos on existing Web sites, social networks…
There are a lot of reasons why Yellow Pages will continue to be the dominant local advertising vehicle. Certainly a major benefit Yellow Pages publishers have is that advertisers and people looking to buy products and services both know a…
There has been a lot of talk in the past week over some of the apparent challenges facing local destination sites. Last week, BackFence endured a major downsizing, including the resignation of cofounder Susan DeFife (past writing on BackFence and…
Sebastien Provencher reproduced a MarketWatch article on his Praized Blog that goes into great detail about most of the major trends in online social media and user-generated content. It's a nice state of the union on where these technologies are…
ClickZ has an interesting article on the practice of advertising on Craigslist. Essentially this entails small businesses advertising products or services in the form of a Craigslist posting. I wrote about this for Search Engine Watch a few weeks ago.…
