Newspapers have always been a pied piper kind of industry, where everyone follows the lead of a few influential players. Right now, the pied pipers are whistling for the recruitment partnerships offered by Yahoo! HotJobs or Monster. There are definite…
The Internet, e-mail and instant messaging are great ways to jumpstart word-of-mouth "conversations." But just 4 percent of word-of-mouth conversations (which are just short of a "lead") are ultimately passed off via e-mail, and 3 percent through IM. Another 1…
Local Insight Media, a company formed by the private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, has acquired 100 percent of CBD Media Holdings, owner of Cincinnati Bell Yellow Pages. Here is the press release. Local Insight has been scooping…
Online classified destination LiveDeal announced today that it will integrate Yellow Pages listings. This feature could be found on the site over the past few weeks as it was released in beta, but is now incorporated as its own category,…
During Day 1 of ILM:06, Google's head of SME product development, Dan Rubinstein, spoke about a new small-business Web site development tool for SMEs. Like many efforts we're seeing in the marketplace by paid search providers, Web hosting companies and…
Canada's Yellow Pages Group is going full steam ahead with Hello Yellow, its ad-sponsored directory assistance service available at 310-YELO (9356). But the service probably wouldn't have gotten anywhere without teaming up with local 411 services, according to VP of…
Success models for city sites have been elusive. But entrepreneurs still believe they can provide a local edge to city sites that can't be done by portals like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ask and AOL. And they hope their "not-so-secret sauce"…
Local shopping engine NearbyNow announced today that it will provide a mobile platform for mall shoppers to find products using mobile devices. NearbyNow works with shopping malls to get their product and inventory information online in a searchable fashion. It…
If newspapers are to grow, they're going to have to leverage their local, regional and national credibility to reach into advertiser segments where they don't have much of a presence today. This means B2B and SME. But somewhere it is…
The power of road mapping and direction sites like MapQuest and Yahoo! Maps is now being channeled by HopStop, a New York-based start-up providing the same type of complete info for walkers and subway and bus strap holders in major…
Comments came into my personal site last week suggesting that AutoTrader CEO Chip Perry, in his keynote at Kelsey's ILM conference in Philadelphia, may have hyped up his company's considerable lead over Cars.com and other auto portals. "Based on my…
Zillow announced today that it will allow users and agents to post homes for sale for free. Zillow has gained a great deal of traction and has become the poster child of vertical search in the 10 months since its…
The blogosphere and news media are abuzz today over the management overhaul at Yahoo!. Starting Jan. 1, the company will be organized into three main groups: a customer-focused group, an advertiser and publisher group, and a technology group. CFO Susan…
There are calls in the press today for more online mapping standards after the tragic disappearance of CNET Senior Editor James Kim. Kim was on a family vacation last week in Oregon when he took a little-used logging road in…
We noticed with interest a recent news item reporting that the Mexican telecom Telifonos de Mixico (Telmex) has expanded into the directory business in Argentina, with plans to launch a new competitive directory in Buenos Aires. This comes on the…
Media General, the publisher of The Tampa Tribune, Richmond Times-Dispatch and Winston-Salem Journal, in addition to 22 community dailies, is the eighth newspaper company to join Yahoo!'s HotJobs consortium. With the addition of MG's 25 papers, the consortium's roster now…
R.H. Donnelley issued its 2007 financial guidance today at the Credit Suisse Annual Media & Telecom Conference. The directory publisher is forecasting "positive sales growth" for the full year, with revenues reaching US$2.67 billion, and EBITDA of US$1.44 billion, a…
At our recent conference in Philadelphia, Yell Group's Eddie Cheng sought us out to tell us about his company's newly revised online directory, Yell.com, which Yell prefers to call a local search engine. One of the new features Yell is…
Historically speaking, MapQuest lost a beat by not pushing out its API. Instead of featuring MapQuest, most Web sites instead highlight Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft maps. Even without the buzz factor, however, MapQuest has retained its strong brand identify among…
As we wrote about briefly last week, AskCity has launched today. I will get a chance to play around with the new features today and will provide more detail in this week's Local Media Journal. In the meantime, Loren Baker…
