Wave V of The Kelsey Group’s annual consumer tracking survey, User View, was just completed in March. The survey asks online consumers about 30 questions, covering topics such as information sources used for local shopping, level of Internet usage and participation…
MediaNews Group, the fourth largest newspaper publisher with titles such as The Denver Post and The San Jose Mercury News, has teamed up with TauMed to launch a video-centric health vertical. The vertical launches this month at four of MNG’s…
Yelp announced a series of tools today for businesses to interact with local reviewers and have more of an active voice. New features for SMBs include: Message customers who have reviewed their business See how many prospective customers viewed their…
The market to produce, distribute and/or enhance small-business videos has intensified in recent months, as TurnHere, Denver MultiMedia, DMC, Spot Runner, Mixpo, BuzzSpot, EZ Show, Spotzer and others have competed (often via third-party Yellow Pages and city guides) to land…
Matt Booth and I had the chance to meet with Topix at its Palo Alto headquarters last week to unearth some of its user data, as well as some heretofore unannounced content partnerships. Late last year, the site redefined itself…
BuzzLogic has been generating some attention for its buzz tracking technology that pinpoints where conversations are happening throughout the blogosphere on certain topics. As we've written, this can be an attractive tool for PR professionals or online marketers to home…
Hyperlocal community site FatDoor has shut down and reopened as Center'd, an event planning and neighborhood search site with the tag line "people, places, plans." This follows last week's fall of Grayboxx, rise of Angie's List, and birth of OurTown.…
I am always leery of reports that point to a “Scandinavian miracle” (or a “Massachusetts miracle” or what have you). But a December 2007 NAA Growing Audience report has some valuable details about how Schibsted Media, the Scandinavian publishing giant…
Local community and recommendation site Angie's List received $35 million in funding today from Battery Ventures. This comes a day after local rating site Grayboxx sold its assets after failing to get enough traction around its more automated local ratings…
I just discovered (via Andrew Shotland) that local rating site Grayboxx has sold its assets to BayAdvisor. The company had an interesting idea in its algorithmically derived "implicit ratings" for local businesses -- the benefit being review generations in categories…
If Facebook is really the next marketing platform, the guys at Loladex will have guessed right. The new rating and review company, formed by two alumni of AOL Search and Yellow Pages, had initially been incubated as a destination site…
Last week, we wrote about The Seattle Times Co. and its new “Network search,” which is powered with FAST. This week, we are covering The Boston Globe’s Boston.com and its new “Federated” search solution, powered by Google. Federated and Network…
To follow up on the recent post about Yelp's funding, I was able to sit down with Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman yesterday at the company's San Francisco headquarters. The company is moving in some interesting directions and the $15 million…
The smart “post Web” money is looking at health care (and green solutions), right? But based on Health 2.0: User-Generated Healthcare, a conference that took place March 2-4 in San Diego, the subject may no longer be search engines or…
Yelp! has announced that it got $15 million in a fourth round of funding led by DAG and existing investors. The company also sent some growth metrics: October '07 -- 5M Unique Visitors December '07 -- 6M UVs January '08…
I liked the 2003-2007 concept of a “local info hub.” The idea was to think beyond the original business boundaries of newspapers (and Yellow Pages). Now that concept has been fancifully enlarged to a “local info and connection utility." The…
This morning I noticed something vaguely different about Google. Just like when a friend or significant other changes something like a haircut, and you get an overall sense that something is different but you can't pinpoint it. Finally I saw…
This year’s National Automobile Dealers Association convention in San Francisco, Feb. 9-12, reflected the tough times that have hit the industry. Themes at the show didn’t go much beyond the convention’s official title: “Focus on Profitability.” But a sub-theme at…
Google News has launched a very Topix-like search of local media and blogs via city name and ZIP code. The service includes semantic search. “We’re not the first news site to aggregate local news; we’re doing it a bit differently,”…
After writing about the cautious progress of publishers adopting Web 2.0 tools and approaches, I came across the introduction of a "wiki" approach to directories recently launched in the U.K. called Brownbook. Officially launched this week, Brownbook describes itself as…
