While I am in Reston, VA, attending Kelsey's Directory Driven Commerce conference, I thought it would be a good time to start talking about our next show, which I am co-producing: Interactive Local Media 2007. The show is being done…
It must be tough running online newspaper sites right now. After many years of strong annual growth in the 30 percent range, online revs are beginning to plateau. And in most markets, the rest of the ship has begun to…
As my colleague Charles Laughlin has written, Idearc Media has purchased Localsearch.com from American Town Networks and will presumably use it as the foundation of a new local search destination to feed off its Superpages.com site. Under terms of the…
As my colleague Charles Laughlin has written, Idearc Media has purchased Localsearch.com from American Town Networks and will presumably use it as the foundation of a new local search destination to feed off its Superpages.com site. Under terms of the…
Amateur sports and lifestyle services are great vertical categories that are generally worth many times more in their own wrapping than in a magazine, newspaper or Yellow Pages. Active Networks, whose leadership and original funding have some roots from IAC,…
Grayboxx Founder Bob Chandra responded, via phone, to criticisms of the site’s launch in Burlington, VT, which resulted in a lot of off-the-mark rankings. Chandra acknowledged that Burlington (population 38,000, with a metro area of about 130,000) may be “too…
Yellow Book today joined Canada’s YPG in launching AgendiZe, the service that captures Yellow Pages and classifieds info and puts it on up to 66 media platforms for recall. On deck for implementation is Belo’s Dallas Morning News. I wrote…
Grayboxx, which ranks local businesses based on the number of mentions they receive on online consumer services, has finally launched, almost a year after I first wrote about it. The service, which assumes that people generally only mention services they…
Grayboxx, which ranks local businesses based on the number of mentions they receive on online consumer services, has finally launched, almost a year after I first wrote about it. The service, which assumes that people generally only mention services they…
New local search destination Grayboxx launched today in its first locality of Burlington, VT. As mentioned in Grayboxx: A Sneak Peek, the site will have a staggered launch starting in small towns and cities where it believes it has a…
Yelp has added events to its listings, maps and user reviews in 10 cities -- San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, San Jose, Austin, Chicago, Washington D.C., and San Diego. The feature includes a landing page for each…
I'm a day late to this because of the natural tendency to get caught up in SES, but LiveDeal announced that it will integrate community discussion boards into its classified engine. This is a good integration for LiveDeal that will…
User ratings and reviews are among the hottest areas of local search (video and mobile being the others) in terms of media attention and funding. But there are still significant barriers to cross and challenges inherent in corralling a user…
Gannett’s “Information Center” project to overhaul its newspapers with user-generated content and data-driven services is making some progress, per this month’s Wired magazine piece by Jeff Howe. Since I first reported on the initiative in November 2006, the company has…
Web exec Bill Day, who formerly led WhenU (a behavioral targeting firm), About.com and Prodigy, was announced yesterday as Marchex’s new chief media officer (an interesting title). The position is a new one for the publicly owned company, which isn’t…
John L. Scott, a leading broker in the Pacific Northwest, has carved out a niche for itself as a major implementator of technology, even as it sticks to a full-service model. Speaking at Inman’s Real Estate Connect last week, Chairman…
Speaking at Inman’s Real Estate Connect last week in San Francisco, Craigslist namesake Craig Newmark says the service is now getting 8 billion page views a month from 450 cities in 50 countries. He also noted that the service is up…
When Zillow originally launched, it was seen in some circles as a liberator for consumers who had relied on the judgment of Realtors for too long. But CEO Rich Barton, speaking at Inman’s Real Estate Connect conference, said its mission…
With the probable exception of Yelp, standalone review sites haven’t figured out a way to make money. In the past year, Insider Pages was sold off to Citysearch, and Judy’s Book, famously, changed its model to coupons. So why would…
OK. Here is the truth. As an analyst, you become quite the connoisseur of hockey stick graphs. “I do like the way the chartreuse in the bar chart plays off the light and complements your logo.” I heard that in…
