We’re always looking to identify TV station groups that really get it and are going to push hard to compete for local traffic and advertisers online. Is Fisher Communications the one? Last week, Fisher – a publicly traded, Seattle-based owner…
Pegasus News announced today that the company will be acquired by Fisher Communications. The deal will bring Pegasus' online local and hyper-local content capabilities to Fisher's communities and existing properties – consisting of 19 television and radio stations throughout the Pacific…
Jitter Fingers, a social network for teen and “tween” girls looking for a secure and focused environment (i.e., away from the predators who lurk in MySpace), has launched a local beta version in Los Angeles. It expects to eventually launch…
Backfence cofounder Mark Potts has done a “final word” on Backfence. The post is a good catch-all, but contains no revelations. Don’t look for much second-guessing of the company’s strategy, either – although he clearly wishes he could have ridden…
Tribune Interactive has added Los Angeles to its list of Metromix city guides, which also include Chicago, Orlando and Baltimore. Next week, it will add New York City as well. Eventually, Tribune aims to have the Metromix brand in all…
Constant Contact, the leader among e-mail marketing services for small businesses with 120,000 customers mailing out 500 million e-mails a year, has filed for an IPO. In the S1, the company says it is looking to expand its services beyond…
Backfence announced June 29 that it is shuttering its 13 community sites, which were in the D.C. area, Illinois and Northern California. The ambitious site raised an initial round of $3 million but never had high penetration in its communities…
You learn a lot from talking to local advertisers. Occasionally, I get to leave my ivory tower and give a speech or appear on a panel in front of local advertisers. Generally, I'm talking “Local Local.” A couple of weeks…
Summary Google has shown a clear interest in beefing up the content that is available to users in Google Local and Google Maps. A few months ago, it announced new features to its Local Business Center to allow businesses to…
Summary Paul Jahn at Search Engine Guide writes today about how fraudulent user reviews can be particularly damning to local search sites. Users are smart, he contends, and can sniff out a fake message from a business owner or constituent.…
Here at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, an annual event for 800+ mashup developers, there’s no perspective yet on the importance of maps to the local ecosphere. But a picture is developing of a “3D Data arms race,”…
Microsoft announced this morning from the Where 2.0 conference that it will add New York City to the list of cities available in 3-D in Live Local Maps. We wrote about 3-D mapping and its possibilities for Local in a…
We’re all guilty of feature creep. A lot of the stuff isn’t especially useful. Now comes Palore. When it comes to directory listings, Palore believes hardly any of the info is useful. In fact, consumers want to know just one…
It’s nice when a foundation puts itself in the middle of what’s happening, and uses its money to inject a little bit of the consumer’s interest in a commercial world. It’s a win-win. Most foundations, of course, don’t actually do…
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…
As my colleague Neal Polachek noted in an earlier post, Local Matters this week launched a new beta version of Localguides.com, the local relocation and travel service originally known as areaguides.com that it purchased a couple of years ago, reportedly…
Centro’s Summit in Chicago this week not only featured a positive outlook on national brands buying local online media, but also dealt with the impact of user-generated content and video on the local ad marketplace, and on the agencies themselves.…
Today I had the chance to speak with Nagaraju Bandaru, Cofounder and CTO of "meta reviews" site BooRah. The site has developed some clever algorithms that scrape, aggregate, structure and serve up third-party reviews for local search. It currently focuses…
A lingering idea from Al Gore's Information Superhighway is using grant money to jumpstart online (and wireless) community services and involvement. One year, as a judge for the U.S. Department of Commerce, I even helped dole out some of the…
My sources got it right and IAC's Citysearch is the company that ended up with Insider Pages. Dinesh Moorjani, Citysearch's new VP of strategy and corporate development, says that Citysearch will incorporate Insider's 600,000 reviews from 30 markets into its…
