The disintermediation of local media doesn't stop. First, we got Realtors cutting into newspaper audiences (and advertising) by adding all the area listings to their Web sites. Phase Two is going to be the disintermediation of Yellow Pages, if you…
Mobile versions of newspaper and TV station sites WAPsites have mostly been corporate vanity projects, generally attracting just a couple of dozen regular users. But as the demographics for enhanced mobile services have graduated from kids downloading ringtones and…
WCAU-TV, NBC's owned and operated station in Philadelphia, is launching DigPhilly, a city site, reports today's Wall Street Journal. The site isn't yet up and running, but a teaser features buttons for "learn," "do," "share," "find" and "shop." The Journal…
OpenTable, the secretive eight-year-old restaurant reservation service, was slow to take off, with some of its local media and directory affiliates reporting little traffic in its early days (and a competing service, Foodline, basically dropping off the map). But in…
Between sessions at SES New York, I had the chance to sit down with Alex Vlasto, head of global communications for Miva. The company is moving in some interesting directions, shown most recently by the deal it formed with Conde…
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,…
The leading evangelists for online TV station advertising WorldNow, IBS, Broadcast Interactive Media, Media Span, the station groups themselves have their work cut out for them. Some TV stations are now registering in the mid-six figures for online sales,…
EBay's PR people seem to have tried to get some human interest stories going by citing Lumberton, New Jersey, as its No. 1 town of buyers and sellers on a per capita basis. Are you surprised? I was. I thought…
Saw an interesting announcement from Idearc Media that shows the publisher is trying to keep pace with the shifts occurring in consumer priorities. Idearc is introducing a Green Business Guide in its Madison, Wisconsin, book, which hits the streets in…
Google has officially launched its free 411 product. The number, 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411), makes business name and category search accessible from any U.S. telephone. This is a product we originally uncovered in our report Wireless Voice Search: The Multi-Modal Revolution. At…
This article in The Australian summarizes a report on overall 2006 media growth in Australia. It singles out print directories as being a particular drag on media spend. It also notes that once online is stripped out, traditional media overall…
Apparently, those who were worried about AT&T Advertising & Publishing leaving its St. Louis headquarters digs can rest easy. This story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch suggests the decision was big news in St. Louis, since it affected more than…
I had an interesting discussion this week with Amy Healy of the Yellow Pages Association. You may recall a few weeks back we blogged about a movement in Norway to give consumers the ability to opt out of print directory…
Yesterday I had the chance to speak with the leadership team at BuzzLogic, which has developed a platform for tracking buzz around any topic or company. The primary venue for this buzz is the blogosphere, where there has been a…
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…
Last week, my colleague Peter Krasilovsky wrote a blog about 1-800-Free411 launching category search and took the opportunity to update how Jingle is doing. According to SVP Lyn Oakes, Jingle is receiving 16 million calls per month, with 60 percent…
Google today launched MyMaps, something appropriately coined by Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land as "mashups for the masses." Google Maps, like most other mapping engines has long made its API available to third-party developers, best documented by the Google…
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…
It seems to me that precious little has been written about the fact that, according to the March 19 issue of eMarketer, four national portals Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL have seen their share of total Internet advertising…
Yesterday I had the chance to speak with Erron Silverstein, CEO of Solfo, the company behind recently launched (beta) local search site YellowBot. The site is built on many social features and will target the same young and tech-savvy demographic…
