Community networks, or "we networks," are so poorly used that they tend to really be "me networks." That's the gist of a new article in Annenberg's Online Journalism Review by Tom Grubisich, who revisits the subject a little more than…
The newspaper recruitment deal with Yahoo! first disclosed here in an Oct. 24 post has finally been confirmed, with some interesting twists. The deal puts in place a recruitment network of seven companies with 176 newspapers in 13 of the…
A favorite hobby of mine is reading the industry's tea leaves via the comings and goings of execs at different local companies. Today I am mulling over the departure of Insider Pages VP of Business Development Andrew Shotland and Merchant…
A dirty secret in the search wars is that you can basically "buy" enough traffic via Google AdWords and other sources to jump to the top of the usage charts. In a recent ZDNet column, Donna Bogatin implied that Citysearch…
Return on investment for advertising is generally measured by local businesses in terms of phone calls generated, call duration and/or store visits. That isn't changing soon. But for local ad sellers and their advertisers, it remains a challenge to figure…
Yahoo! Maps unveiled a host of new features today. Unlike the novel and graphically rich Microsoft Visual Earth 3-D announced last week, Yahoo!'s improvements are solely functional (although Visual Earth 3-D has a hefty balance of form and function, the…
InfoSpace-owned Dogpile announced today that it will partner with video search site Blinkx. Blinkx will bring enhanced video search capabilities to Dogpile and other InfoSpace metasearch properties, including WebCrawler and Webfetch. Blinkx has indexed more than 6 million hours of…
The Washington Post, following Gannett's "Information Center" approach toward the newsroom, says it will beef up several vertical sections in print and for the Web, including Health, Food and Home. A staff memo from Executive Editor Len Downie Jr., republished…
InfoSpace today launched Zoo.com, a search engine for kids that filters out sexually explicit content. It does this by filtering out search results that contain any of a list of 50,000 adult words or phrases. It also prioritizes search results…
Modern Mom, a Los Angeles-based pioneer in the increasingly crowded "online moms" space, is launching 12 city guides on Wednesday (Nov. 15). Previews of L.A., San Diego, San Francisco, Chicago, New York City and Washington, D.C., are already up. These…
There is clearly a lot of activity in the online video space, but there are still many question marks about how to effectively monetize the experience, and how local advertising could eventually come into the picture. Both of these are…
First we had Topix aggregating local news and events from thousands of sites. Now we have Outside.in trying to pull off the same idea using hyper-local blogs as a primary source. Steven Johnson co-created the site with John Geraci. He…
Backfence may be the biggest laboratory out there for community networks. It reads like a newspaper written by citizens, and its hyper-local coverage features community-by-community Yellow Pages, special sections, business reviews, event calendars, classifieds, blogs and user-generated photos. The company…
Very few people are as compelling as Morgan Stanely's Mary Meeker in arguing that the transition of media and commerce dollars to the Internet is under way. For sure, she understands, and anticipates, the macro. At the Web 2.0 conference…
I'm down in San Jose at the Consumer Technology Ventures conference, which has featured some engaging panel discussions. The highlight so far for me has been the luncheon keynote yesterday by prolific Wall Street Journal personal tech columnist Walt Mossberg…
Zvents, a Web 2.0 app that enables local sites to manage events, including events inputted by users, announced today that it has received $7 million from several VC firms, including Vantage Point Venture Partners (a funder of ReachLocal). It also…
The person who headed up the 1.1 million-employee BellSystem when it was broken up is a Virginia gentleman by the name of Charles Lee Brown. He retired to Princeton, NJ, and I once asked him why he gave up the…
Last night I had the chance to attend Microsoft's launch event for Virtual Earth 3-D in San Francisco. It was a well-organized event that included introductory remarks by Microsoft GM of Search and Mapping Erik Jorgensen and the GM of…
Gannett, the nation's largest newspaper publisher with 110 titles, is rolling out "information center" guidelines that it calls "the newsroom of the future." In its essence, the Information Center downplays hard news in favor of more community touch points. It…
In an exciting development from Microsoft, the company just announced it will provide 3-D models of 15 U.S. cities in its Live Search results. Starting tomorrow, users who click on the "maps" tab after entering a search term in Live…
