LOCAL MEDIA WATCH. The Nexus of All Things Local

I'm probably the last one to write about this, but news aggregator Topix.net (majority owned by the newspapers) added 15,000 blogs to its crawl. The company also organizes that information by ZIP, so you can get blogs in your local…

Here's an interesting article from Sunday's N.Y. Times about Yahoo! and its long-term search strategy. I was at Yahoo! on Friday talking to Local GM Paul Levine about his just-added keynote at ILM:05. He and I discussed a range of…

Yelp, a San Francisco Bay Area local community site with directory listings -- or local directory site with community and social networking -- got some VC money last week. The site, which has national aspirations, exists in an already crowded…

The N.Y. Times reports on a pending announcement between Yahoo! and TiVo. Yahoo! moves off the desktop and into the living room. It's mostly about using Yahoo's TV listings to schedule TiVo, but there is a range of other Yahoo!…

Here are a few, somewhat related thoughts for Sunday: Festoon will video-enable your VoIP conversations on Google Talk or Skype. (Catch: You've got to go out and buy the camera, and so does everyone else.) While this capability is interesting…

The short answer is "probably." Ka-Ching: El Greedo is rearing its head at MySpace and while the site is hot hot hot now, it may lose its mojo if users no longer perceive it as a cool community but rather…

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) can save consumers and small businesses a lot of money with flat-rate service plans and a less costly technology to place calls. In a Web context, it promises to bring click-to-call functionality, which in turn…

The Kelsey Group is conducting an informal survey of industry professionals and those coming to ILM:05 to get a sense of how good you think "local search" (broadly defined) is today and what you believe the ideal local search product…

Here's a fairly comprehensive piece from The N.Y. Times' Saul Hansell, reviewing Google's model and history and speculating about its future: Google, the one-stop shop for all forms of advertising (TV, print, online, etc.). Traditional ad agencies don't generally like…

This is interesting. (Going for blogging minimalism here.)

I received a note from Google today indicating that Google Desktop 2 is coming out of beta with several enhancements. As part of that, there's a Maps plug-in for Sidebar: This new Sidebar panel rotates through maps relevant to the…

The advent of Windows Live (a version of the pre-existing beta Start.com) confirms what we already know: the Larry Ellison vision of a "network computer" is here. (Further proof: the coming Wal-Mart US$398 laptop.) Whatever the relationship, ultimately, of these…

Everybody's doing it: Google, Yahoo! and, apparently, now America Online will add blogs to its search tool kit (on the heels of its Weblogs purchase). Reportedly, the underlying engine will be Intelliseek's BlogPulse tool. BlogPulse hasn't received the attention of…

Now Yahoo! has apparently gotten into the game of bidding for a piece of AOL. Whether AOL first approached MSN or vice-versa, I believe that AOL has very shrewdly played this whole minority stake investment. TimeWarner has billions and billions…

It is not surprising that the Yellow Pages industry has stepped up to the plate to help their employees and their customers. Dan told me that, ironically, the White Pages for New Orleans are at the printer. He said, "I…

This is a short post about a complex subject 'cause I'm technically not working. But Google getting into offline on behalf of advertisers is radical. I had been quite skeptical of the Trader Classifieds rumor for several reasons. But this…

Thanks to Chris Sherman for pointing this out . . . As they promised earlier in the year, Verizon has added reviews/ratings to its SuperPages directory. Kudos to SuperPages for taking yet another risk.