LOCAL MEDIA WATCH. The Nexus of All Things Local

In a separate item by David Carr, titled €œWhy You Should Pay to Read This,€ the author suggests that paid content is in real danger because youth expect information to be free. They are willing to pay for the distribution…

Classifieds provider LiveDeal, which was initially dismissed by some as being unable to compete with Google, Craigslist and eBay, has scored a major coup by partnering with Canadian media giant Torstar Corp. to launch LiveDeal Canada (site not currently available).…

Noteworthy . . . from the folks at PaidContent: Weblogs Inc, the blog media company founded by Jason Calacanis, is being bought by America Online . . .The company's blogs have had an exponential trajectory, with sites like Engadget, Autoblog,…

HousingMaps, Yahoo! Apartments, HomePages, Trulia and now Google may be seeking to combine real estate listings and related data with Google Earth and/or Google Local. (Thanks to John Battelle for pointing to the article on the San Jose Mercury News…

There are simply too many things going on. Here are a few quick hits with some thoughtful remarks (hopefully) to come later: MapQuest to Publish (Real) Books (taking online offline; they've got the brand to do it) Yellow Pages Group…

Today next-generation news aggregation site Inform unveiled itself. I spoke to CEO Neal Goldman a couple of weeks ago and got a demo of the site, which was very impressive. I don't have a great deal of time this morning…

The recent earnings' results from BellSouth, SBC and Verizon all show that their growth is coming primarily from high-speed Internet and wireless. Accordingly, we believe that the FCC's recent decision will enourage more investment in DSL by the RBOCs. Since…

I'm stuck in the Phoenix airport waiting for a plane that is delayed. By now, you all know that Google made a lot of money this past quarter. Here's the low-down from the official release: Google reported record revenues of…

Craigslist (CL) has been the proverbial poster child for friendliness, openness and online cooperation. However, as John Battelle reported first yesterday, CL has apparently blocked Oodle CEO Craig Donato's classifieds aggregator from crawling and indexing CL's listings. Currently, the local…

One of the things I've always liked about Yahoo! Maps is the ability to plot a point -- say the Hilton Hotel in downtown Atlanta -- and then perform category-based local searches in relation to that point. This is the…

To anyone who hadn't guessed, that's Espa±ol for open vs. closed. Here's a fascinating post at SiliconBeat about the brewing debate, ignited in part by the Craigslist objection to Oodle's scraping. I had a conversation about the whole thing with…

I'm in Hotlanta (where there's plenty of evidence of global warming) . . . at the DMA convention on a panel about "marketing to a consumer who is in control." Meanwhile, things keep happening. Here is today's third-quarter Yahoo! earnings…

The confidentiality inherent in this closed industry kept jealousy at bay, and it no doubt encouraged many executives who were successful to stay with their current employers. You have to wonder if the large sums of money made by a…

SiliconBeat thoroughly covers the new launch of this health search engine/destination. Blogger and sometime Kelsey Group conference panelist Tony Gentile disappeared from the radar, and this is where he landed as VP of product. Vertical search is about niches generally.…

Here's more from the Search Engine Watch blog on Google's bid to provide free Wi-Fi to San Francisco. We've discussed the implications of such a service before. It would allow for super precise location targeting, among other things (e.g., Wi-Fi…

The ever vigilant crew at SiliconBeat has identified another interesting mapping/real estate "mashup" (Google Maps) + meta search. There's a lot happening with maps, and real estate is the leading edge of practical, monetizable apps. Check out Trulia (proving how…