Hitwise, via Reuters, reports that Wikipedia's traffic has grown 154 percent during the past year. It now threatens to surpass traffic to the New York Times site -- one of the few successful news brands online -- and other major…
By and large newspapers' blog-related efforts have so far not been terribly successful. Now, according to a blurb in PaidContent.org, a Knight Ridder-owned newspaper in Columbia, S.C. has launched a separate "citizen journalism" site, TheColumbiaRecord.com. According to the site: TheColumbiaRecord.com…
Verizon is heavily promoting its $60 per month wireless broadband offering. They claim to cover a population of 130 million. That is a lot more expensive than my high-speed cable connectivity I have at my office.I doubt I€™d switch from…
I saw this item on newratings.com, which reports that Google may be pursuing an acquisition of Yell Group, the UK-based company that operates Yell in the UK and Yellow Book in the US. We do not yet know whether this…
Again, no time to devote to this yet but Om Malik writes some very provocative stuff about Google VoIP, VoIP in general and how they might intersect with local search and PPCall. Make no mistake, all the major networks/paid search…
Recently, I have had the opportunity to speak to a number of publishers of all sizes to get a sense of their perspective on this important issue. My take is that Yellow Pages executives believe there will be a major…
Having waited and waited to upgrade my cellphone technology and music listening experience, I read with considerable interest the hot rumors about the pending product launch of a new Motorola cellphone that comes loaded with iTunes software. With 2.5G and…
Last week the New York Times did pieces on the current state of the movie rental market and the state of movie going. Both thought-provoking articles offer views of the challenges industries built before the age of the Internet are…
Internet service providers (ISPs) have long been frustrated by the seeming indifference of their subscribers to their content offerings. Comcast, in particular, has more recently been very aggressive in trying to beef up its content offerings so that it doesn't…
Rupert Murdoch has gone from lambasting newspaper publishers about their online inaction to building with several swift strokes of his checkbook pen an Internet powerhouse that, via its collection of properties, now claims to be "the fifth most trafficked presence…
Commenting on personnel matters is outside the typical scope of this blog, but Om Malik argues that Google's announced hire of Vint Cerf from MCI indicates that GoogleNet (the national broadband wi-fi network) is real. Read more.
In the battle of the interactive maps, MSN is seeking to challenge Google's satellite mapping supremacy with a suite of mapping tools that will seek to combine the best elements of satellite mapping with A9's Yellow Pages local business photography…
Last Fall general purpose (as opposed to niche) search engine Accoona launched to considerable media fanfare. Yes the name does come from the Swahili phrase "acoona matata," popularized in the U.S. by the Disney film The Lion King. Though I'm…
Click fraud is getting more attention and media coverage lately. And now there's a cottage industry emerging around the perceived problem. My question is: Will this motivate or accelerate a move to an alternative model (e.g., cost per lead/action) that…
Loren Baker posted some information on the search engine competition going on in China. He cited a survey which showed that Baidu.com Inc. had boosted its market share in Beijing by 10.8 percentage points to 52 percent. Google share was…
We noted with interest on RHD's latest earnings call that it has removed cover ads from its SBC-branded directories in Illinois, the logic being that cover ads make it harder for the publisher to distinguish its brand from its competitors.…
BellSouth put out a press release today quoting BAPCO CEO Ike Harris announcing that the company's RealPages.com IYP site has reached 20 million monthly searches. The press release also claims that search traffic has grown by 18 percent from 2004…
AdWeek reports this week that YellowPages.com has selected SBC's longtime advertising agency GSD&M to handle the advertising account for YellowPages.com, the company jointly owned by SBC and BellSouth. The magazine estimates the size of the account at US$4 million. This…
About a decade ago, I wrote a lengthy article for Link magazine (anyone remember Link magazine?) about the efforts of the U.S. Postal Service and others to crack down on bogus Yellow Pages scams, which exploit the inattention of busy…
For the better part of 15 years, TMP was the 900-pound gorilla of the national Yellow Pages market. Some time in the late 1980s with Andy McKelvey at the helm, TMP began an aggressive CMR acquisition roll-up strategy. By the…
