It’s kind of ironic that on a day when the blogosphere is beating up Businessweek for bad reporting, a reputable blog is also doing some bad reporting. Kudos to the folks setting BusinessWeek straight and kudos to Seth Finkelstein for setting Consumerist straight.
Archive for August, 2006
Shoddy Journalism Offline AND Online
Friday, August 4th, 200660% and Growing – Will Google Ever Slow Down?
Friday, August 4th, 2006According to Hitwise, Google has reached 60% market share for US search in July. This gets scarier by the day. While I think that Google is the best search engine, they are not that much better than everyone else. No one should own that much of the market. Would someone please step up to the plate and take back some market share.
Paul Levine, General Manager of Yahoo! Local
Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006Disclaimer – I work for Verizon SuperPages.com, so I compete with Yahoo! Local. These notes are my comments and not that of my employer.
Small Business Commando put together a teleconference today with Paul Levine of Yahoo! Local and Matt Booth of The Kelsey Group. The tagline for the conference was “Insider Secrets to Blow the Doors Off Your Competition using Local Online Marketing.” While the conference didn’t live up to the tagline, it was none-the-less very informative.
Matt started off saying that print yellow pages isn’t likely to go away anytime soon and that many of the major players are active in the local space online, in particular Verizon. He said that local search is growing at a faster rate than traditional IYP (Internet Yellow Pages) searches.
Paul says that they found most local searches to be commercial in nature. Yahoo’s local strategy follows along these lines:
- User Participation (as evidenced by their use of user reviews and the connection with Yahoo! 360)
- Integration with Mapping (believe that mapping can be an interface to local search)
- Encouraging Merchants to Participate (as evidenced by ability for merchants to add/update online listings for free)
Of special interest, though it’s already pretty obvious, is Paul’s statement that Yahoo plans to include social networking and user participation across all Yahoo products.
Mobile is a big part of the future of local, though the technology is not there yet. In particular, Paul said that mobile devices need more bandwidth, more memory, and carriers to provide more information about users’ locations. In the next few months Yahoo will allow merchants to participate in the mobile environment.
Paul went into detail on Yahoo’s local products – local listings (free), enhanced listings, and featured listings. The upcoming sponsored search platform will include the ability to geotarget.
Yahoo works with Dex, YellowPages.com, Leads.com, and Lawyers.com to take their local products to market in addition to direct sales from Yahoo’s web site.
Interesting stuff.
Here’s a summary from The Kelsey Group.
AOL Finally Passes Marketing 101
Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006AOL has announced that it will give away e-mail accounts and software to broadband users. It’s about time that AOL paid attention to Marketing 101 – You don’t spend money promoting a cash cow. You use revenues from the cash cow to drive development of new products.
It would be nice to see them succeed because the industry needs multiple players, not just Google and Yahoo.
Meebo Launches MeeboMe & Perhaps Their Own Chat Network
Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006Techcrunch covered the launch of MeeboMe.
…has Meebo just leveraged the existing IM applications like Yahoo and MSN to build their own powerful IM service that completely bypasses those entrenched brands? How long before loyal Meebo users are simply IMing eachother directly through Meebo’s Jabber service?
These guys are brilliant.
Tom Jones on Flickr
Tuesday, August 1st, 2006
Is Google Paying Syndication Fees For Google News?
Tuesday, August 1st, 2006John Battelle’s Searchblog: Is Google Paying Syndication Fees For Google News?
Hmmm, very interesting. How will this impact Google’s ability to continue to get free content from non-news partners?
Online Karaoke – TiVo needs to jump all over this.
Tuesday, August 1st, 2006Om Malik wrote about Karaoke today. Online Karaoke is the perfect application to bring together the home entertainment center with the Internet. TiVo needs to jump on this. It could be a showcase application for what they’ve been trying to do with their boxes lately, though it is admittedly not a mainstream application in the US. This is a major improvement over hauling your Karaoke crap over to a friend’s house and buying overpriced Karaoke CDs. I think this is great! Are you listening SingShot?
