Store locators, the only "local" part of many national retail sites, are an increasingly important part of both national and local retail sites, according to "Expectations of The Cross Channel Customer," a new study released by authoritative retail analyst Lauren…
As the previous post pointed out, college towns can represent strong markets for hyper-local community sites because of the activism (conducive to user generated content), buying power (sometimes), and high turnover of apartments, furniture, books, merchandise etc. My former colleague…
Four months after it landed on the West Coast, hyper-local Web site Backfence.com has established its first community site in the Midwest. The Evanston, Illinois, site will join Backfence's community sites in the D.C. area (the site started in Reston,…
The report on Newspaper Next, a Harvard Business School-influenced blueprint for transforming newspapers into local ad hubs, has been released by the American Press Institute — or at least a stripped-down, free version of it (i.e., very little data). Included…
It was widely reported today that A9, the search engine operated by Amazon, has pruned its branches by getting rid of several features and products, largely focused on location.This is from a Reuters article earlier today: The A9 Toolbar, maps,…
Last week, I got 22 comments within a two-day timeframe on a several-month-old post regarding Merchant Circle. I took all the comments off the blog after noting irregularities among them. Basically, I saw a deliberate attempt by one or more…
There is vast opportunity for local niche players in a world that is otherwise dominated by the leading search engines. Moreover, the emergence of search, in all its variations, creates a wealth of local inventory for advertisers smart enough to…
Geo-tagging is becoming a significant part of the local ecosphere and is a very popular feature on Yahoo!'s Flickr service, according to Yahoo! Local GM Paul Levine, who spoke at SES Local on Sept. 28 in Denver. Levine said that…
