Virginia Tech and MySpace
We all share the grief in the tragedy at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, but it is especially gnawing on me. Over the years that I lived in Virginia, I watched with pride as the Hokies became a first-rate school and…
@SES: Social Networking and Local
This morning I attended an interesting session on advertising on social networks at SES New York. Much of the subject matter here has implicit ties to local, and some explicit. The conversation around social networking in this session was, correspondingly,…
Live Local Gets Social (and Other New Features)
Following closely behind the social media trend in local search, Microsoft Live Search Maps launched a feature that will allow users to read and contribute ratings and reviews of local businesses. This is part of a new feature set it…
Pegasus Hyper-Local Deal With Fox Affil Unravels
Pegasus News, the social network site based in Dallas, made a deal with Fox4 TV for a mutual content swap that would fill Pegasus' news hole, leverage its features (weather, etc.) and increase awareness about it in the community. At…
Smalltown Adds 3 Locales, Video
When you have access to $3 million of VC money, you are going to eventually want to spend some of it. That's what Smalltown, an IYP site with social aspects via reviews, calendars and (now) top 10 lists, is doing.…
TechCrunch: Insider Pages Acquisition Set
TechCrunch published a report today that Insider Pages, the review site that has been actively shopped for some time, may have found a buyer for more than the $8.5 million it raised last March from Sequoia and Softbank Capital. I…
Facebook Gets a Job(ster)
In a move that resembles MySpace's partnership with SimplyHired (to create MySpace Jobs), fast moving social network Facebook has partnered with career site Jobster. CareerBuilder and Monster were in the running for this deal, according to GigaOm, but Jobster won…
Online Video News Roundup
The online video space continues to see a lot of action. This is not to be confused with the IPTV space, talked about in the previous post, which involves telco-delivered video service packages (akin to cable). Online video is rather…
Sack: How Yelp Beat Judy’s Book
There is no better guide to how to avoid the potholes in hyper-local than Judy's Book cofounder Andy Sack, who has been writing a series of "don't do this at home" posts about Judy's Book's failed efforts building an online…
NAA Day 1 Overview: Classifieds and Social Networking
I'm at the Newspaper Association of America's annual Marketing Conference in Las Vegas this week, where there have been lots of interesting sessions that I'll break down in individual blog posts later. Most of the sessions were breakouts involving five…
NAA Coverage: Fox Interactive Thinks Local
Fox Interactive Media, the home of MySpace, Fox Sports, Fox News and other sites, definitely has local on its agenda and is rolling out several new features to bring users more in touch with their communities, says Dan Strauss, VP…
What Microsoft Could Have Been in Local Search
Back in 1999, Microsoft sold a small business called Sidewalk because it didn't fit into its core software business at the time. In a lengthy story in Sunday's New York Times, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted: "but Sidewalk was really…
A Conversation With vSocial
Recently I had the chance to catch up with Mark Sigal, CEO of online video distribution platform provider vSocial. The company provides a platform for advertisers and video publishers to publish and brand videos on existing Web sites, social networks…
Who Will Dominate Local Video on the Web?
There are a lot of reasons why Yellow Pages will continue to be the dominant local advertising vehicle. Certainly a major benefit Yellow Pages publishers have is that advertisers and people looking to buy products and services both know a…
Local Troubles
There has been a lot of talk in the past week over some of the apparent challenges facing local destination sites. Last week, BackFence endured a major downsizing, including the resignation of cofounder Susan DeFife (past writing on BackFence and…
UGC: To Be or Not To Be III
Sebastien Provencher reproduced a MarketWatch article on his Praized Blog that goes into great detail about most of the major trends in online social media and user-generated content. It's a nice state of the union on where these technologies are…
SME Advertising on Craigslist
ClickZ has an interesting article on the practice of advertising on Craigslist. Essentially this entails small businesses advertising products or services in the form of a Craigslist posting. I wrote about this for Search Engine Watch a few weeks ago.…
Jason Calacanis on Social Media and Local
Search Engine Watch has a write-up of an interview between Danny Sullivan and blogging pioneer, turned AOL exec, turned VC Jason Calacanis. Last time we wrote about Calacanis, he was given the task of turning the downtrodden Netscape brand into…
Digg Adds Video, Podcasts
I'm a bit late on this news, but Digg.com started off the week with a new interface that users so far (going by anecdotal evidence) seem to really like. Part of the redesign involves the integration of videos and podcasts.…