As if the landline business hadn’t suffered enough with wireless carriers taking share for domestic usage and VoIP taking share for international calling, now comes a slew of cheap international long distance calling plans from the cellular operators. Verizon and Sprint are offering plans at $4.00 per month for highly discounted international long-distance rates.

Cheap international long distance has been a key driver of VoIP penetration. Now one has to ask "Why should I have anything other than a cell number?â€� Whatever consumers or small businesses choose â€" landline, cell or VoIP - those companies out there that supply basic and enhanced listings to the offline and online Yellow Pages and local search publishers must be feeling numb from the velocity and pace at which their once stable and reliable source of information has been thrown into flux.

And what about caller ID â€" that great innovation that came out of SS7 switches that could display the area code and phone number of an inbound call. In the not too distant future when we move from the Bay Area to America’s heartland, we’ll take our four, 415 area code, cellphones with us. Then when we ring up the local plumber’s wife in Iowa she’ll have to decide if a call from area code 415 is worth taking. After all, if pay per call platforms are really the new business model, she and her husband will be paying for each call.

Two brief items caught my interest from opposite ends of the online spectrum, but both reflect consumer sentiment. First, there were some reports about a "grassroots" resistance among Flickrphiles to registering as Yahoo! users. Wired News has a fairly extensive story.

What seems to be at issue is the "top-down," compulsory nature of the registration drive.

Flickr users — who have to register, ironically, to use Flickr in the first place — are of the early adopter, Burning Man ilk. And so they instinctively react against such perceived “corporateâ€� maneuvers. This is the same type of objection voiced by users of MySpace after Fox bought its parent company.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Web, most newspapers (and some other content sites) have forced people to register before getting to see articles/content. This is true, in my anecdotal estimation, about 50% of the time coming from Google news. I have long railed against compulsory newspaper site registration without any apparent benefit to the user except getting to see a particular article.

More recently, the Washington Post has created local and national sites, depending on user location. That starts to answer the question "Why should I register?" But it still doesn't go far enough. On some newpaper sites the registration process is long and cumbersome.

Sites like BugMeNot.com (if widely adopted and not shut down by litigation) now threaten to destroy part of the claimed demographic/user targeting offered by online newspapers. (I say that with a skeptical tone because much of that information is faked to begin with.) The resistance to forced registration is, in a general sense, a cousin of the cookie-deletion debate.

In the end, I believe that newspapers will be forced to develop a more compelling value proposition to justify user registrations. At least I hope so. More publishers are going to need to be aware of and more scrupulously honor their users' interests and wishes to secure loyalty.

All this stuff about the power of the consumer-user is very real.

I think this has been around since late June, but A9/Amazon is making a formal announcement about A9 Maps. A combination of "Block View" and MapQuest, the site is so far unique in offering street-level photographs of storefronts along with graphical maps.

As I said at the time, if Google Earth and A9 started dating that would really be something. Seriously, someone is ultimately going to piece together the aerial and the street views and that will be really interesting. Admittedly, people aren't going to use Google Earth to find the best Mexican restaurant or the local library — that's like using a flame thrower to light a match — but some of these features will make their way to the Web via Google Maps.

Over time people will become accustomed to and appreciate more dynamic mapping.

While some have dismissed "Block View" as primarily a novelty, I believe that consumers find value in this visual information — or perhaps more precisely will value it when they discover it exists.

Driven by broadband, the Internet is becoming more and more a rich "multimedia" (to use the tired term) environment, think Flickr, podcasting, video. Interactive and visual mapping is broadly consistent with that larger trend.

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More: SiliconBeat mini-interview with A9's Barnaby Dorfman (no API so far).

According to a press release this a.m. classifieds aggregator Oodle has now grown to 20 U.S. metro areas. It's still a site in search of a business model, but it's obvious value to consumers will probably bring a (perhaps newspaper) buyer at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Just a few miles away, LiveDeal is also hitting some impressive benchmarks and developing a mutifaceted strategy. I met with CEO Rajesh Navar and VP Steve Harmon last week. The company will be making some announcements in the next few months.

Most of the action in the online classifieds arena is happening in verticals (some of which are newspaper owned) or at non-newspaper sites (e.g., Craigslist, LiveDeal, Oodle). I've had a few current and former newspaper people recently tell me off the record that they believe the newspapers have already lost the classifieds business (despite it being worth $16 billion offline in 2004).

I think that position is too simple and severe, but the innovation is happening outside the newspaper culture and, mostly, outside newspaper ownership. This puts continuing pressure on newspapers to keep buying their potential rivals (e.g., KRD, Gannett, Tribune acquisition of HomeGain or NYTimes investment in Indeed) to stay in this very fast-moving online game.

Google took investors by surprise in announcing that it would sell additional shares expected to generate US$4 billion. GOOG consequently took a bit of a hit. And now many in blogland are buzzing with speculation about what it means and why the company is doing it.

It's pretty clear there will be many more acquisitions (in Local for certain) and here, if true, is another way to spend the cash. (Here are some more.)

On a related yet somewhat distinct note, the Internet Stock Blog republishes part of Kevin Delaney's "Heard on the Street" column about Google's current share price and why some think it's low.

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I was pointed to Bambi Francisco's broad review of the past year of Google. And here's a relatively interesting take on why Google's selling more stock from The Stalwart.

Excerpts from Google warnings about competition and revenues from the Internet Stock Blog.

SMARTpages has relaunched with a new look and feel, preparing for the eventual merger of the site with RealPages.com under the unified YellowPages.com brand. The new site is a significant improvement over the user experience previously offered.

FAST Search & Transfer is the vendor behind search on the site and there's a product roadmap that extends beyond what's visible today. But this is a downpayment on the eventual YellowPages.com user experience.

One of the things that was really interesting about the old SMARTpages vs. other IYP players was its life events guides. Yellow Pages publishers have long known that life cycle events (e.g., homebuying, weddings, etc.) drive usage and comScore has shown the same to be true of e-commerce and related Internet usage patterns.

The new site translates those life events guides into "Smart Guides," a separate area on the site. The new site also has city guides. These are important efforts to broaden beyond the basic contact information historically offered on IYP sites. There's a ton of valuable content here, but the information is generally segregated from lookups on the "traditional" part of the site.

It will be interesting to see when the three sites (YellowPages.com, SMARTpages, RealPages) become one how the product evolves to meet a rapidly changing set of online user needs and interests.

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Chris Tolles of Topix pointed out to me that that Topix is the source behind SMARTpages' local news in its city guides section.

Specifically, DCCI is focusing on “the ROI data our Call Measurement Services provides to marketer and business owners,� and how their “Call Measurement Programs deliver real-time information about high-value customers.� They have placed the ads next to a YPA print ad with a headline, “Guess Who Leads the Way in ROI?� And so the two ad campaigns reinforce each other.

I’m not in a position to judge whether these ads will be successful in introducing their new “Telmetrics, powered by DCCI� branding, but the direct-mail piece succeeded in increasing my Desire to know more and at least sufficient Action that I wrote this blog.

Most of our company’s marketing is electronic (as you all probably are very well aware), but the part of the Yellow Pages business that still generates 90% of industry revenues lands on our front doorstep and gets put in the kitchen drawer â€" the heart of the information center of most homes.

I'm trying to get a bunch of things done and only have time for bullets right now:

• Print growth was sluggish but there was significant Q2 online newspaper revenue growth (28.6% to $500.7 million) vs. one year ago, according to the NAA.

• Many are speculating or trafficking in rumors re a Google announcement about an IM client. PaidContent reminds us that Google-owned Hello.com includes an IM client.
• Yahoo! and Verizon team up for an SBC-Yahoo!-like broadband deal.
• New wiki/search/P2P/blogging substitute Jeteye launches. Coverage from MediaPost.
• Lycos names a new CEO and struggles to right the ship.

More later.

I got an opportunity to preview Google's version 2 of its desktop client (GD2) late last week. It's very interesting and, in the few days I've been testing it out, pretty useful.

It offers much improved desktop search, indexing an expanded range of documents. It also offers the ability to sort those files by type and to sort emails. (The other desktop search client I've been using is Copernic. Copernic has been much better at finding documents than the first Google desktop client, which I previously used primarily to find email addresses.)

GD2 also offers an MS Outlook toolbar. But the most interesting thing is "Sidebar." Sidebar is a column of content modules (Google calls them "plug-ins") that offer a range of tools and features, some of which are personalized.

As the name suggests, it sits beside an open document or browser window (it can be minimized) while the user is working and allows the performance of a range of functions. The tool can be customized and modules can be removed or rearranged, dragged around (as with the modules on the Google Personalized Homepage).

There's a great deal of functionality in Sidebar and much more to say than I have time for right now. (There are no ads and apparently no intention of serving them — one could imagine a contextual strategy in one of the modules — but Google told me it's not being monetized.)

Although this is not likely the impetus behind its development, Sidebar can be seen as something of an answer to Yahoo!'s Konfabulator (although it's different enough that that comparison may not be entirely justified). Konfabulator is a collection of tools put together largely by third parties that allow users to perform a range of tasks — some purely fun, some functional. Those "widgets" sit on the desktop independent of one another, while Sidebar (less aesthetically pleasing) is a kind of "dashboard" that gives users the ability to manage content on the Web and on their local machines in one place.

There's an API apparently and Google will allow third parties to create plug-ins for the tool, so I would imagine there will be a range of things in the future (iTunes search, currency converters, Google maps, etc.). In fact, one could imagine a huge number of possibilities.

Konfabulator's widgets don't reach into the OS (unless there are some there I haven't seen), whereas Sidebar's "quick find" search box allows users to launch applications (e.g., Excel, Word, PPT, etc.) without going to the MS Start menu. (This is actually a terrific feature.)

People are out there this morning second-guessing this: What is it; is it a preview of the rumored Google Browser or OS? Putting aside that speculation, this is a tool that functionally sits somewhere in between a toolbar and a browser (with a taste of OS functionality), allowing users to do a bunch of things without having to go to separate places on their machines or on the Web.

The tool gives users a running inventory of email, recent files and Web pages viewed, photos, stocks, weather, personalized news and RSS reader ("Web Clips") and several other tools. In one way of looking at it, it's an alternative version of the Google Personalized Homepage and Search History with an RSS reader thrown in.

I asked Google: "Isn't this a power user's tool?" They said no because nothing had to be set up or selected for Sidebar to work; it's entirely passive. The personalization engine is shared by the desktop client (which gathers information from the user's machine and browsing behavior). Google calls this "implicit" personalization.

The news and Web Clips modules are the two that offer personalized feeds based on the sites users visit. Some of this information is captured by Google in anonymous form. Most resides on the user's machine. Privacy advocates will undoubtedly raise the "Should you fear this? Google has too much information" argument in response to Sidebar, etc.

I don't want to minimize privacy issues, they're real and very important. However, much of this debate about privacy is a debate about whether Google has become too powerful in the marketplace. If Google had developed the same product in 1999 or 2000, when it was a hip, young company people would likely react to this product as a useful tool and raise the privacy issues as something of an afterthought.

Now that Google is the dominant search engine and making gobs of money people have become suspicious of the company's motives ("But what are they really doing here?"). From speaking to the product manager, Nikhil Bhatla, I don't believe that there's a hidden motivation or agenda behind this product.

It's a helpful tool that brings together a great deal of useful information in an accessible way. Of course, if users download and adopt it, it will reinforce Google usage. And that will necessarily come at the expense of some of Google's competitors.

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Related: John Markoff piece in the NY Times. SiliconBeat. Search Engine Watch.

According to MediaPost:

Google and Yahoo! are attempting to purchase Amsterdam-based Trader Classified Media, which publishes 578 print guides and runs 56 Web sites with classified ads in 22 countries, according to published reports in Reuters and the London Sunday Times.

It's a kind of "double hearsay," but if true it would be a big deal for many reasons. Among them, Trader is a global publisher and has traditional print publications.

Buying Trader would be a role reversal: online brands moving offline into the traditional media space. Lots of implications. After talking to some folks about this (not any of the parties reportedly involved) I'm skeptical that this is real. But we'll see if it is true.