There are lots of broadband data — seemingly contradictory — now running around in the market. Pew says: Growth has slowed and will be flat. Nielsen says it's up and continuing to grow: "Two out of every five Americans has broadband." Rumors about a national (U.S.) Google WiFi network still are vigorously circulating.
To make …

The Swedish publisher Eniro AB is buying its Norwegian rival Findexa A/S for a combination of cash and new shares worth roughly 7.9 billion Swedish kroner (about US$1.01 billion). The deal will further strengthen Eniro’s position in the Nordic market, giving it the dominant position in print and online directories in Sweden and Norway, along …

The DEMO conference is happening in SoCal this week (not there, trying to get some writing done) and there are some interesting developments that concern local:
Local Matters announced its next-generation local search platform. I saw a very early version in January of this year and it was highly impressive. I'm waiting for the busy …

There are lots of things happening and announcements in the local space. However, I'm in the thick of conference schmoozing so I'm just stealing a few moments to mention something that Peter Zollman reported to me about Google launching classifieds (via partners). For more see Peter's press release. What this does is provide more complete …

It was a very interesting day yesterday at DDC2005, which saw keynote speeches from Dex Media's George Burnett and YellowBook's Joe Walsh (both of which seemed to elicit strong reactions) and videotaped interviews of SME advertiser interviews about their advertising budgets and behaviors (many had pointed things to say). There was also lots of interesting …

Almost everyone from The Kelsey Group is in Denver for most of this week for our annual directories/Yellow Pages conference, DDC2005. I'm still working furiously to get some things accomplished before I join them tomorrow.
So, for now, here are some quick hits on the news today:

MSN's AdCenter formally launches today in France and Singapore …

Google wi-fi broadband network? — Om Malik hypothesizes. This would be potentially very appealing for both for consumers and advertisers (creates more reliable geotargeting).
"Appealing?" Perhaps that's too tepid — more like boom chaka laka!
If it was free (Google might be advised to charge nominally) it would kill the business models of T-Mobile, Cingular and …

We noted several stories last week that reported Universal McCann’s longtime ad forecaster Bob Coen had downgraded his 2005 U.S. advertising outlook, which was issued in December 2004. The revised outlook calls for U.S. total advertrising growing by 5.7 percent and international advertising by 5.9 percent. The previous forecast called for growth of 6.4 percent …

While Housingmaps is a novel "mashup" (third-party data on top of maps) Redfin is the real thing. The folks at InfoSpace alerted me to this when I was visiting them in Seattle last week.
This is EXACTLY what we've been talking about regarding the monetization potential for maps and local search.
It's a map-based local …

Nielsen//NetRatings issued some very interesting findings late this week that should give newspapers a considerable boost. The company found that "online readers in nine of the top 10 local markets were loyal to the city's top newspaper Web site."
In terms of percent of local market penetrated by online newspaper editions, here were Nielsen’s findings:

WashingtonPost.com …

It's official: Ask launched its own bidding engine/network. But the company still wants to preserve its Google relationship:
"Ask Jeeves plans to continue to display ads from Google's network but will feature them below the listings generated from its own auction-based ads. Since users generally click on the links displayed higher on the page, that hierarchy …

Perhaps I'm obsessing over this whole user-generated content phenomenon — and I don't want to overhype it. But in my view, this is one of the most interesting things happening online. I tried to capture the phenomenon in the context of Yahoo!'s local strategy previously.
This piece in BusinessWeek is a very interesting survey of …

Google added a link to its "personalized home" in the upper right of its Google.com home page.
If you click on the link and are not signed in to Google, you'll see weather, quote of the day, word of the day and top news stories. The page encourages users to personalize the Google home page …

Yahoo!'s "FUSE" (Find, Use, Share, Expand) strategy is more apparent in what might be called Yahoo! Local 2.0. The newly launched site, which I was fortunate to preview during a hectic SES conference, combines an impressive and rich array of elements:

Dynamic mapping
User-generated content (reviews + popularity)
Events
Personalization (search history + Amazon-style recommendations)
Neighborhood-level detail
Search and browse navigation
RSS …

My apologies to all those who've been repeatedly asking me about the ILM conference and speaking opportunities. I've been buried in work.
The agenda is completed. We started with 30+ panels and whittled down, condensed and compacted them into 22 sessions over 2.5 days.

On the very same day, both Borrell Associates and Jupiter released reports that are quite bullish on the local space. Jupiter, which had taken something of a contrarian position about the outlook for local search (previously the company projected $879 million for local search by 2009), appears now to be somewhat more enthusiastic about local. …

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that RH Donnelley is in talks to acquire Dex Media, an acquisition that would propel RHD into the third position in the US directories market, behind SBC and Verizon, ahead of BellSouth and YellowBook.
The Kelsey Report will issue an Advisory that explores the possibilities this deal represents, …

Paid Content reports Google is:
reviewing bids received from multiple technology vendors for the development of a national DWDM fiber network, an optical switching fabric that would cover the entire continental U.S., and ultimately the globe.
Here are more details from Reuters which appear to confirm the veracity of some version of the GoogleNet rumor, including …

On the very same day, both Borrell Associates and Jupiter released reports that are quite bullish on the local space. Jupiter, which had taken something of a contrarian position about the outlook for local search (previously the company projected $879 million for local search by 2009), appears now to be somewhat more enthusiastic about local. …

Perhaps I'm obsessing over this whole user-generated content phenomenon—and I don't want to overhype it. But in my view, this is one of the most interesting things happening online. I tried to capture the phenomenon in the context of Yahoo!'s local strategy previously.
This piece in BusinessWeek is a very interesting survey of the different …