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.

AOL announced an impressive VoIP offering, TotalTalk, which will be available October 4 (the TotalTalk site says "coming soon," but you can get a general taste here).
The offering, available via the new AIM Triton client, has a suite of integrated communications features and is positioned as an alternative to traditional phone service ("a quality …

How did I miss this one? According to Netimperative:
The service is already available in Yahoo! Cars and will be introduced into Yahoo!’s other e-commerce properties, Shopping and Travel following an initial introductory period beginning in early August on its shopping- comparison portal Kelkoo.
There are a couple of really interesting things here. This is more …

Yahoo! "Instant Search" has been introduced based on Yahoo! Shortcuts. AOL (with SmartBox), SNAP and a couple of others are doing similar things in providing answers before the query is completed.
More from the Yahoo! Search Blog on Instant Search.

AOL announced an impressive VoIP offering, TotalTalk, which will be available October 4 (the TotalTalk site says "coming soon," but you can get a general taste here).
The offering, available via the new AIM Triton client, has a suite of integrated communications features and is positioned as an alternative to traditional phone service ("a quality phone …

According to the FCC (reported by CNET), broadband (BB) grew in all 50 U.S. states and was up overall by 34 percent in 2004.
Here's why BB will continue to gain:

Government initiatives (e.g., municipal free access)
Price competition
WiMax (which can spread it to rural areas w/o infrastructure)
Social pressure (can't watch Live 8 on AOL w/o a …

Yellow Book USA announced another acquisition this week, purchasing two directories from User-Friendly Phone Book LLC, which is itself a company that has been actively pursuing acquisitions in the U.S. independent sector.
The two properties involved are the Steel Valley and Ohio Valley directories, which have combined distribution of 225,000. What is interesting about this deal …

From the February 10 Yppaelinc:
"SuperPages.com traffic rose to an all-time high in December as online holiday shopping helped increase search volume.
The SuperPages network, which includes SuperPages.com and other sites with which we have traffic and partnership agreements, received more than 16,238,000 unique visitors — an increase of 31 percent from November. And, it's estimated that …

Yahoo! announced quarterly revenues of US$1.25 billion and net income of US$755 million. That represented a 51 percent increase from revenues of US$832.3 million last year during the same period. Yet the stock lost value in after-hours trading.
I believe this reflects overheated expectations for the Internet bellwethers. We'll see what happens to Google and …

What do you get when you ask a YPA staff vice president to ask six board members questions in front of the membership? In short, not a lot of controversy. That's nobody's fault. It's just the environment.
Stephanie Hobbs, who managed the best YPA conference in memory, had the difficult task of trying to pull …

As Google became progressively more powerful, more and more people began trying to manipulate Google's "organic" search results. That aim has spawned a whole industry — search engine optimization — and in fact resulted in more manipulated links (some would say "spam") on results pages.
Now Google is considering implementing a new approach to …

First Google and Yell announced that the latter, the owner of the Yellow Pages brand in the U.K., would provide the content for Google Local U.K. Now Yell's rival in the directory publishing business, Thomson Directories, has announced that it will effectively be a sales agent for Google, selling local advertisers into Google's ad network. …

Also this week, a group of private equity buyers acquired Yellow Brick Road, the European directory holding company, from its existing PE owners, paying them 1.8 billion euros, more than four times the cash investment of current owners Veronis Suhler and 3i Group. The buyers are led by the Australian investment fund Macquarie Capital Alliance …

I’ve made a big deal of late of user-generated content and its importance in local. But not all publishers and sites can effectively pull this off. Getting users engaged and creating a community atmosphere that will encourage this is no easy task.
Verizon has indicated that SuperPages will be adding user ratings and reviews to …

So if you’re looking for a way to get people to write reviews about local businesses, what would you do? Insider Pages is offering a $10 Shell gas gift card to members when they review 10 local businesses. You are required to register, but if you follow their rules, such as each review being at …

It would appear, as some have speculated, that Google is working on just about everything that its hundreds of engineers can sink their intellectual teeth into. Today, for example, Google launched blog search from both its Blogger site and from a separate URL (same results) available under the "more" link that takes users into the …

So I'm 20 years out of college this year (and 15 out of law school) and starting my mid-life crisis in earnest. That's why I glance wistfully at a host of applications and marketing initiatives directed at college students:

LiveDeal's College and University platform (an online classified platform for the top 200 College and Universities in …

The NY Post reports that Microsoft wants to buy a piece (how big?) of AOL. (Perhaps it's time for some Scooby-Doo sound effects and other incredulous reactions.)
Why? Maybe:

TimeWarner wants some cash to pay down its billions in debt?
MSN is hedging and doesn't feel it can fully compete against rivals Google and Yahoo! (and perhaps the …

According to a story yesterday in MediaPost, BURST! Media surveyed 6,400 online users (14 and older) and found that 62% were most interested in news when they went online. Entertainment was the second most popular category of information, sought by slightly more than half as many respopndents.
This finding suggests that online newspapers can leverage …

Idealab's Snap.com search engine has launched comparison shopping. The site was developed in partnership with Smarter.com and CouponMountain.com.
Shopping search is one of the most furiously competitive market segments and Snap is fighting an uphill battle to gain traction (just as in the general Web search space). The consumer differentiator is "coupons and deals." More …