According to an article that appeared in Editor & Publisher, Tribune Co.'s Newsday has abandoned AdSense in favor of an "in-house" contextual product powered by Quigo:
As more and more newspapers are embracing Google AdSense and other third-party context-based advertising, Newsday Monday announced its in-house answer.
The Newsday program, called Pay-Per-Click, allows advertisers to place ads on …

Thanks to SiliconBeat for pointing out Social Media + Maps site Frappr. It's fun; take a look. Also John Battelle discusses a new button from Yahoo! intended to get more content into social search content repository MyWeb.

A raft of competitors using the label "pay per call" is about to enter the marketplace and compete for business in this up-and-coming arena. The first of these new would-be competitors for Ingenio making a public push is ZiffTalk.
Another is Thinking Voice.
Call measurement firms, such as MediaTraks and those who offer "push-to-talk" …

LocalLaunch's CEO Justin Sanger several months ago wrote a column that was strongly critical of IYPs ("Internet Yellow Pages Are Dead") as destination sites. So it's very interesting that his most recent ClickZ column is extremely bullish on YellowPages.com.
What does he think makes YellowPages.com different? Sanger says: "A winning strategy that includes sales, destination, …

There are three dimensions to local: "where I am," "where I'm going" and "where can I buy it?" The new Yahoo! Trip Planner seeks to leverage a number of Yahoo!'s locally oriented applications and information, including search, maps and user-generated content (ratings/reviews). The app also lets users share their trips with others (per Yahoo!'s overall …

AOL wisely starts marketing AIM to younger audiences, where it has brand and usage strength.
Also, another area of AOL strength, the company beefs up Singingfish and AOL broadband video search with RSS feeds.

Eric Auchard (Reuters) profiles a new social search engine, Kaboodle (sort of like Jeteye but simpler). It looks very interesting, but what will be its fate?
One has to ask the broader question (with all the new launches recently): What will happen to all these new engines and tools, and where will they ultimately wind …

A bad bit of news (reg req'd) for the newspaper industry that had been using free metro dailies to reach new audiences — in theory:
While they are attracting some hard-to-reach readers, including younger and minority, they have been small gains that have had more to do with distribution strategies — such as giving papers away …

Ran into Jonathan Blue of Cobalt Publishing at the ADP conference last week. He pointed out that his company, which publishes Spanish-language directories under the Enlace (Spanish for Link) brand, has moved into its largest market to date by acquiring Miami En Sus Manos and Broward-Palm Beach En Sus Manos. Cobalt has built a niche …

Google Base (now apparently down) is a content entry system for:

Description of your party planning service
Articles on current events from your Web site
Listing of your used car for sale
Database of protein structures
This could be the entry point for the rumored Google Classifieds. It appears to be more than that, however — a kind of universal …

In a separate item by David Carr, titled “Why You Should Pay to Read This,â€� the author suggests that paid content is in real danger because youth expect information to be free. They are willing to pay for the distribution vehicles â€" cable, broadband Internet and cellphones â€" but not for the stuff that comes …

Classifieds provider LiveDeal, which was initially dismissed by some as being unable to compete with Google, Craigslist and eBay, has scored a major coup by partnering with Canadian media giant Torstar Corp. to launch LiveDeal Canada (site not currently available). It immediately becomes Canada's largest online classifieds site.
The company also raised additional financing. Apropos …

Here at the Association of Directory Publishers conference in Huntington Beach, CA, the mood seems upbeat and the independent publishers in attendance see blue skies ahead for their businesses, which offer competitive Yellow Pages directories, primarily in the United States. Jim Hail, the ADP’s chairman, set this tone with an address built on the theme …

Noteworthy . . . from the folks at PaidContent:
Weblogs Inc, the blog media company founded by Jason Calacanis, is being bought by America Online . . .The company's blogs have had an exponential trajectory, with sites like Engadget, Autoblog, BloggingBaby and others. In total, the company has about 130 bloggers, with about 15 full-time employees …

HousingMaps, Yahoo! Apartments, HomePages, Trulia and now Google may be seeking to combine real estate listings and related data with Google Earth and/or Google Local. (Thanks to John Battelle for pointing to the article on the San Jose Mercury News site.):
Commercial real estate's largest data provider is working with Google to integrate its vast …

There are simply too many things going on. Here are a few quick hits with some thoughtful remarks (hopefully) to come later:

MapQuest to Publish (Real) Books (taking online offline; they've got the brand to do it)
Yellow Pages Group Launches HelloYello Enhanced DA (automated, should be a big improvement on current, inept human operators. This is …

Today next-generation news aggregation site Inform unveiled itself. I spoke to CEO Neal Goldman a couple of weeks ago and got a demo of the site, which was very impressive. I don't have a great deal of time this morning to run through the site's features, but here's what makes it different:

Comprehensiveness: Algo + …

The recent earnings' results from BellSouth, SBC and Verizon all show that their growth is coming primarily from high-speed Internet and wireless. Accordingly, we believe that the FCC's recent decision will enourage more investment in DSL by the RBOCs. Since all three RBOCs have historically high debt levels, now would be a good time to …

I'm stuck in the Phoenix airport waiting for a plane that is delayed. By now, you all know that Google made a lot of money this past quarter. Here's the low-down from the official release:
Google reported record revenues of $1.578 billion for the quarter ended September 30, 2005, up 96% compared to the third quarter …

Craigslist (CL) has been the proverbial poster child for friendliness, openness and online cooperation. However, as John Battelle reported first yesterday, CL has apparently blocked Oodle CEO Craig Donato's classifieds aggregator from crawling and indexing CL's listings. Currently, the local marketplace accounts for a large percentage of Oodle's listings (haven't done the count, but it's …