As expected, the merger of R.H. Donnelley Corp. and Dex Media closed today. Dex Media is no more, and RHD is now the third-largest U.S. directory publisher, with combined revenues of roughly US$2.5 billion. You can read more about the deal here.
More detail was revealed about the newly combined company’s management structure. As we …

EarthLink has apparently finalized its deal with Philadelphia to provide what amounts to wholesale wireless/Wi-Fi access that can then be resold to ISPs (which would then sell to consumers). So this isn’t "free" Wi-Fi, but reportedly EarthLink would only be charging $9 per month as a wholesale rate — so retail costs could wind …

To add to Greg’s post last week about My Yahoo!, there was an interesting article in The New York Times yesterday about the site’s usage and strategy.
The Times reports that as of December, there were 30 million Americans that have created a My Yahoo! page. RSS is the main feature of …

It was reported late last week that Verizon has settled the strike by 300 CWA workers in upstate New York. Here is an article with details.

YellowPages.com has launched its long-awaited advertising campaign to generate awareness and organic traffic. The site is jointly owned by AT&T and BellSouth, and the agency handling the campaign, GSD&M in Austin, also does work for AT&T Yellow Pages (formerly SBC).
The stakes for this campaign are fairly high. YPC has a real opportunity, given its …

News Corp.’s True Local search engine has gone live in Australia. Its purpose is to compete with Sensis and it’s "powered" by News Corp.-owned newspapers. This is an interesting thing for U.S.-based newspapers to consider, but perhaps impossible for them to pull off as a collective (sort of a YellowPages.com approach).
I suspect we can …

America Online has decided to make another push into broadband. Built on top of third-party partnerships with BellSouth, Time Warner Cable, Qwest and AT&T, the company will offer high-speed access across the U.S.
AOL had limited success with this the first time around, so why is the company "giving it another go"? This Reuters …

Google went live tonight with version 4 of its toolbar for IE (Firefox version coming soon, I’m told). You can take a look at the laundry list of features and upgrades here.
Worth noting from my point of view are the following:

Bookmarks (the ability to add any page or …

Almost everyone is using the term "social search" to describe a rash of "Web 2.0-style" offerings (whether product features or new sites) that try to blend community with another application (e.g., search, shopping, etc.).
Here’s a post by Danny Sullivan (SEW) about a dispute between Judy’s Book and presumably Yahoo! regarding Judy’s Book’s asserted …

Having just returned from a Yellow Book "summit" with the national ad community, it is fair to say that the national agencies are viewing the company in a new light. The reason? Yellow Book showed significant strength in the first batch of reports for Yellow Pages Market Reporter, a syndicated usage research service from Knowledge …

No time to discuss now. Check out a screenshot of the test.
More to come later. Precious little additional info in this article.

As Google more and more becomes a "media company," media opportunities cannot be missed. Here’s Gary Price speculating about and discussing the seemingly impending Google Music.
Music and other potential vertical domains raise the broader question of how Google intends to handle "vertical search" going forward — separate sites for everything (video, local, …

Blogger Jennifer Slegg uncovered today that Google is experimenting with rich media ads. The undisclosed plan will, according to Slegg’s sources, involve site targeted campaigns (rather than contextual) and have interstitials (those that precede a link’s destination), expanding ads and floating ads.
If true, this will be a major departure from Google’s text-only ad setup …

Microsoft will be an integral part of the IPTV revolution, running the software that will reside in the set-top boxes of IPTV systems for Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth. As in the PC market, it has made a very smart and forward-thinking decision to corner the market for software that will dominate the node level of …

I’ve heard it occasionally said about InfoSpace, which owns metasearch engine Dogpile, "what do they want to be when they grow up?" In other words, what’s their business model?
Here’s a very bullish piece, originally published in The Motley Fool, that argues the model is healthy and InfoSpace is undervalued by the market: …

MyYahoo! is a powerful strategic asset that has been languishing to some degree. Now Om Malik reports that it may be ready to rise to the level of attention that it deserves internally.
It's really a potential personal dashboard for search, local, email, news, mobile, video, calendar, etc.—everything to help users manage what is now …

As TV audiences fragment, advertisers are clinging to large-scale "live TV" events that still draw large audiences, i.e., the "Oscars" and the Super Bowl. There's something of a paradox going on: even as audiences shrink, TV networks (in certain cases) have been able to command advertising premiums and the Super Bowl is an example (rates …

It appears that everyone is the world of search is opening new labs. Google has been announcing new research labs here and there for the past several months; Yahoo! earlier this week announced research labs in Spain and Chile. And last night Microsoft announced that it was creating a new research group "Live Labs": …

To add to Greg’s comments on the strengths and potential of My Yahoo!, see our post earlier this month about Yahoo!’s expressed plans for the personal hub.

The other day I was considering updating my old "candybar" cellphone. I went into the Sprint/Nextel retail store and began playing around with numerous new and advanced smartphones. I was all set to pull the trigger on buying a new smartphone when I asked a simple question: "How much talk time does this wizbang phone …