Yellow Book continues its stready pace of acquiring independent directory publishers — large, small and in between. The company just announced the acquisition of Banana Publishing in Springfield, Mass. This is not the Springfield of "Simpsons" fame (at least we don’t think so). It is, however, the largest and oldest of the countless American cities named Springfield.

Fast Search & Transfer has announced it landed a deal with the Finnish directory publisher Fonecta, which is part of the PE-backed European Directories organization.

Here is the release from FAST.

Here is what we picked up from Norwegian News Digests:

Norwegian real-time search and filter technology company Fast Search & Transfer ASA said on March 24, 2006 that Finnish directory company Fonecta Ltd will deploy its directory and Interactive Yellow Pages (IYP) solution FAST AdVisor across Fonecta’s Internet directory services offering, under a contract between the companies.

The agreement with Fonecta is based on software license, maintenance fees, and professional services, Fast Search & Transfer said.

Here is what we have found about the bids that have come in for the 60 percent stake in Spanish publisher TPI currently owned by Telefonica, Spain’s leading telecom.

This is from the AFX news service. Note an apparent contraction with earlier reports that the Italian publisher Seat PG was not planning to put in a bid.

Telefonica SA has received at least four non-binding bids for its 59.9 pct stake in yellow pages unit TPI, including from France Telecom, Cinco Dias reported, citing unnamed market sources.

According to a Spanish news agency, Yell and Seat have also presented bids.

Just got my hands on a copy of the "Style at Home Special Issue — Home Improvement" produced by Canada’s Yellow Pages Group and media partner Transcontinental Media. The product was recently distributed in Toronto. The joint venture between the two publishers is aptly called "Vertical Guides Limited Partnership."

Briefly, the guide is exhibit A (or should it be exhibit "eh"?) of what we have been calling "vertical hybrids," or publications that mesh two types of media (magazines and directories) in order to drill deeper into a vertical category (home improvement).

The product is very slick and professional, and very upscale.

We will write more about this in an upcoming White Paper on core product innovation.

There’s an incredible amount of hype and anticipation among marketers and the mobile industry in general around ad revenue projections and the anticipated size of the mobile TV/video market. This mostly bullish BusinessWeek article does a nice job of assessing the state of mobile marketing.

But, in reality, mobile is still years away. Most people don’t want to pay for video (notwithstanding Apple’s success to date) and don’t even want advertising on their cellphones. Until the user experience is worked out, there isn’t going to be massive mainstream usage of mobile for much more than voice and SMS.

That’s not to say there isn’t money to be made and users are totally immune to advertising on their mobile phones. But it must be presented to them in ways that are relevant, offer value, and are consistent with their needs and interests. Again, this goes to the overall user experience.

I’ll be very curious what the panelists on the "Mobile Ads That Work Today" panel (3/28 at Drilling Down) have to say about their models, their learnings and their projections.

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Related: Miva conducted a test involving 500 mobile phone users in the UK with "pay-per-text" ads on SMS/text messages. The test was in conjunction with Britain’s leading directory assistance service, 118 118. Callers to the service who opted to receive the desired number via text also saw a contextually relevant ad as part of the message (after the desired number). Here are the (relatively impressive) results:

• Nearly 60% of respondents who were sent the message recalled it, and 14% of these people used the additional number.
• 93% of users said they would like to receive an additional number in future.
• 75% of respondents said that they could see clear benefits in the service.
• Just over 80% of respondents were also interested in an enhanced offer (such as a discount on goods or services) and the majority said that even if they didn’t use it immediately, they would do at some point.
• Half also said they would think about sending the information on to family and friends.

A few weeks ago at SES, Google told me they were going to be allowing advertisers to add logos and graphical images to the mapping balloons that appear on Google Local. I looked for them but couldn’t find them. Today, apparently, they started appearing. This blog has a screenshot. I was unable to find this ad (or other similar ads) on my own.

My understanding is that this doesn’t cost anything beyond the keyword bid; it’s a kind of a perk to marketers. (It’s also an enticement to advertise.) Yahoo! has been doing a version of this for a long time, although the branding is not presented the same way.

This is really just the beginning. AdMission Corp. has a directories module (like a mapping balloon) that can host photos, chat, e-commerce, e-mail forms, even video. I would expect to see all those options and PPCall or click-to-call functionality integrated into these mapping balloons over time.

Just wait.

Google has added a social tagging feature to Google Reader. After setting up RSS feeds in the reader, users can tag articles or Web pages and share them with friends via e-mail or syndicate them on a blog.

Just as Google Reader seemed to have been an answer to MyYahoo!, This feature seems to follow Yahoo! down the social tagging path it’s attempting to blaze with My Web (and del.icio.us).

My Web hasn’t been adopted by mainstream users to any large degree, but it hasn’t integrated it with its popular My Yahoo! personal portal, which we expect it will do. Google Reader has had even less adoption, so this tagging and sharing feature — as tagging in general has proved to only attract a small segment of early adopters — will have trouble finding users. It is also confusing to set up RSS feeds on Google Reader compared with My Yahoo! and to create tags compared with MyWeb. These will further stand in the way of attracting new users.

Tagging falls under the broader category of social search, which is slowly gaining acceptance and is being touted by many local search sites that wish to infuse social media and community layers into their content. Yahoo! and Google haven’t indicated any specific local intentions for social tagging, but they could eventually integrate it with local in ways that let users find ratings and reviews of businesses from within their group of friends, extended friends or any group that has similar geography, interest or professional track.

It requires a certain critical mass of users and contributors to make social search "work" in local, so it will take time. But it can be a powerful tool to build content around local listings that creates a level of trust among users, and thus stickiness.

We’re closely watching this area develop. Look out for a forthcoming report on social search; and if you’re at Drilling Down on Local next week, don’t miss this panel:

Social Search Is the New Black
Almost every new start-up includes a community or "social media" layer. Notwithstanding the success of MySpace (at least in being acquired for lots of money), do these new applications really offer something compelling for the end user or is this just hype and novelty? The Kelsey Group has described social networking/social media as a valuable "online word of mouth" feature that needs to be appended to or integrated into a pre-existing business model. Is "social" really the "future of search" as some have recently argued or merely a fad that will pass in time?

Panelists:
Manish Chandra, CEO and Founder, Kaboodle
Chris DeVore, COO and Cofounder, Judy’s Book
Andy Gadiel, CEO, JamBase
Steven E. Marder, CEO, Eurekster
Chris Tolles, VP, Sales and Marketing, Topix.net
Jeremy Zawodny, Technical Yahoo!, Yahoo!

Search Engine Journal reports on a few Google Base sightings.

The appeal of Sling Media’s Slingbox is that you can use it to tap into your home television’s broadcast feed from remote locations (great for catching a local sportscast if you are on the road). It has introduced the term "place-shifting" to join "time-shifting" in the new media lexicon.

Now it’s gotten even more, well, mobile. It used to require a broadband connection and laptop connect to the slingbox that is sitting atop your television many miles away. Now you can do the same thing from a Windows Media mobile phone or a Windows PDA.

This will further infuriate (scroll down required) broadcasters, mainstream content producers and advertisers by disrupting their distribution models. Ironically, it opens up many more opportunities for advertisers to better target viewers by pushing along the adoption curve for content consumption on mobile devices, which some research shows to be pretty steep.

Om Malik has the full scoop. More from the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Each year I attend a few conferences put on by other companies, both because they tend to have different speakers, but also because it enables me to pick up some ideas that can enhance our events.

Today I went to the 23rd annual Kagan Radio/TV Values & Finance Summit. Robin Flynn, senior analyst for Kagan, was the very competent moderator of this one-day conference attended by about 125 people in New York City.

What was perhaps most striking, and at the same time least surprising, was that the message that came from these broadcast executives was virtually identical to what we hear in the print media. For instance, Jay Ireland, president/TV stations group, NBC Universal, was critical of his industry for its failure to move more quickly and "tendency to do things as we have before." Ireland lists television's advantages as reach, relevance, brand, community position and local. Finally he said that television needs to add more resources to the Internet and deliver product in whatever form people want and when and where they want it.

Sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it?

What was most relevant to our conference coming up next Monday and Tuesday (Drilling Down on Local: Targeting the Online Marketplace in San Jose) is the emphasis on local. Elliot Evers, managing director of Media Venture Partners, told the audience that "radio should be super serving the local populations." Mary Quass, CEO of NRG Media, reinforced that message when she said, "Great local radio is what we do."

In the next panel on the future of TV, Douglas Kiel, CEO of the Journal Broadcast Group, underscored what many on that panel said in one form or another: We drive local branding to get ratings and we leverage local brands to build our local products.

Not surprisingly, the audience came away with a clear message about the importance of local, both as a threat and an opportunity in the broadcast business. Like Yellow Pages, newspapers or magazines, broadcast media is not going to disappear, and a combination of the healthy cash flow and status of owning a local media outlet, especially in an environment where there is a great deal of private equity money looking for a home, will keep the deal flow healthy.

What will hurt any company and ultimately any industry will be owners whose sole purpose is to take as much cash out of the business as possible.