A few news bits from the interactive media world this week:

—Online search and contextual advertising firm Marchex announced yesterday that it will buy Open List. Open List has a vertical and local aggregation platform for reviews and listings data that will help Marchex improve the many local domains in its network.

—Prolific New York Times tech writer John Markoff reports on social search start-up Tacit. The company has developed a platform to direct search queries to the sources that are most likely to hold the best results or answer to a specific query. The article is framed around searching for people or noncommercial information, but the technology clearly has applicability (and better monetization potential) with local search.

—Jason Calacanis (via SEW) has an interesting comparative analysis on the results pages of major search engines.

—Krishna Bharat, the man behind Google News, spoke in front of the International Press Institute Congress in Edinburgh about the future of online news. His general message was that the medium must be fostered with better attention to users’ needs than has been done by traditional publishers and news organizations. Read more here.

—In other Google news, the company has been quick to respond to Yahoo!’s partnership with eBay (which among other things will utilize the latter’s PayPal online payment system) by finally launching its much anticipated online payment system, described here by Search Engine Lowdown.

—Google has also released an API for AdSense that publishers can use to incent user-generated content (could be value-add reviews, ratings in the case of social search and community sites) by sharing ad revenues with contributors. John Battelle describes it here.

—Good Morning Silicon Valley’s John Murrell also has an interesting post on the emergence of user-generated content. It links to Pew data on upward trends in UGC and to this interesting piece by Robert Young on Om Malik’s blog, which contends that the social networking phenomenon is part of a much broader trend of digital self expression. Like many discussions on this topic, Young and Murrell circle back to the much grappled question of how to harness the power of these trends in the form of a business model.

—A start-up called Kozoru has developed a search technology to be used from within mobile IM clients. It promises to be better suited to the medium by delivering fewer and more relevant results that are limited by users’ preliminary selection of specific sites of interest. CNET News.com has more.

—Lastly, some data: Online advertising was up 38 percent in the first quarter, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau; ZDNet has April search engine market share numbers; Pew reports on broadband adoption growth; And Harris Interactive (via ZDNet) published historic U.S. online adoption data.

The Kelsey Report® issued an Advisory yesterday that offers some insight into the online strategies of three leading European directory publishers. Here is what the cover letter says:

The latest Advisory from The Kelsey Report® chronicles the progress being made by leading European directory publishers in migrating their online properties from extensions of the Internet Yellow Pages into something much more rich, deep and relevant. We profile three publishers — Eniro, PagesJaunes Groupe and Seat Pagine Gialle — all of which recently presented updates on their online product development efforts at an investor conference in London. The Kelsey Report® plans a series of advisories throughout this year that will focus on the progression of online directory properties worldwide.

For more information on The Kelsey Group, contact Steve Vasil.

Buried in an item from channelnewsasia.com on Singapore Yellow Pages’ recent annual results announcement was the following:

Going forward, Yellow Pages is looking to expand, including possible acquisitions in Asia.

Singapore YP, which posted a 42 percent improvement in the bottom line despite continuing slippage at the top line, may see expansion as one path out of its persistent difficulties in finding growth in its home market.

The Asian region is challenging for directories. There are a handful of developed markets, particularly if you stretch the boundaries to include Australia and New Zealand, and a large number of very small, underdeveloped markets that may never develop the cultural triggers of a strong directory market — a consumer-oriented and highly mobile middle class. So expansion in that region is fraught with at least as much risk as opportunity.

Still, it is hard to overlook the rising income levels in markets such as India, China and others without imagining a strong long-term opportunity in directories — print and online. The real questions include which mode consumers in these markets will use to find local business information. And will directory publishers have the same role in that process that they have in more established directory markets?

Reports circulated over the weekend that France Telecom is considering selling off the 54 percent it owns of PagesJaunes Groupe. PagesJaunes is among the best Yellow Pages assets in the world. It has had the great advantage of learning from Minitel (perhaps the world’s first online Yellow Pages) and using that knowledge to evolve its current www.pagesjaunes.fr site. Among the most impressive metrics is that nearly 70 percent of PagesJaunes’ print advertisers are also online — certainly the envy of print Yellow Pages publishers around the world. We’d expect France Telecom to see strong interest in this very valuable property.

This is an interesting story from the Miami Herald about post-hurricane remodeling. Note the mention of Home Depot and Lowe’s installation services. This development in the local services marketplace is something TKG will be following in the coming months.

Here is some news from the past few days in case you missed it (or we missed it):

—The biggest event of the past couple of days that we haven’t blogged about yet is the partnership formed between eBay and Yahoo!. Yahoo! will run ads on eBay, while eBay’s PayPal will run Yahoo!’s online payment service. They’ll also work together to develop click-to-call services (perhaps using some combination of Skype and the voice-enabled Yahoo! Messenger). Overall, this is a countershot of sorts to the Google-AOL alliance and a general bolstering of Yahoo!’s ability to take on MSN and the emerging threat of Windows Live. Read The New York Times’ coverage here and Search Engine Journal here.

—The San Jose Mercury news has a good introductory piece on VoIP and the recent developments in the market. This has implications for the growth of click-to-call for local and national advertisers. Marketing Sherpa meanwhile has an interesting rundown of PPCall trends.

—The Internet outpaced print two to one for late model used vehicle sales, according to this report, and help wanted ads online and in print fell in April, according to this.

—Elsewhere in online classifieds, The Tribune Co. earlier in the week bolstered its online real estate positioning by acquiring national real estate Web site ForSaleByOwner.com, and job search start-up Jobster acquired job site Jobby.

—As we reported in Local Media Journal this week, Journalism.co.uk reports that classified aggregator Oodle has entered the U.K. market by forming a partnership with News Corp.’s The Sun newspaper. Like its stateside partnership with The Washington Post, Oodle will run its aggregated classifieds on The Sun’s Web site.

—Lastly, as expected, on-demand content is in high demand. Red Herring explains the trend and has some data to back it up.

Vodafone UK announced earlier this week that its mobile TV service has reached 100,000 subscribers and more than 70,000 streams per day. The service, known as SkyMobile TV, is the result of a partnership with British broadcaster BSkyB formed in November. Retail sails, according to Vodofone, are largely driving adoption. More details can be found here.

After Microsoft acquired video game advertising company Massive late last month, the concept of placing ads in video games seems to have gotten more attention from the media and investment community. We’ve blogged at length about video game advertising and its targeting and contextual advertising possibilities. And Microsoft recently told us about its objective to integrate ads into Xbox Live games using its newly launched adCenter SEM platform.

Paid Content reports that video game advertising firm Double Fusion just received $5.02 million in funding from JVP and Accel Partners. comScore also just released a study that examines gamers’ attitudes toward in-game advertising across different demographics as well as the sheer volume and attractiveness of this audience. Among other interesting stats in the report is that 23 percent of heavy gamers are aware of the contextual placement of brands or products within games.

As targeting and graphics improve, more companies receive funding, and as Microsoft pushes this medium into a mainstream phenomenon, this number will go up. More importantly, gaming will increasingly become a vehicle for targeted advertising. For now it is mostly display advertising and awareness for national brands, but it could reach a level where e-commerce and cost-per-action models are baked into games and where local advertising could play a part.

Gaming companies will be careful, however, not to over-commercialize the experience. It will be interesting to watch this play out, and we’ll keep a close eye on the the technologies and companies that could push the medium forward.

As we mentioned yesterday, Windows Live Local has launched its third version, a sizable improvement that deserves a closer look. We examine the product in this week’s Local Media Journal (published today), and below is part of that article with comments from Microsoft and some additional screenshots:

In its new release, Windows Live Local’s UI has improved a great deal with additional Ajax functionality that enables interactivity within the map interface. Windows and menus that previously took up valuable map real estate can now be collapsed at the click of a mouse. The user can also create new points on a map by right clicking on any point. An additional feature provides real-time traffic information (including flow and incident data) to which Microsoft gained access through its recent partnership with Traffic.com.

Source: Microsoft

WLL has also been integrated with Microsoft Outlook, where users can now create and e-mail maps and driving directions as they relate to scheduled appointments within their Outlook calendars. Similar integrations are expected for the future, as Live Local is designed to be tied into the myriad online products that orbit Microsoft's Live initiative, including Windows Live Mail, Windows Live for Mobile and Office Live.

One area in which this integration seems natural involves a new social media feature of WLL known as "Collections." This builds on the scratchpad feature in the previous version, which allows users to create personal notes that are appended to points on a map. Collections comes with more functionality to tag and share information with friends or the Internet at large regarding locations on a map or businesses in WLL's local search results.

Source: Microsoft

The social dimensions of this are a natural fit with Microsoft's blogging product, Windows Live Spaces, which will have the capability to link users to map locations and businesses. This could also represent the foundation for a social or community layer of content on top of its business listings — a strategy that is growing in popularity in the marketplace, and one on which Insider Pages, Judy's Book and Yelp have been built.

"Part of our overall Windows Live strategy is to integrate a range of services together — in this case around local search and mapping," says Bailey. "And we're making a very big bet on creating an immersive local search experience that will enable people to really get in and get a great feel for the local areas that they are interested in."

Microsoft today signed a deal with infoUSA to license its business listing database. This will bring 13.5 million U.S. businesses into MSN Local Search and Windows Live Local Search — a significant data boost that will complement the new feature set and usability enhancements of Windows Live Local announced yesterday (see previous post). Microsoft currently has about 13 million listings from Amacai, and the additional infoUSA data will be integrated over the next few months.

In this way Microsoft is covering all bases on the data front (a non-sexy yet vital backend component to any local search site) with an up-to-date listing database. Add to this the capability for businesses to add and update their own information, and the social media layer that will be built on top of listing data (not to mention the imagery, traffic data and mapping interface), and you have the makings for a very robust local search experience.