Here are a handful of news items to round out the week:

—Google is moving further down the social search path by allowing users to tag video content with comments, ratings and labels. Search Engine Watch explains.

—Microsoft has come out with its "answer" to Yahoo! Answers and Google Answers, called Microsoft's Windows Live QnA. Like the others, this could be a valuable local search resource for users to ask specific questions — a kind of social media way of getting us closer to the elusive concept of natural language search. Search Engine Journal has more.

—In the recent TKG Advisory Targeting Users: Application Level Innovation in Mobile Local Search, the uptake of some mobile local search platforms was seen as being dependent on (among many other factors) the widespread adoption of hardware that is more conducive to data input and mapping, i.e., smartphones. Gartner recently predicted rapid expansion in the smartphone market, and Palm reported strong top-line growth and projected continued growth in Treo sales.

—The Wall Street Journal reports (via Paid Content) that Comcast has acquired thePlatform. It will use this to build a more robust online portal that will include free and paid video-on-demand content.

—Om Malik poses the question, Will the growth in Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi services help location-based services get off the ground?

—Wired magazine has an interesting piece on the challenge facing MySpace in its tightrope act of monetizing massive amounts of traffic, without driving away that very traffic (consisting largely of a fickle demographic, as we and others have pointed out in the past). With MySpace, Fox Interactive Media has everything to lose but also a great deal to gain. More of our past commentary on this challenge here, here and here.

—ClickZ News points to a Borrell report that projects online real estate spending will grow from $2 billion this year (17.7 percent of all real estate ad spending) to $3 billion by 2010 (32.1 percent of real estate ad spending).

—Lastly, John Dvorak tells us why Microsoft won’t buy Yahoo!.

The Yellow Pages Group held a CMR summit in Toronto last week. According to the ADM Flash, "During the last three years, Yellow Pages Group has been the fastest growing publisher in the world, has the highest EBITDA, highest IYP growth, highest Internet reach and penetration and highest advertiser penetration at 41%. Half of the advertisers also buy online products. YPG has the highest customer renewal rates."

What has made YPG such an industry stalwart? Certainly part of it is the company’s very strong market position reinforced by its trademarked walking fingers logo and ownership of the words Yellow Pages. Its 90 percent market share (achieved in part through its purchase of the former SuperPages Canada business) allows it economies of scale that few other YP companies enjoy these days.

My colleague Matt Booth (vice president of TKG and program director for Interactive Local Media) paid a visit to YPG this week and verified its strong position. Matt found a marketing and sales team that had an unusually firm grasp of the Internet. "These are talented people and they really get it," Matt told me. The ADM Flash article reinforced this notion by saying that YPG "has found that advertisers who embrace online are strong prospects to add to their print program."

Ever since I've been involved with the electronic delivery of information that was previously available only in print, I have heard the concern about cannibalization of the print product. The argument has been that, yes, there may be some loss of business, but isn't it better that you're the one who is taking your company's market share rather than letting someone else do it?

YPG is giving companies in any media a strong reason to push their online business … it could lead to greater sales of the traditional media. This is a subject we will be exploring at Directory Driven Commerce 2006, September 18-20, in Los Angeles. Among our speakers will be Jean-Pascal Lion, who has recently had his responsibilities increased from marketing VP for online products to include print as well. Also, Genevieve LeBrun, who has been named vice president-marketing for the newly acquired Trader publications.

As the owner of a small business, I have always been interested in the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year competition. Therefore, I was pleased to read that Perry Evans, CEO of Local Matters, was honored by E&Y with the Entrepreneur of the Year award in the software category.

Everyone who has ever been considered for this award knows full well that winning it requires surrounding yourself with an outstanding team, and Local Matters is no exception. However, Evans has very impressive credentials. He had been CEO of Webb Interactive, a software development company; a founder and chairman of Jabber, an XML-based messaging company; founder and president of MapQuest Publishing Group; and founder of netIgnite.

Local Matters provides software and media services to allow Yellow Pages publishers and 411 service providers "to expand their traditional service offerings and capitalize on emerging opportunities in the local search market."

Google’s long-awaited online payment system launched today, which, among other things, will enable better tracking by closing the loop on search and online conversions. There is obviously a lot more to it, which we’ll get the chance to explore later. In the meantime, here is coverage from the San Jose Mercury News, The New York Times and Search Engine Journal.

Mobile coupon engine Cellfire launched yesterday for Cingular users. The tracking and marketing benefits that online and mobile coupons offer will make this a big area of development in the local space over the next year. As more third-party software developers build platforms, more carriers sign on and more merchants participate, it could become a powerful medium. The ball is starting to roll, thanks to the efforts of companies like Cellfire and ZiXXo. This is only the beginning. More from TechCrunch.

Some notable happenings from around the local search and media worlds this week:

—MapQuest launched the beta version of a new tool today that helps road-trippers plan routes. It includes some new Ajax functionality to drag and drop points on a map and recalculate directions accordingly. Users can also search for gas stations, hotels, restaurants, ATMs and other places along their travel routes.

—Search Engine Journal reports that click-to-call technology provider eStara has partnered with a new click-to-call service from AzoogleAds. eStara will enable AzoogleAds to provide its advertisers with the ability to bid on leads for targeted customers. AzoogleAds will offer the service to the 14,000 companies in its network of vertical sites that include mortgage, payday loans, debt consolidation and online education.

—And elsewhere in the click-to-call world, Jambo announced last week that it will run pay-per-call ads on remnant radio inventory. It will partner with Bid4Spots.com, which aggregates airtime from 2,000 radio stations and distributes it to advertisers and ad networks.

—From the video game advertising department, RealNetworks has announced it will integrate streaming ads in free online video games.

—paidContent.org reports on online and mobile content usage trends among 16- to 24-year-olds for World Cup video feeds.

—The New York Times ran a piece over the weekend that was an overarching and comparative look at online and offline media. Times tech reporter Bob Tedeschi also wrote earlier in the week about growing online advertising numbers, particularly surrounding classified verticals such as jobs, autos and real estate. Meanwhile, CBSnews.com provides yet another article on the growing online shift in classifieds.

—SEW profiles two new online travel sites.

—GigaOm contributor Robert Young has an interesting column on Google’s missed opportunity to purchase MySpace.

—Elsewhere in Om, USC Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review picks the prolific blogger’s brain about the state and dynamics of the blogosphere, and how it relates to (and affects) the world of journalism.

—eWeek speculates on the reasons behind, and the possible outcomes of, Google’s Gbuy payment system.

—A new study by the Nielsen/Norman Group confirms the somewhat logical assumption that most Internet users avoid viewing banner ads. It also found that text advertising is read more often than display ads.

—And lastly, eMarketer provides some interesting numbers on the growth in local online advertising in its report, Local Online Advertising: Measuring the Potential. A summary is here, and we’ll analyze these numbers further in the near future.

The roll-up of mom-and-pop Spanish-language directory publishers continues. Hispanic Yellow Pages of America, a portfolio company of Hispania Capital Partners of Chicago, has acquired the Milwaukee Hispanic Yellow Pages and Resource Guide. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Here is the announcement.

HYPA is one of several investor-backed companies acquiring locally owned Spanish-language directories in the hope of building a national network. HYPA’s main competitors are Cobalt Publishing of Louisville, Kentucky, and HYP Network, which is backed by the Boston-based private equity firm ABRY Partners.

Univision Communications, the largest Spanish language media company in the U.S. was sold to a group of private equity players for $12.3B. This comes after intense bidding by Grupo Televisa — a large media company in Mexico. Univision is the fifth most watched network in the U.S. and delivers the highly desirable and often elusive 18- to 24-year-old market segment. You can say the Hispanic advertising market is certainly coming of age.

All well and good, but last year The Kelsey Group conducted a client survey and research and analysis about the Hispanic market could not have scored lower in terms of client interest. At recent TKG conferences, we have offered sessions focused on the Hispanic market opportunity in the U.S. and around the world — and there were few takers.

The buyers of Univision — Texas Pacific Group, Thomas H. Lee Partners, Madison Dearborn Partners and Providence Equity Partners — should ring a familiar tune with the Yellow Pages industry. Many of these private equity players have had hugely successful plays in the Yellow Pages industry in recent years.

If at coming TKG conferences we offer additional sessions on the opportunities for selling directional advertising to the Hispanic market, perhaps we'll now be able to fill a room. After all, the private equity market has now placed its seal of approval on the market. Sound familiar?

Before leaving the Bay Area this week to go to Atlanta and Seattle, I needed to make a hotel reservation in Seattle. It was suggested I try the Westin Seattle, so I went to the hotel’s Web site — it’s part of the Starwood family. Once there, it offered me a click-to-call button and instead of ignoring it — which is what I have traditionally done — I clicked on it. I typed in my phone number and almost instantly I received a call on my office line from reservations at the Westin.

Very impressive user experience — importantly for Westin because: 1. I didn’t have to fill out forms and while doing so get a telephone call at which point I would forget about the form and have to start the process all over again and who knows I could have ended up on the site for the W Hotel and 2. Within minutes I had my reservation secured for a room — get this — with an exercise bike already in it. Doubt I would have upgraded my room if all I had was a form to fill out. Cool stuff.

The New York Times' John Markoff has an interesting write-up today on a location-based service gaining traction in Japan, based on the technology of U.S.-based GeoVector. Achieving a similar end as mobile visual search, it uses a combination GPS, Web, and an electronic compass to help users find locations and businesses.

From the article:

"Mr. Matsunuma showed how it works on a Shinjuku street. He selected "lodgings" on the screen. Then he pointed his phone toward a cluster of tall buildings. A list of hotels in that area popped up, with distances. He chose the closest one, about a quarter-mile away. An arrow appeared to show him the way, and in the upper left corner the number of meters ticked down as he got closer. Another click, and he could see a map showing both his and the hotel’s locations."

The product has been able to thrive in the Japanese market because of dense urban areas, and more importantly a GPS mandate in mobile devices that isn't yet present in the U.S. As we mentioned in the recent Advisory Targeting Users: Application Level Innovation in Mobile Local Search, the lack of GPS ubiquity is currently the biggest barrier to adoption of location-based services and more advanced mobile local search applications in the U.S.

CDMA carriers including Sprint Nextel will have wide-scale GPS integration in the first half of 2007, and we should see the door swing wide open for these types of products at that point (although many other cultural and logistical factors will ultimately weigh in on adoption rates).

More significant are the possibilities to infuse performance based advertising. The beauty of this product is that it sidesteps one of the fears of location-based services — privacy concerns and spam advertising based on targeting precise location. This product is more active in its search capabilities so it ensures targeted advertising based only on information actively sought. Once it is combined with other performance-based advertising tools — such as click-to-call (push-to-talk) — it could be a powerful marketing vehicle and a well-received consumer product.

As Markoff's subject pointed out after finding his location using the product:

"There it is … Now, I just wish this screen would let me make reservations as well."