Interesting articles today in Media Post Online about how online media got the scoop on two stories before mainstream mass media. Yesterday a big news report in all media, including various online news alerts, was how CBS gave its new anchor, Katie Couric, instant weight loss by photoshopping a promotional picture.
So …

Yellow Book issued a press release yesterday citing new results from the Yellow Pages Market Reporter that showed it has a usage leadership position in Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Northern Virginia. The release also noted that Yellow Book has moved into the No. 2 spot in the Manhattan market. The latter is important because the …

The majority of U.S. Realtors prefer online real estate to newspapers, according to a new report from Peter Zollman’s Classified Intelligence. Fifty-one percent of real estate agents surveyed said they advertise online. Many likewise plan to cut back newspaper spending budgets with the contention that it is "no longer necessary."
The Newspaper Association of America reported …

A pair of reports released this week forecast IPTV subscriber and revenue growth for the next four years. Both Gartner and Research and Markets predict solid growth for IPTV by 2010.
The growth of IPTV will have implications for local advertising, as we’ve written about here, here and in a White Paper late last year. …

The San Jose Mercury News’ Dean Takahashi writes about using a MySpace profile as an advertising vehicle. Lots of businesses large and small have caught on to this concept and it will continue to grow. We wrote about the local implications of this here and here. This will be an exciting area to …

There has been substantial coverage today on the ad deal formed between eBay and Google. There is a lot to this deal, notably the pay-per-call advertising implications brought by the integration of eBay-owned Skype and Google’s extensive online ad network (the Google Talk IM and voice client will be integrated as well). We will have …

Yahoo! continues to integrate different forms of social media. This time the venue for the integration is Yahoo! Maps. Om Malik’s blog reports that Yahoo! Local today will bring in the Flickr photo-sharing service and Upcoming, a social online calendar service it bought last year. Users of Yahoo! Maps will be able to search …

Under the headline "Here's a $14 Billion Print Business That's Loving the Digital Revolution," Ad Age's Abbey Klaassen writes that the Yellow Pages industry "is finding traditional plus digital equals a whole greater than the sum of its parts." What is significant is that there was focus on the total increase in usage indicating …

Local search engine TrueLocal, which provides enhanced listing info for franchisees and brands, is trying out direct sales via a five-person call center. According to Founder Jake Bailes, the call center will target specific verticals, market-by-market (i.e., tire stores in Tampa).
Bailes concedes that setting up a local sales channel has turned out to be …

Last week we previewed local product and inventory search provider NearbyNow. The company has since announced a key partnership that will form the basis of its local search model going forward. Its partner is the Eastridge mall in San Jose, California. The company's "white-labeled" software platform will integrate inventory and product data within Eastridge's existing …

Search Engine Watch speculates that Yahoo!’s Panama search engine marketing platform could be here sooner than its recent delays have indicated.

We often cite U.S. Census Bureau data that report e-commerce accounts for only 2.5 percent of total U.S. retail spending (the rest is offline). Here is an indication that this is shifting. If this is true, it could have considerable effects on shopping engines, local search and business models built on leading offline purchases …

About 50 percent of small businesses in the U.S. now have "Web sites" — or pages, microsites, listings, pages or even e-mail addresses that they might call Web sites when asked in phone surveys. The number of real Web sites is probably much smaller.
In Germany, the number is apparently much higher — 72 percent — …

Last week, we wrote about local product and inventory search provider NearbyNow (an extended write-up of the company is in this week’s Local Media Journal and coming tomorrow on the blog). A key part of NearbyNow’s model will be to provide coupons along with inventory data for local retailers. A week before that, Google …

Yahoo! Local now relies on more than a dozen resellers, in addition to its own self-service center, says Yahoo! Local GM Paul Levine, who was speaking on a Small Business Commando Tele-Seminar with Dick Larkin and Kelsey's Matt Booth. "They help us reach advertisers that Yahoo! couldn't ordinarily reach," said Levine.
Among the resellers are …

The Yellow Pages Association just released the industry’s annual usage numbers. The good news is overall usage continues to grow for the industry and Internet Yellow Pages usage is increasing … the not so good news is continued decline in usage for the print product.
While usage for the print product has been …

The recent personnel changes at European Directories — the addition of Peter Darpo in the Netherlands, Kimberli Lewis in the Czech Republic, the exit of Lex Cohen and the addition of Cornel Riklin as CEO — signal a significant change in the organization.
The former Yellow Brick Road organization, now known as European Directories, …

Yesterday, I wrote about PremierGuide's innovative Microsites, which can act as searchable, full-featured alternative to Web sites. They're highly effective if you want to be found by a search engine, and also put all your expensively produced TV commercials, Yellow Pages display ads, etc., in once place. As I noted, PremierGuide joins EyeBallFarm …

In the online video space, video-sharing site YouTube has launched an advertising model that appears to be its first effort to monetize its explosive popularity (the site received 16 million unique U.S. visitors in July, according to comScore Media Metrix).
Known as participatory video ads, they will run on YouTube’s home page based on …

By some accounts, more than 50 percent of local businesses that advertise have Web sites. But they still need to be found by the search engines. That's the role that PremierGuide, a local search vendor that works with 250 newspapers, TV stations and geodomain sites, hopes to play with its new "Microsites."
The PremierGuide microsites, like …