Online real estate has gone through its “classical” period, from 1995 to 2000, and its “dark ages,” from 2001 to 2005, but is now in the midst of its “renaissance” due to “data enlightenment” and “consumer driven industrial change,” per Spencer Rascoff, Zillow's CFO and VP of marketing.
Speaking at Kelsey's ILM conference in Philadelphia, Rascoff …

Google's head of SME product development, Dan Rubinstein, speaking at The Kelsey Group's ILM event in Philadelphia, said the company is going to meet SMEs halfway to get them to actively market themselves on the Internet. Google is developing several new products specifically with SMEs in mind (and may have quietly launched them).
First, it is …

IAC/InterActiveCorp Chairman and CEO Barry Diller announced yesterday at a Reuters Media Summit that Ask.com will launch a new local search destination Dec. 4, called AskCity.
The key here is that the new local search play will be the glue that brings together many of the local vertical destinations in IAC’s stable, including Citysearch, Ticketmaster and …

Interactive advertising platform provider WebVisible has produced a report with the help of Nielsen/NetRatings that dives into Internet usage patterns for local merchant search. The report, titled “I searched, I clicked, I contacted  I Transacted: Measuring a Website's Ability to Drive Offline Conversion For Small Business Advertisers,” takes the specific angle of looking at …

Monster has fallen off its leadership perch, hit hard by CareerBuilder's heavy media spend and its extremely effective bundling of print/online ads. But by most counts, it is still fairly equal with CareerBuilder. It is certainly well ahead of Yahoo! Hot Jobs, which made its own splash last week by teaming with 176 newspapers.
Monster has …

Exactly what Rob Curley has been working on since joining The Washington Post Co. in September has been a matter of curiosity for people who've watched his thoughtful, transformative influence on interactive newspaper sites.
A podcast interview with Marketwatch's Frank Barnako makes it clear: Curley is working on “local, local, local” … and video too. None …

Bob Smith was the founder of AOL's Digital City, the first nationwide city guide service. Given that ILM is this week in Philadelphia and roughly 10 years have passed since the local Internet city sites started, I thought it would be interesting to get Smith's view on the past, present and future landscape. He will …

Several execs involved in CareerSite wrote into my personal site to weigh in on CareerSite's demise, its apparent neglect by the newspaper owners of PowerOne Media, and what it all might mean as Yahoo! tries to work with most of the same owners to rival Monster and CareerBuilder. They disagreed on several details. But they …

Vertical sites carved out from broader Yellow Pages categories are one of those things that make tons of sense  although the only surefire winners at this point seem to be the lawyer sites. What most of these sites have in common is the passionate interest of their founders. The business hypothesis is these categories …

AskTheLocal.com is a new “shopping search engine” recently launched in the U.K. Started by husband-and-wife team Philip and Paula Abrahamson, along with Philip’s brother Peter, AskTheLocal is similar in concept to ShopLocal in the U.S. (and to a lesser degree, other local shopping services).
The goal of these “Web-to-store” services is to drive customers doing Web-based …

To all of our U.S. readers, Happy Thanksgiving.
Our offices will be open on Friday but blog posting will be light as we gear up for our ILM ‘06 conference next week. Hope to see you in Philadelphia.

Today I had the chance to chat with Dan Rubinstein, head of SME product initiatives at Google. Among many other things in the rapidly shifting online local marketplace, we spoke about Google’s integration of click-to-call links in all its local business listings in Google Maps. Though this was announced on the Google Blog late last …

PowerOne Media, once a major vendor for small and medium-sized newspapers, has sold off its recruitment site, CareerSite, to three of its newspaper owners: MediaNews Group, Hearst and Lee Enterprises. The companies are expected to shut down CareerSite after an 18-month transition period, per rumor, and try to convert its remaining affiliates to the new …

Several stories today highlighted the decision by Canada’s Yellow Pages Group to increase its cash payout to unit holders in the Yellow Pages Income Trust.
This is widely read as a signal the company is moving full speed ahead as a trust, despite the recent proposal by the Canadian government to begin taxing trust distributions. The …

Last week I had the opportunity to attend Yellow Pages Today!, hosted by Peter Buxton and Jesper Simonsen in Vienna. The event, titled “Staying Ahead in Search,” was well conceived and executed. The hosts often made the point that directories are the oldest and most successful commercial search engines in the world. To demonstrate the …

Community networks, or “we networks,” are so poorly used that they tend to really be “me networks.” That's the gist of a new article in Annenberg's Online Journalism Review by Tom Grubisich, who revisits the subject a little more than a year after first looking into it.
The review of sites is a little scattershot. It …

The newspaper recruitment deal with Yahoo! first disclosed here in an Oct. 24 post has finally been confirmed, with some interesting twists. The deal puts in place a recruitment network of seven companies with 176 newspapers in 13 of the top 15 markets. Additional activities that go beyond the scope of recruitment are to be …

A favorite hobby of mine is reading the industry's tea leaves via the comings and goings of execs at different local companies. Today I am mulling over the departure of Insider Pages VP of Business Development Andrew Shotland and Merchant Circle Chairman and CEO Ben Smith's assumption of the top job at Borland's CodeGear  …

A dirty secret in the search wars is that you can basically “buy” enough traffic via Google AdWords and other sources to jump to the top of the usage charts. In a recent ZDNet column, Donna Bogatin implied that Citysearch has done exactly that. “Industry estimates of the cost to Citysearch for its 'partnership' with …

Return on investment for advertising is generally measured by local businesses in terms of phone calls generated, call duration and/or store visits. That isn't changing soon. But for local ad sellers and their advertisers, it remains a challenge to figure out where calls are coming from, the conversion rate of calls, and the viability of …