Chevrolet hasn’t always been seen as the most environmentally friendly company. But it hopes to rectify the situation with a helpful “gas-friendly to gas-free” advertising insert in the print edition of Wired Magazine. The insert is printed “using 35% post-consumer waste, utilizing 100% hydroelectricity, eliminating 100,000 pounds of greenhouse gases.”
The insert touts five things Chevy is …

After two years in operation, CitySquares hasn’t necessarily broken out of the box. But Beantown’s neighborhood-centric directory of local businesses has got about $1 million in venture funding; almost 400 advertisers paying roughly $600 a year, mostly for “deluxe” business profiles; and an 88 percent renewal rate.
In mid-October, CitySquares is going to re-launch using new neighborhood …

For those who weren’t able to attend DDC last week, you can see the recap of coverage here on the blog. There is also my quick take on one of the show’s main themes on the YPA’s Local Search Guide reproduced below and a longer recap on Search Engine Watch earlier this week.
Of Yellow Pages, …

With all the hype around local social search sites, particularly Yelp, Chowhound has largely flown under the radar, starting as a bubble-era jaunt for food enthusiasts to share tips on little-known gems throughout San Francisco.
Sound familiar? Yelp started in late 2004 to do basically the same thing and is now the darling of the local …

Today I attended the R.H. Donnelley “analyst workshop” in Denver. Much ground was covered, so we’ll offer a few quick takeaways here and follow up with more detail in an upcoming TKR Advisory.
One key objective of the meeting appeared to be for RHD’s leadership team to introduce its newest asset, Jake Winebaum, to the investor …

I don’t know if I like DEMO’s whole concept of “all demos, all the time” … and that companies pay to be on the podium — apparently, $18,500 for three tickets and six minutes, per Jason Calacanis, who runs the competitive show, TechCrunch40. Jason makes the salient point that only funded companies can afford …

R.H. Donnelley today announced the integration of user ratings and reviews to its flagship IYP, DexKnows. Although this is the official launch, reviews have been live on the site for a few weeks now.
The integration, metrics and lessons learned in the first few weeks, were discussed in depth by RHD head of competitive strategies and …

Don’t shoot me, but I’ve got to say: “search” is just the end result. The essential building block is “cataloging.”
To this end, David Weinberger (The Cluetrain Manifesto), has published “Everything is Miscellaneous.” It is the best book I’ve read about how we find, classify and prioritize information about information (meta data).
The book takes readers from …

It’s sometimes useful to track search terms as an indication of demand and popularity of products, both online and off, as Chris Smith has done in his column referenced yesterday by John Kelsey.
In the case of Yellow Pages, however, I don’t think this method lands you in an accurate measure of real world metrics. Smith …

At first, there was no news coverage for the 15,000 residents of a central coastal New Hampshire area including the little villages of Deerfield, Candia, Northwoods and Nottingham. Manchester’s Union Leader, a family-owned paper that is fairly notorious for its politically charged, NH primary coverage every four years, basically ignored the area.
But then three years …

Belated congratulations to our friend Sebastien Provencher and his Praized Media team for getting $1 million from Garage Ventures Technology Canada. That’s $1 million Canadian … better than greenbacks right now.
Here’s all the company will say about it, publicly or privately: “Praized is a social media company developing software that connects blogs, social networks, and …

Two articles. Two perspectives. Two headlines.
Yesterday, Chris Smith wrote in Search Engine Land the following headline, “Google Trends: Yellow Pages Will Be Toast in Four Years.” He went on to back up his thesis using statistics. “My gut feeling is that the Google Trends graph for searching for ‘Yellow Pages’ is likely representative of a …

Google and AOL teamed up to commission a survey (n=2394) from TNS Media Intelligence, released today, that shows favorable user and advertiser metrics for online video. A few high-level data points are:
– 75 percent of users watch more online video than they did one year ago, and 52 percent expect to watch more over the …

Last week’s DDC conference was a success on many fronts. In case you missed it, below is a recap of blog coverage from the show. Thanks to all who attended or contributed. Now it’s time to start gearing up for ILM ‘07 in November, which will be co-hosted for the first time by Search Engine …

My feeling about this week’s DDC2007 conference is that everyone was able to come away with what they wanted to hear. For instance, we heard that usage is declining, but Paul Gordon of Catalyst Paper said that demand for Yellow Pages paper is up 25 percent in the past few years primarily because of new books. …

Zillow has landed $30 million in new financing, which comes on top of the $57 million already raised. The new round values the 155-employee “Zestimate” provider at $350 million, according to reporting by Rebecca Buckman at The Wall Street Journal.
CFO Spencer Rascoff called to provide some color to a fairly complete profile I wrote after …

Yellow Pages branding has had a major shift in the past couple of years, with company after company downplaying the “Pages” part of their name, and highlighting their multi-channel capabilities, often via a generic, appealing sounding names such as Sensis, Idearc, etc.
Does that make a company named Yellow Book a dinosaur? Not according to Yellow …

The churn rates for low-end local businesses are incredibly high. Why is that? WebVisible CEO Kirsten Mangers told Directory Driven Commerce attendees the reason we don’t see high conversion rates for low-end advertisers is their Web sites “really suck.”  It is typical that they have “three-page, templated Web sites that they haven’t touched in three …

A session on online video this morning at the DDC conference explored some of the opportunities for directories to integrate video on their sites and video ad units in the toolbox of their sales reps.
The thought is that this can be a nice user retention tool — in line with users’ growing affinities toward …

Verticals are important to Yahoo! and others on a national basis, but they really aren’t the way to go at the local level because of the limited resources for local sales, says Warren Kay, managing director, strategic alliances, Yahoo! Search Marketing. Kay was keynoting Kelsey’s Directory Driven Commerce conference in Reston, VA.
“In an ideal world, …