Among the most challenging but potentially lucrative verticals is “Legal.” Long dominated by legal listings leaders such as Martindale Hubbell and Reuters Thomson, legal has opened up a little with the rise of social media and social media driven review sites such as Avvo.
Taking another approach is Chicago-based Total Attorneys. The company, founded in 2002, …

Website Pros is taking the name of Web.com, a company it merged with in late September 2007. Company officials say the name change will occur by mid-2008. They note that it reflects the company’s increasingly broad mission, and is easy to remember.
The small-business specialist, which was founded in 1995 and is publicly owned, provides a …

Getting down to the final wire…. we think the Local ‘07 program in Santa Clara next Tuesday and Wednesday is looking really good.
Piper Jaffray's Safa Rashtchy is the latest big add. Safa will be talking about PJ's new report, The User Revolution, and we think he complements VSS' Nick Veronis, who is talking about local …

A new compact between Monster and Adicio, a classified vendor that previously insisted on newspapers’ “independence” from Internet verticals, seems likely to evolve the world of classifieds even faster.
The deal was unexpected  Monster has recently grabbed the key accounts for Freedom Interactive (The Orange County Register) and The New York Times Co. (The NY …

Eric Grilly, president of MediaNews Group Interactive and a major driver of the Yahoo! consortium for HotJobs, has left his position to take a new job as head of Philly.com, the Web site for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News  and incidentally a Monster affiliate.
As a leader of the newspaper consortium, Grilly …

Outside.in, the place-blogging site that collects everything that appears on the Web in a geographical context  blogs, traditional media, individual contributions  has won $900,000 of funding from a number of high-profile investors, including Esther Dyson, Marc Andresson, John Seely Brown and Union Square Ventures (formerly FlatIron Partners). It is nice to see these …

Newspapers can’t expect to beat Yellow Pages or Google in broad local advertiser categories, but they can focus on niche areas and invest in human editors and SEO to bring out their real strengths in the local marketplace, according to Jay Small, who is E.W. Scripps Newspapers’ director of online audience and operations. Small was …

The “Internet portal,” as the Daily Camera calls it, enables users to access customized community news, dished up via RSS feeds, as well as publish their own news. “You'll be able to send in news from your clubs and organizations, schools, youth sports teams, softball leagues or even a photo of your child's first haircut,” …

Tuesday’s article in the New York Times about Google’s million dollar employee incentives inspired Shawn Wiora, a former Verizon Information Services manager and Yellow Pages consultant, to send me an e-mail asking what might happen if directory publishers followed suit and began offering more creative incentives for their people.
The article, Wiora said, made …