The San Diego Union-Tribune and the upstart San Diego News Network are launching competing “Daily Deal” products, with Facebook and Twitter accompaniments, and will try to eat into the lead in the local market that has been assumed by Groupon (and Living Social and many others).
The SDUT launches its Groupon-like “Sign On San Diego Daily …

Citysearch has debuted “cityseries,” a new digital “best of” magazine for the iPad that allows users in key cities to quickly find “best” bars, shopping, spas, breakfast and other top categories.
The attractive online magazine, which will be promoted on other iPad sites, relies on Citysearch’s editorial staff and combines reviews with business profile information. Initial …

Citysearch announced today that it has shifted its ad model for small businesses, moving from the cost-per-click model that it pioneered several years ago to a new model that will drive consumers directly to their own Web sites. The new model provides advertisers with a complete range of SEO and marketing services across the CityGrid …

Zvents, the events lister, is reporting 35 percent year over year growth with over eight million unique visitors, largely due to its powering events for 285 local media brands, including  major newspapers and the NBC owned-and-operated TV stations.
CEO Ethan Stock cites Quantcast data showing Zvents Media Network as the 250th most used net on the …

Citysearch officially rolled out its CityGrid publisher network this week. The network moves Citysearch away from an exclusive focus on its individual sites (“Citysearch.com,” “Insiderpages.com,” “Urbanspoon”). Instead, it works on a distributed basis with partners (i.e., “SuperPages”) to marry local content and advertising.
In the short term, CityGrid represents the new face of Citysearch and the …

Center’d started its mission in June 2008 like most city guides, albeit one largely aimed at women and planning. But over time, the local space has changed. And the site itself has refocused to meet “the missing pieces” in local.
CEO Jennifer Dulski and CTO Chandu Thota, in a conversation with us, say they’d encountered  a …

Three years ago, BIA/Kelsey created the Marketplaces research program and conference because we saw that local advertising was quickly “verticalizing.” Indeed, money and talent have poured in for the new breed of vertical products that would take their place among existing vertical success stories, such as AutoTrader, Cars.com, Realtor.com and ServiceMagic.
The Marketplaces 2010 conference reveals …

New York Magazine, whose online effort is run by longtime MSNBC.com exec Michael Silberman, has emerged as one of the most ambitious city magazine efforts on the Web, competing directly against city guides and other local services. Yesterday, the site, which leverages a sales force of 100, announced a partnership with Clickable to power its …

Mapping has become less about radius of where you are and more about what people define as local, how far people are willing to travel and the importance of certain events or locations in their community. While the advertising paradigm has focused on ZIP codes/postal codes, consumers identify more with neighborhoods or specific areas of …

Neil Budde of DailyMe and Mike Orren of Pegasus News helped the ILM:09 audience understand what it takes to offer a truly customized news offering that is engaging and relevant.
One of the key takeaways both Orren and Budde discussed was the idea that not everything can or should be customized on the news site. …

In a wide-ranging interview this afternoon at ILM:09, ILM Program Director and conference chair Matt Booth tried several times to pin the Yelp COO, Geoff Donaker to the mat. But the unflappable and diplomatic Donaker just wasn’t going to go there.
Donaker spoke with surprising humility about Yelp’s phenomenal growth, from around 14-15 million uniques in …

The New York Times weighs in today on whether hyperlocal sites will fill the local coverage gap left by shrunken or collapsed newspapers — never mind that newspapers themselves have only recently rediscovered neighborhood-level news themselves. Almost of their attention has been on broader, metro-wide coverage.
We’re delighted to be included in The Times’ piece. Our …

The San Diego News Network seemed like a model for local news development but now its future is less clear. Launched last week after nearly a year of development, the network was built to provide compelling local content to the area’s broadcasters, cable news networks and local papers. At the same time, its own site …

MySpace and Citysearch today confirmed the launch of MySpace Local, a new local city guide using functionality and feeds from Citysearch, including its taxonomy of categorization, geography structure, search functionality and content. A beta version of the site launches this week, with a general U.S. launch next month. It will be available on the Web …

Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti, in a keynote at Marketplaces 2009 in Los Angeles, stressed that there are four things local sites need to focus on: being “more local,” “mobile,” “social” and “balanced.” “Local is really an evolution,” he said. “Now the evolution is transforming the marketplace from cities down to neighborhoods.” Accordingly, Citysearch has “rearchitected” …

AOL Yellow Pages has greatly benefited from search engine optimization, with 50 percent of its traffic coming from SEO, according to Chris Spanos, GM, local search, who was speaking today at Kelsey’s Marketplaces conference in Los Angeles. “We have a very healthy Yellow Pages business,” said Spanos, who called it “the No. 1 independent Yellow …

At the end of the second day of Marketplaces 2009, my colleague Matt Booth made a statement and then asked a follow-up question. He said, “most of what I’ve been hearing from the podium is optimistic. Don’t people realize that this is a challenging business environment? Is this optimism my imagination, or is it real?” …

Cox’s Kudzu, a local service rating and review directory, announced last week that it has implemented Facebook Connect. Users can now share their Kudzu reviews with friends by signing in via their Facebook account. Previously registered Kudzu users can also connect their Kudzu and Facebook profiles.
Kudzu head Tom Bates told us the site continues to …

Local.com, the public company that started life as Interchange Corp., observed its 10th anniversary last week, complete with a red balloon-festooned party at its headquarters in Irvine, California, and an upgrade of its three-year-old, local ad distribution agreement with Idearc’s Superpages.com.
There are, of course, a lot of pieces to Local.com, which has evolved right along …

Five-year-old Yelp has been something of a phenomenon, and is a preferred rating and review directory for millions of people online and mobile in 24 cities. In December, comScore pegged its traffic at 7 million visitors, up from 2.8 million a year before. It also has gathered a library of 5 million reviews, which are …