Despite some traction by sites like Yelp — OK, specifically Yelp — the hybrid IYP/rating-and-review segment remains something of a question mark in the industry. It remains to be seen whether such sites can attract a large number of frequent reviewers and users — and not just recent college grads and/or mothers. It also remains to be seen whether they can cross the chasm out of restaurants and bars into the gold mine of services traditionally mined by Yellow Pages.

Besides Yelp, other sites abound, including Cox’s Kudzu, Boorah, Loladex and Citysearch’s Insider Pages. But it is hard to get a handle on how well they are doing. MojoPages, a newer Yelp-like site, reports it has been making progress.

A year out of the gate, the San Diego-based site claims a solid base of 500,000 user reviews and 100,000 local advertisers across the U.S., mostly on the backs of partners including Superpages.com, Marchex, ServiceMagic and ServiceMaster. It also has coupon distribution with ValPak.

President Jon Carder, a 29-year-old vertical search pro who previously sold a mortgage-oriented venture to IdeaLab, says the site has been seeing steady growth. He acknowledges the comparisons to Yelp and others, but says MojoPages has been developing its own unique mix of features, including video reviews, e-mail notification for reviewed businesses, and an “ask friends” feature. It also has set its algorithms to bring up more relevant results.

A search on MojoPages for Carpet Cleaners in Sen Diego will get you mostly relevant results, he says. If you do a search for carpet cleaners in San Diego on Yelp, he says, “six of the 10 results aren’t even carpet cleaners.”

Local retailers are increasingly going beyond store locators to drive sales. The extensions to store locators include brand locators, coupons, menus, trip planners, and even guides to where Wi-Fi, nonsmoking and RV parking can be found.

A leading vendor in providing retailer solutions is Anaheim, California-based Where2GetIt. Roughly 280 companies and 550 brands are using Where2GetIt today, representing 700,000 brick-and-mortar locations. These include manufacturers, retailers, restaurants and agencies.

Brands that use Where2GetIt include such mainstays as Office Depot, Hancock Fabrics, Columbia Sportswear, Mountain Hardwear, Patagonia, Monster Cable, Mitsubishi Digital, Sony, ViewSonic, Outback Steakhouse, Red Lobster, Applebee’s, White Castle and Cracker Barrel. I ran across the firm looking for an Alpine car stereo, for instance.

The 25-person company got its start in 1997, when it won an assignment from Seiko to build online maps showing where its watches could be bought. Since then, Where2GetIt has extended its “locator” capabilities to a wide range of brand-specific products.

It provides a “turkey locator” for Popeyes Fried Chicken, a “running locator” for Reebok, a “pie locator” for Bakers Square and a “job locator” for recruitment firms. What ties them all together is a focus on helping consumers find brand-name products.

Where2GetIt CEO Manish Patel says the firm’s “Business Locator” continues to be the firm’s mainstay — typically one of the two most used features on a retail Web site. But the supplemental products have become increasingly important to the firm’s business model, which is based on licensing. For instance, adding coupons to Popeyes’ site doubled the chain’s Web site traffic, he says.

The firm’s other services tendered tend to be more strategic (i.e. future oriented). Firms such as Office Depot, for instance, use Where2GetIt’s mobile products. They include mobile locators, mobile browsers, SMS text messaging and toll-free 800 interactive voice response.

The firm is also heavily engaged in site analytics to drive sales conversion. “We try to figure out how far people will drive” using crowd sourcing and other techniques, says Patel.

Spas have always been a leading advertising category for city guides and other local sites. In many cases, they are virtually the only breakthrough for “services.” The rest may be dominated by restaurants and bars.

But the spas themselves have more upside to explore from online marketing. Gift certificates are especially hot. Spa Web site development and targeted e-mail management are compelling add-ons.

Working with them is SpaBoom, a two-and-a-half-year-old, 10-person company based in Albuquerque, N.M., that started with a gift certificate solution, winning its first 1,000 customers via direct mail and spa industry meetings. Since then, it has been providing the spa community with a growing range of services, such as a spa directory. It has also developed a partnership with Millennium, a leading spa software firm, and begun exploring local media and directory ties. It now has 2,000 spas on board.

SpaBoom VP Seth Gardenswartz notes that it is important to appreciate that the spa business has many elements. There are day spas, vacation spas, med spas and salon spas. And then there are subsegments, too. Med spas, for instance, include therapeutic, holistic and aromatherapy spas (or services).

Whatever their specialty, spas tend to have a strong local brand. What is unique about them is that treatments are often given as gifts, especially around the holidays. Roughly 30 percent of all spa revenues are gifts.

Many of the gift givers, especially men, don’t really want to go to the spa to buy a certificate, notes Gardenswartz. And spa treatments are often gifted from out of the market. Both of these characteristics bode well for e-commerce transactions.

The SpaBoom offer to spas is a $99 set-up fee, and then 5 percent of the gift certificate value. “We don’t pitch it to the spas as advertising,” says Gardenswartz. “We are delivering cash to them. There is a nice cash flow.”

Part of the gift certificate business is participation in “Spa Emergency,” a national directory of spa gift certificates that often drives last-minute sales after mail deadlines have passed. For instance, $2 million of the company’s $5.4 million gross in December came after Dec. 20. “It is a private label e-commerce presence,” says Gardenswartz.

While the company’s core business is gift certificates, it also provides free e-mail marketing tools as a bonus for signing up. E-mail is critical to keep in touch with customers, and to drive online sales for gift-giving occasions, Gardenswartz notes.

The company has also branched off into Web site development. Most spas could use an improved Web site, says Gardenswartz. SpaBoom’s Dynamic Spa Websites are provided for $39.95 per month and have a range of templates and full- or self-service options.

While SpaBoom still sees plenty of new opportunity in the spa space, it is beginning to investigate additional segments. Recently, it also began working with restaurants.

The balance between merchants and brands is being shifted by the increasingly common use of enhanced “product locators,” which adds store locations, maps — and frequently promotions such as coupons — to the mix, says Lauren Freedman, president of The E-Tailing Group in Chicago.

Freedman has just completed a round of shopper behavior research for Krillion. The results, not surprisingly, reinforce Krillion’s mission of providing brand information, and now actual store inventory, to local shoppers.

The research’s key finding is that shoppers want to “see everything” and will look at multiple sources on the Web to find it, says Freedman. They especially want to shop online and pick it up at the store. She finds that merchants benefit from store pickup because consumers invariably add more to their shopping cart once they’re inside the location. On average, for instance, Circuit City brings in an extra $154 from such “cross-channel” shoppers.

Cross-channel shopping is increasingly being enabled by big-box stores, she adds. Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Sears, RadioShack, CompUSA each launched in the past six months. Increasingly, it is also having an impact on Main Street stores as well. Fifteen of 75 retailers surveyed, or 20 percent, now have a product locator on their site. A similar number had store pickup. “It is growing really fast. No one had it 18 months ago,” she says.

Freedman’s research also found that ratings and reviews are increasingly important, especially as the “local component” of the shopping experience. Generally speaking, women have especially seized on reviews, while men are more tied to the search engines.

“What people really want to know is the service element,” says Freedman. Besides price and inventory, “it is the only differential” at the local retail level.

Do you really need to have raised millions of dollars to succeed in selling search solutions to small businesses? It is a question that I often ask myself.

Dan Hobin’s G5 Search Marketing in Bend, Ore., is profitable without having raised outside money. Hobin’s secret is initially focusing the five-year old, 17-person company on a specific vertical category: self-storage

Hobin’s brother is in the self-storage business in Southern California. Consequently, Hobin, a veteran of numerous dot-com start-ups such as CyberSource and Beyond.com, knew enough about their needs to try to transition their large marketing budgets to search. These companies typically take out full-page ads in Yellow Pages, and spend $1,500 to $2,000 per month on the Yellow Pages programs, he says.

G5’s search solutions typically run $300 to $500 per month. The money provides a full range of search engine optimization and search engine marketing programs, trackable coupons, dedicated call tracking via VoiceStar, and graphically rich reporting tools. The combination of SEM and SEO is critical, says Hobin. Other companies have focused too much on SEM and miss entire groups of customers.

Currently, G5 serves 30 self-storage companies with over 600 locations. These companies recognize that search is far cheaper than Yellow Pages, says Hobin.  With G5, Hobin estimates that they’re spending $5 to $20 per lead, or $30 to $50 per self storage rental. With Yellow Pages, Hobin estimates it is $150 to $200 per lead, or $300 to $400 per rental. Yellow Pages shouldn’t be abandoned, but other kinds of marketing should be added, he believes.

A typical client profile shows that search efforts lead mostly to phone calls. Sixty percent of users make a call, 20 percent want to use a coupon, and 10 percent seek a price quote.G5 provides search solutions on a wide range of services. But most of the action is with “the Big 4,” Hobin notes: Google, Yahoo!, AOL and MSN. The IYPs and classified service providers, meanwhile, are all described as “second tier.” “If you are an IYP, the only way you get traffic is if you are listed on Google.”

G5 is also doing some advertising on Facebook. It is a good way to reach college students, who tend to be very big users of storage facilities. But it is also very seasonal, based mostly on school semesters. Texting quotes on demand is also popular with college students.

Currently, G5 is adding a set of new verticals to its initial focus on self-storage. The criteria are that categories are dominated by companies with multiple locations — ideally 20 or more. It has already added a focus on apartments. Assisted-living facilities will be next. “The key is they have a high lifetime value, and that we can manage their transition” to online, he says.

Local.com, which has previously relied on third-party sales, is going direct in a big way. The company has outsourced contracts for 50 salespeople, up from 10. “We plan to ramp sales staff to several hundred this year,” says CEO Heath Clarke in an earnings-related announcement, which noted the sales effort is the company’s “most important project.”

Clarke said the sales effort, along with other initiatives, should move the company into the black “no later than 4Q 2008.” Revenues for the fourth quarter were $5.9 million, and $21.5 million for the year — a 51 percent increase over $14.2 million for 2006. But the company suffered a net loss of $18.2 million.

Among the company’s major initiatives is a strategic partnership with IAC’s Citysearch, which calls for it to display Citysearch business profile data, including its reviews, ratings, business coupons and photos.

One of the many reasons the Internet has bloomed in the U.S. is that the administration, under the leadership of Ira Magaziner, former head of U.S. Internet policy, allowed the World Wide Web to grow without putting unnecessary restrictions on it. At a Kelsey Group conference on Interactive Newspapers in 1996, Esther Dyson, then the chairwoman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, spoke to our audience about the EFF defending consumer rights in the digital world. Some countries, concerned about what people might say or do on the Net, did put rules and regulations in place and they inhibited its growth.

Yesterday, the FTC issued a very unsurprising decision allowing Google’s proposed merger with DoubleClick. More importantly, the FTC also stepped into the issue of privacy by taking a tentative step regarding behavioral advertising (the tracking of what a user does online — from searches, to Web pages visited, to content viewed). I believe that the companion announcement is more important than the Google/DoubleClick decision. The FTC recognized that behavioral advertising does provide real “benefits to consumers in the form of free content and personalized advertising.”

Behavioral advertising, in theory, is good for consumers and good for advertisers, especially as more advertising moves online. The jury is still out on consumer acceptance of even the most customized advertising on our mobile phones. However, as the use of video increases on the Internet, personalized advertising becomes very attractive, especially if it offers a coupon or other mechanism to lower prices. The trade-off is that some computer in a cloud somewhere knows all about me because of what I do on the Internet.

In my view, I should be able to direct advertising in a way that is acceptable to me. This is a difficult challenge, but my wish is that in 2008 we make substantial progress in addressing privacy principles. The FTC’s voluntary privacy guidelines would require consumers to have the ability to choose whether they want their information collected. Consumers could also request reasonable security for that data and require express consent before the information can be used in a way that is different from what a company promises when it collects data.

People are understandably concerned about pornography, spam and how it interacts with the First Amendment. I believe privacy, or the lack of it, is the one issue that could derail future Internet growth. So the second part of my wish is that companies abide by the voluntary privacy guidelines proposed by the FTC. Every organization involved in local media should endorse this concept.

  BooRah, the Bay Area restaurant review site, has raised some seed funding from Storm Ventures and other investors (amount undisclosed) and plans to use the money to grow beyond its roots as a tech vendor for alternative newsweeklies. The “new” BooRah will continue to work with alternative newsweeklies, but it intends to create a more robust platform so that it can also share content with Internet Yellow Pages, newspapers and city guides.

CEO Eric Moyer says the four-person company has been limited by its previous focus, and is now undergoing a makeover to aggregate more content from across the Web, while adding a level of user-friendliness. “We’re building a tech platform from user-generated content,” he says.

BooRah’s five-star rating system, for instance, will still be available to its 12 existing affiliates. But otherwise, the ratings are being simplified to “Boo” or “Rah” votes. And users don’t need to directly vote, either. The site’s computers will semantically review user comments to sense whether users are positive or negative about a place. In doing so, BooRah begins to resemble other “semantic” review companies, such as Marchex’s OpenList and UrbanSpoon. But Moyer says it will be different.

“I do not believe that either OpenList or UrbanSpoon generate ‘votes’ by analyzing the text of reviews. This is unique to BooRah,” he says. “I believe their ‘votes’ are just user clicks on the voting buttons, and are entirely separate from any reviews they display. BooRah combines both elements (voting ‘clicks’ and analyzed reviews text) into a single overall score.”

The home page is also being reworked and will now feature contextual ads from the likes of ValPak.com and Restaurant.com, in addition to the latest reviews. “The ValPak and Restaurant.com deals and ad units provide examples of how we combine ‘offers,’ reviews content, and ratings in a single ad unit to generate better conversions from local business sponsored listings and ads,” says Moyer.

Google is simultaneously the most open and most shut business I can think of. On one hand, it is amazingly transparent. You walk around the two campuses in Mountain View and you can walk right by Larry and Sergey’s offices. During my short time there, I even spied CEO Eric Schmidt casually ambling by with a group of Japanese businessmen.

It also takes real pains to understand its partners, and to help their businesses. What’s the word I am thinking of? It is thoughtful. And it keeps the checks coming.

On the other hand … it hardly ever says anything. Not in public, or in private. Like magicians, its executives mostly want to show off demos of its increasingly large roster of products. And while it pays its partners nicely, and on time — it is even a life saver for many companies — who knows what the payment formulas really consist of? Basically, it doesn’t think it is any of our business.

So it was interesting to fly out to the Google-plex to speak at the company’s first Local Symposium, with 120 invited partners and would-be partners. The symposium was not necessarily a unique event — apparently, Google is going right down the list of business segments, doing one symposium after another. But it was unique to us Local Onliners.

Craig Newmark gave the keynote. Steve Johnson from Outside.in was on stage, too. As was Josh Walker from CityVoter, Court Cunningham from Yodle and Zorik Gordon from Reach Local. And then there was our local blogger panel, and a group of local businesses that use Google products.

None of this was Google-centric. It was local-centric. We were welcome – and even encouraged — to talk about whatever we wanted to. Even the Yahoo! Newspaper consortium.

Google’s own efforts at the symposium were to go over its rules and best practices, and to discuss some of its ongoing efforts with call reporting, mobile ads, printable coupons and Web site analytics. It was not very revealing, but it was pretty helpful.

Some highlights:

General Improvements: Simple signup and pricing, snapshot “proofs” of ads, and minimal campaign management. “We want to drive customers through the door.”

Call Reporting: Google is providing extensive call reporting to small-business advertisers for both online and offline ad formats (including radio and print). The reporting includes frequency, duration and originating location, and advertisers can use either local or toll-free numbers.

Mobile Ads: Google is rolling out AdSense for Mobile, including syndicated search ads on search partner results. The service carries the same charges as online clicks.

Google Maps for Mobile: In addition to putting maps on the phone, Google is enhancing them with traffic reports and satellite views.

Printable Coupons: Remember when Jeff Jarvis said Google’s entry into coupons was the true death knell for newspapers? That may or may not be true. But Google is pushing a coupon capability via its local business center. A coupons link appears on local listings and on Google maps search results. They can also be searched at the local level.

Web Site Analytics: Google intends to expand the use of its free analytics tool for small businesses. The analytics, formerly Urchin Software, is embedded directly in AdWords. Advertisers that take advantage of the tools tend to spend more as a result. It has proved especially powerful for geotargeting.

Interactive Local Media: 07 is ready to roll Nov. 28-30 in L.A. That’s next Wednesday through Friday!

The show, which is being produced in partnership with SES Local, has attendees from all over the world. One exec told me he is coming on Wednesday, taking the red eye to New York that night due to a prior commitment, and flying back on Thursday night for the final day.

Attendance-wise, we have the biggest sign-up list for a Kelsey event since the mid-1990s. Almost everyone that we have slotted will actually be there. While the agenda has been tight for some time, with 70-plus speakers, here are some last minute adds:

• Christophe Maire, a cofounder of Nokia’s Location-Based Experience Development, is set for Day 3. HOT DISCUSSION TOPIC: Nokia’s $8.1 Billion purchase of NavTeq.

• Laurel Gilbert, from Microsoft’s Atlas division, is speaking on our localizing national advertising panel. HOT DISCUSSION TOPIC: How Microsoft will use Aquantative to transform itself into a true Web advertising giant.

• Doug Kilponen from MerchantCircle is speaking on the localized shopping panel. MerchantCircle just received a $10 million cash infusion from IAC and others. HOT DISCUSSION TOPIC: Best Practices for Signing up Small Businesses.

• Claudia Poepperl from mobilePeople is set to provide a demo of the London-based company’s cutting-edge social mobile technology.

We are also expecting a drop-in from a top executive of a company that’s been in the news, but we can’t say much more about it. And speaking of news, there are lots of interesting news announcements that will drop around the show as well. So, will we see you in L.A.? Here is the registration page.