The current distribution of the AT&T’s Real Yellow Pages produced by Dex (R.H. Donnelley) will no longer include the Chicago Metro Residential White Pages.

According to the release:

“Local residential listings are already included in the Chicago Neighborhood directories that we deliver in August, on DexKnows.com(TM) and on YELLOWPAGES.COM, so we felt it was better for consumers if we discontinued delivery of a standalone Chicago Metro Residential White Pages directory,” said David Kelly, director of marketing, Dex. “However, people who still wish to receive the Chicago Metro Residential White Pages can contact us and we will happily supply them with a complimentary copy.”

While this strategy has been in practice with Canada’s Yellow Pages Group in select major cities, this is the first such instance where a major U.S. publisher has opted not to deliver a residential White Pages edition while offering consumers and businesses the option of requesting a copy. With a high focus on the environmental impact of directories, this is an interesting move given no formal opt-in movement has been instituted in the Chicago market. It will be interesting to see if this is a leading trend with publishers as a self-imposed means of addressing public concern.

Update: It’s worth clarifying that R.H. Donnelley has not eliminated residential White Pages. It is eliminating (except by request) the stand-alone metro-wide residential White Pages book, while continuing to deliver business and residential listings via community directories. R.H. Donnelley publishes 13 such community books in the Chicago metro area and their combined coverage exactly matches the metro book, according to a company spokesperson. So while this approach seems like an opt-in plan, technically it is not, since an opt-in plan would give consumers the clear choice between receiving or not receiving residential listings.

Yellow Pages Group Canada has signed an agreement with Copernic, owners of Mamma.com, to supply local Canadian advertiser listings to the mamma.com search engine. According to the press release from Copernic, “The agreement means local search queries will be served YellowPages.ca listings in premium positions clearly identified as local listings.”

Mamma.com is a well established search site that simultaneously searches a variety of engines, directories, and deep content sites. Adding local listings in premium positions is a departure from its current strategy that features site aggregators in many of its local search results. 

With YellowPages.ca moving up to number 8 in the December 2007 Comscore rankings in Canada, this move is yet another traffic agreement that should continue to improve its position in overall traffic rankings.    

Closing remarks at the Warrillow Conference in Toronto this week confirmed major opportunities for business-to-business platforms in Canada.

Major Canadian national brands that target the 2.3 million small businesses in Canada plan on increasing their online media budgets in 2008.

E-mail had a planned increase of 54 percent, paid and organic search was up 47 percent, and spend toward banners was raised by 39 percent. The big losers of this survey were television and national newspapers, which saw decreases of 7 percent and 8 percent, respectively.

Because small-business owners are primarily consumers, social networks already blur the lines between personal and professional lives. It’s a question of whether these environments will provide the appropriate resources for small businesses to find vendors within the same walls that they post nutty pictures or play scrabble in.

Warrillow highlighted some interesting localized guerrilla-style tactics being implemented by major national brands targeting the small-business sector in Canada. None of the case studies included local search.

Currently, searching Canadian B2B suppliers on the major search engines is like wading through peanut butter. When it comes to local search for this market, the field is wide open. Most B2B directories are internationally based with limited brand awareness in Canada. The current strength of the Canadian dollar makes purchasing B2B advertising from international vendors very attractive. What is lacking is the utility of these internationally based services and the organic and paid search efforts behind them.

While the tactical details were not quite grasped, the general sense from the speakers and the attendees this week was that given more B2B platforms, be they social or local search, there would be budgets allocated toward them.

The numbers are looking very, very good for the Interactive Local Media:07 conference in L.A. Nov. 28-30. Internally, we think this one is a record breaker. Register and book the hotel while you can. The latter tends to sell out.

In recent weeks, we’ve been putting the final touches on the program. For instance, we’ve added Facebook’s Chamath Palihapitiya, who is VP of product marketing. Here’s a snippet about Chamath from Fast Company’s cover story this month:

“Palihapitiya, 31, is tall and whippet thin, with elegant manners and a ready smile. A former electrical engineer, born in Sri Lanka and raised in Canada, he ran AOL’s instant-message group, then jumped to the venture fund Mayfield. He is part Sand Hill Roadster and part freethinker.”

Other notable adds include ShopLocal CMO Bob Armour, Scott Ferris from Microsoft’s Atlas division, LA Times.com’s Robertson Barrett, and City Voter’s Josh Walker. There is also a brand-new Local Mobile panel, featuring Gary Roshak, who has migrated from Marchex to Yahoo!, Jeff Torgerson at InfoSpace, and Collin Holmes at V-Enable.

Also, take a look at the SES side of the show. Google Local head Eric Stein, Zorik Gordon from Reach Local, and Topix head Chris Tolles are just some of the great execs SES is bringing in. Kevin Heisler and Kevin Newcomb are moderating the SES panels.

The Kelsey Group also has its LinkedIn networking set up for the show. We’ve got dozens participating already. Once you register, you should sign in for that, too (even if you haven’t used LinkedIn for a while). See you in L.A.?

When is a local Yellow Pages not a local Yellow Pages? When a global gift shopping catalog is part of the directory. Idearc Media has partnered with Shop Yellow, an online and print gift catalog company offering gift items for every occasion from around the world. Starting with editions in Virginia and Pennsylvania, Idearc plans to bind in the new catalog within 500,000 editions of its print Yellow Pages directories and to expand distribution in other markets. 

According to a press release from PR.com: “The print and online versions of the Shop Yellow catalog offer over 170 original gift ideas from around the world. ‘The most exciting thing about Shop Yellow is the extent and originality of our selection,’ says Matt Jackson, President of Shop Yellow. ‘There are products covering all occasions and tastes, from stylish designer bags to gourmet baked goods – delivered fresh, delicious and ready to eat.” 

What is curious about the offering is that in a truly local directory, the Shop Yellow catalog sends shoppers outside the local community to purchase gift items. The product, while unique to a print directory, seems a contradiction with the potential to upset local gift businesses not featured in the Shop Yellow catalog. I suppose this might in and of itself spur local businesses to contact Idearc to be part of the catalog — which might be the ultimate strategy of enticing more boutique retailers to become advertisers in the directory or local artists’ products to be featured in the catalog. 

The trend of creating unique local marketplace products both in print and online is one that The Kelsey Group’s Peter Krasilovsky continues to follow. As consumers wish to enhance their shopping experience, they are turning more and more to unique vertical products that address their specific shopping needs. While recent product launches by directory companies have focused on Home Improvement & Decorating, Restaurants, and Local Contractors, Idearc’s move into catalog shopping stands out as a new avenue for addressing the unique shopping needs of local buyers.   

I am not a New York City person anymore, in great measure because of the challenge of getting from one location to another. So when I do have to go to New York, I try to cover as much ground as I can. Recently I was able to arrange four meetings in the city on one day and discovered from my colleague Joe DeBlasio the wonders of HopStop. The idea is a simple one and makes personal local search and mapping incredibly easy. You type in your starting destination and address (like Penn Station) and then enter where you want to go. HopStop tells you how to get there by subway or bus along with easy-to-follow walking directions to make sure you get on the right subway.

Since this was new to me, I did a little homework and discovered that similar services are available in a variety of places, including Japan and London. I did my searching in advance and printed out all the directions, but I might have been in a bind if I had had to make a change. It is clear to me that this is the perfect service for a mobile application, and I’m sure it would have worked just fine with my BlackBerry. Accessing HopStop mobile tells you how you can get “subway directions when you’re on the go,” using PDA, SMS or HopStop Voice, which allows you to call a toll-free number and speak your address. Currently HopStop covers New York, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Chicago and areas around New York City.

It still has a long way to go to be perfect, but when you are trying to figure out what subway line and stop is best for you to come up somewhere near your above-ground destination (and you dislike NYC cabs as much as I do), this is a wonderful service. Here’s my concern: The entrepreneur who started this may decide to expand too quickly. It is a normal issue with people who think they have a great idea and then decide that they need to be in as many cities as quickly as they can in order to beat the competition. This was both Microsoft’s and Knight Ridder’s thinking when they expanded their city guides before they had demonstrated the value in a few markets first. If this business is managed well, I believe it will be very successful.

While I am in Reston, VA, attending Kelsey’s Directory Driven Commerce conference, I thought it would be a good time to start talking about our next show, which I am co-producing: Interactive Local Media 2007. The show is being done in tandem with SES Local, takes place Nov. 28-30, and is at the Los Angeles Hyatt Regency Century Plaza — a nice location with a very good pool and a lot of local history (movie stars, Reagan, Nixon, all that).

Kelsey started doing this show in 1997; I started co-producing it in 1998, and we are proud of the legacy. It is typically the biggest local show in the industry, with the best networking, the best speakers and the best demos. My goal is for every participant to get an inspiring, 360-degree perspective on local online, mobile and video issues.

We’re just getting started confirming our guest list of 50+ speakers. Watch this space for updates. But here’s who we have to date (in alpha):

• Jason Calacanis, CEO, Mahalo

• Bill Day, Chief Media Officer, Marchex

• Chris DeVore, Cofounder and COO, Judy’s Book

• Jennifer Dulski , GM, Yahoo! Local

• David Galvan, VP, Retrevo

• Elaine Kunda, President and CEO, ZipLocal

• Malcolm Lewis, VP, Local.com

• Stuart McKelvey, CEO, TMP Directional Media

• Alicia Morga, Chairman and CEO, Consorte Media

• Daniel McCarthy, Chairman and CEO, NCI

• Mike Orren, President, Pegasus News

• Shawn Riegsecker, Chairman and CEO, Centro

• Jim Riesenbach, President and CEO, Autobytel

• Niki Scevak, President, Homethinking

• Joel Toledano, Cofounder and CEO, Krillion

• Nick Veronis, Managing Director, Veronis Suhler Stevenson

• Jake Winebaum, President, RHDi; CEO, Business.com

We’re putting the Kelsey analysts up front with the new mobile forecasts and other research. There’s a lot of mobile at this thing.

Marchex released a report today that examines some of the opportunities in local search. The report is written on a basic level to educate a general marketplace on local online media and advertising (while not being overly promotional of Marchex).

It likewise reaches a few basic conclusions that we have examined here on the blog and in other TKG reports. A few of these include:

• Companies wishing to have large-scale success in local search will need to own a critical mass of local traffic and a critical mass of local advertisers, either directly or through partnerships.
• They will also need to provide comprehensive content and information across business listings and all locales, making it just as easy for consumers to find the perfect plumber in Poughkeepsie as it is to find the perfect hotel in New York City (this traditional data challenge has taken on new forms with user-generated ratings and reviews).
  
• Local search providers will have to offer a variety of products and services at scale for SMB advertisers. While the bulk of local advertisers will not self-provision, they will become more sophisticated about local search and will require similar products and services to national advertisers, including analytics and services such as pay-per-call (this topic will be examined further in a report on selling search-based advertising, to be released later this week).

You can download and read the report here and see past coverage of Marchex here. The company also launched a new blog today called LocalPoint.

Also note the report is cowritten by Marchex lead search architect Matthew Berk, who will speak on the following panel on day 2 (next Tuesday) of The Kelsey Group’s DDC conference:

2:30 pm - 3:15 pm

Session A – Building a Better Database: Acquiring Content in a Dysfunctional Environment

Local business content is fragmented. And if anything, it is going to get worse. Learn the strategies publishers and third parties are using to compile meaningful content, particularly for use in online directories/local search.

Panelists:
Jeff Beard, President and General Manager, Localeze
Matthew Berk, Lead Search Architect, Marchex
Jon Cohn, Product Leader, Acxiom
Erron Silverstein, CEO and Founder, Solfo

Grayboxx, which ranks local businesses based on the number of mentions they receive on online consumer services, has finally launched, almost a year after I first wrote about it. The service, which assumes that people generally only mention services they like, has repositioned itself as the rating service for small towns that couldn’t hope to get enough users to individually sign in and rate services.

To my eyes, it looks great. It is elegant and intuitive, and it is really nice to see every category heavily populated with lots of listings — even in tiny Burlington, VT, population 38,000, which is its first market. Grayboxx’s system has 12,000 “neighbor recommendations” on more than 3,000 of Burlington’s businesses.

But do the mysterious algorithms really produce reasonable results? To find out, I was going to call Michael Wood-Lewis, the Burlington-based hyper-local guy at Front Porch Forum who writes the Ghost of Midnight blog. But then I thought I’d just read him. Wood-Lewis says the results are pretty awful.

Wood-Lewis notes that he checked out a wide range of categories, including jewelers, taxis, computer repair, groceries, computer dealers, newspapers, shoes and pizza. “As a local, I haven’t had one search produce what I would call ‘good advice from a neighbor.’ Makes me wonder about the chef’s secret recipe (mysterious ranking criteria) … hard to trust when initial tests come up with what I’m seeing.

“Burlington, and all of Vermont, is so reasonably scaled, that lots of this kind of information is near at hand. Ask a few co-workers, friends, etc. Indeed, this is one of the most common types of messages posted among neighbors on Front Porch Forum. People get real ‘neighbor recommendations’ in Burlington everyday this way.

“At this point, I’d rather ask a couple hundred neighbors for a computer repair recommendation through FPF than turn to this kind of service. Or I’d sooner take a peek at the local successful reader survey that our weekly alternative paper runs, the much coveted Daisies, by Seven Days.”

Yelp has added events to its listings, maps and user reviews in 10 cities — San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, San Jose, Austin, Chicago, Washington D.C., and San Diego. The feature includes a landing page for each event, a comment board and a “will you be attending” feature. Unlike Yahoo!’s upcoming.org, which is in a separate silo, the Yelp events feature is fully integrated (as Josh Lowensohn at Webware points out in his excellent and comprehensive review).

The question remains whether an organic events effort will ever get traction over pro-level event listers. In hometown San Francisco, for instance, Yelp launches with just 230 events.

Zvents leader Ethan Stock notes in his Onotech blog that “Zvents has 43,000 events in San Francisco. Granted, that’s one of our better metros — in Boston we have a mere 47,000 events, in Detroit we have a bare 13,000 events, and in Chicago, a snip at 7,900 events. Sigh. Gotta work on Chicago.”

Stock also notes that “ ‘search’ is a fairly important part of local search. If you click on that link to Zvents’ open search for San Francisco between now and noon Saturday, you’ll see that the Beastie Boys show in Berkeley that Josh mentions comes up first. Why? Because one of the several flavors of secret sauce that our dynamite search team has baked in the Zvents relevance algorithms is popularity, including both click and search query factors.

“If you didn’t know that the Beastie Boys were playing this weekend in Berkeley (I know, it happens to even the most-informed of us) Zvents will help you discover it — and many other events besides,” he says. “And if events aren’t your cup of tea? How about a quarter-million restaurants, or over a million movie showtimes?”

My take on this is each of the services will remind you that the Beastie Boys are in town. But a service like Zvents will help get you to the more obscure things like … a dance concert.