OK, we’ve got the format(s) and “best and brightest” speaker roster set for Interactive Local Media: Extending Local Channels, which is Nov. 19-21 in Santa Clara, California, next to San Jose.
At the top of the list is Angie Hicks, “the Angie” from Angie’s List, and Rodney Rice from ServiceMagic. They’ll tell it all during one-on-one …

Yahoo announced today from the ADWEEK conference that it will launch a new ad platform called APT. It is meant to be a one-stop shop for media buys across Yahoo’s growing sources of localized inventory. This includes its own network as well as that of the growing list of partners (782) in its newspaper consortium.
Unlike …

Yahoo Brickhouse division-head Tom Coates officially launched the Fire Eagle platform today to a packed room of San Francisco journalists, analysts and bloggers (and Yahoo cofounder David Filo).
The platform, in beta since March, is based on managing users’ location data to make online services smarter and more relevant to them. It basically does this by …

The 32-company-strong Yahoo Newspaper Consortium, which covers 41 percent of Sunday newspaper circulation, has 700 to 900 reps selling Yahoo inventory, with a couple of the newspapers selling more than $1 million in annual inventory, reports Yahoo’s Lem Lloyd, who we know from previous stints with Oodle and Knight Ridder Digital. We talked to Lloyd …

It is an awkward time for a company to be holding an affiliate meeting right after it has been sold. This week, ShopLocal was put in this position for its long planned meeting with 120 retail partners in Chicago (where I was a speaker). The company has just been consolidated by Gannett, which bought off …

Yahoo! is set to place contextually relevant display ads with its newspaper consortium, which now represents 40 percent of all newspaper circulation. The new AMP program for newspapers begins by the end of 3Q at the San Jose Mercury News and SFGate.
Yahoo! and the newspapers are banking big on AMP’s success. Indeed, it has been …

If you believe at all in the “marketplace” vision of next generation commerce, it is hard to dispute that Yahoo! remains front –and- center as a verticals factory. This core strength of Yahoo!’s is especially important to note in the wake of Microsoft’s pullback from acquiring the company.
What accounts for Yahoo’s focus on verticals …

Alibaba is China’s answer to Google and Yahoo!. The online site is 39 percent owned by Yahoo and recently entered a strategic partnership with Infomedia, the second-largest Yellow Pages publisher in India.
The agreement with Infomedia provides Alibaba access to the second-largest population in Asia. The deal with Infomedia opens the opportunity to sell online advertising …

I use My Yahoo! as a personal portal to browse headlines within the long list of RSS feeds I’ve set up. I find it’s easy to personalize and set up news feeds, weather, e-mail, team schedules, movie times, etc.
In all this talk of “universal search,” personalized portals like this (others include Netvibes and Pageflakes) take …

Yahoo! announced that it will make a considerable change to its result pages, and the content it will allow Web sites to provide in organic listings.
According to the Yahoo! Search Blog:
Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, …

The 19-company Yahoo! newspaper consortium is set to launch beta tests with two newspapers of Content Match, an AdSense-like product. The beta tests are expected to be followed by a launch throughout the entire consortium in September, according to Lee Enterprises VP of Interactive Media Greg Schermer. Schermer, a frequent spokesperson for the consortium, made …

A new national newspaper network has been set up by Gannett, Tribune, New York Times Co. and Hearst Newspapers, representing 37 of the top 40 U.S. markets.
The network, Quadrant One, will compete (or extend) McClatchy’s RealCities; the NAA’s National Newspaper Network; Centro, which is independently run and includes a wide range of local media; …

This morning I noticed something vaguely different about Google. Just like when a friend or significant other changes something like a haircut, and you get an overall sense that something is different but you can’t pinpoint it.
Finally I saw that a “Photos” tab had joined the standard “Web,” “News” and other top spots after I …

Newspapers increasingly see an opportunity to sell SEO/SEM solutions to local advertisers. Such efforts probably began in earnest last year with members of the Yahoo! consortium using Yahoo!’s platforms. Others have been working with WebVisible and other resellers on a custom basis. But things seem to have been heating up, prior to the NAA Marketing …

Amid all the noise about Microsoft and Yahoo!, one of the unanswered questions has to do with MS’ intent toward the recruitment business – a business that actually has some relationship with Microsoft’s core enterprise solutions (as opposed to its less established interests in social networking and arguably, search).
As Ken Doctor points out, HotJobs comes …

Today’s big news is Microsoft’s unsolicited takeover bid for Yahoo!. The $44.6 billion bid represents a 62 percent premium on Yahoo!’s closing stock price yesterday, which was affected by Yahoo!’s depressing earnings announcement, in which Yahoo! said it would lay off 1,000 workers to “re-accelerate” growth.
For 2007, Yahoo! reported a net profit of $660 …

In a significant development, AT&T’s Yellowpages.com is replacing Yahoo! Local Search for AT&T’s broadband and Internet customers. It is a move that will greatly enhance Yellowpages.com’s position in the space. The company recently told analysts it expects to attract 2 billion searches in 2008 and 3 billion by 2010.
The move is part of a broad …

One of the quietest but apparently most successful producers in the local search space has been GeoSign, owned by webpreneur Tim Nye. The Canadian company has incubated TrueLocal, which aggregates local online databases, and is also invested in mobile directory player Go2, among other geospatially savvy companies.
But most of its fortune, apparently, has been …

Auto dealers and real estate brokers (and agents) are increasingly contending with mission creep for their Web needs that require them to have two or more Web sites. Part of the problem is that they must conform to standardized requirements. For instance, Ford, Toyota and Nissan dealers have a number of mandated requirements.
At the same …

The way Yahoo! breaks up business segments is always instructive — something we follow closely at The Kelsey Group as we do our best to sort out our Interactive Local Media, Marketplaces and Yellow Pages/Directional Advertising (“The Kelsey Report”) research programs.
Just as we’ve figured out what goes where — even borrowing Yahoo!’s “Marketplaces” name for …