Leaders of the U.S. independent directory publishing industry were passionate in their defense of print media at this morning’s opening session of the Association of Directory Publishers meeting outside Houston, Texas. Jim Hail, the outgoing chair and head of Idaho-based Hagadone Directories, declared “Print is not dead!” He argued that the industry has become too apologetic about print and should take a much bolder posture in defending it in the media, where it continues to take a pretty vicious beating.

To bolster his point, Hail held up a recent Wall Street Journal article that details an effort by the magazine industry to embrace the “power of print.” Rather than accept its demise to digital, the magazine industry decided to run a campaign that basically says, at least where magazines are concerned, the print experience is superior. One tagline example, “The Internet is fleeting. Magazines are immersive.”

Hail was not impressed so much by the “esoteric” messaging but by the gumption the magazine industry has shown by saying, in effect, our old product is awesome, so deal with it. He wants the Yellow Pages industry to do the same thing.

“We need a consortium of publishers for an ad campaign … to tout the inherent strength of our medium,” Hail said.

Of course, Hail is aware that this call has been made many times before and never executed successfully. Joe Walsh, speaking after Hail, offered a somewhat different take. He said that while he has always favored a Yellow Pages version of the “Got Milk” campaign, he thinks it is “too late now” for any such effort to be effective.

He says the sense of print Yellow Pages as a passe medium has been fully baked into the public consciousness, “and we may not be able to reverse it.” Plus, he says there is no appetite among the major publishers to fund any such effort.

That said, Walsh sees some modest signs of improvement in the performance of Yellow Pages. He says his internal metrics show growing print usage, which he ascribes to an improving economy.

Just six months after it launched its SP411 Twitter integration, Superpages is at it again with an offer to Tweet any coupon that businesses upload to an online profile.

To do this it has created 72 city-specific Twitter accounts, which users in those cities can follow to get daily tweets for coupons and promotions happening around them. Businesses interested in taking part can register on Superpages and go through a process to create or upload coupons.

According to the press release, this includes:

• create up to three different coupons,
• set a start date and expiration date,
• add a disclaimer,
• apply coupons to multiple store locations,
• include a promotion code to track specific offers; and
• update coupons at any time.

Coupons are then automatically tweeted out by the geographically appropriate Twitter handle. Of course this is only as good as the number of followers of each of these city-specific accounts, but they should build followers quickly.

The growing interest for coupons on Twitter combined with Superpages ability to cross promote this, will make it happen. Meanwhile you can check out the aggregated feed of all of the 72 city promotions on Twitter (and link directly to your city’s account) at @superpages/superpages-cities.

Like SP411, this is a clever integration, utilizing only a standard Twitter account to communicate and create additional touch points with users looking for local business information. The coupon angle makes it that much more enticing.

As we said at the SP411 launch, media is fragmenting and Superpages is meeting users where they are going. This is an important paradigm that traditional media need to take to heart, as a once siloed world becomes more about presence across platforms and less about owning destinations.

PaidContent reports that AOL Ventures is creating a $10 million venture capital fund for local start-ups. The fund expects to support the “increasing number of startups” in the market. AOL Ventures had previously announced that it is spending $50 million this year to launch Patch.com in “hundreds” of communities.

The company also announced it will relaunch its “City’s Best” entertainment guides in 25 cities, while adding geotargeted local content to AOL.com. In its announcement, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong says the local space online is “an untapped market for the most part and one of the largest commercial opportunities online that has yet to be won.”

AOL Ventures EVP Jon Brod is the opening keynote at Marketplaces 2010 next week in San Diego.

Online scheduling appears to be one of the break-out features in the marketplaces space this year. Nineteen percent of respondents to BIA/Kelsey’s most recent User View say they made a non-restaurant online appointment in the past six months.

Major appointment sites include BookFresh, Full Slate, ZocDoc, Agendize and MaxiPage. Each hopes to be the OpenTable of the services world. While they each have different focus points, they tend to provide an online scheduling platform, with additional services, such as enhanced profiles, pricing, etc.

The latest entrant we’ve become aware of is Atlanta-based AppointmentCity. The site launched last September with an effort initially aimed at dentists.

Founder Sherwin Krug, a former CPA, says he is targeting a market in which more than 7 million searches a month are performed for dentists. An online appointment is a more definitive source of leads since you know where and when consumers want to go. The enhanced profile that the site provides makes it more of a Yellow Pages-style considered purchase.

The original model had a monthly fee of $100 and a success fee of $50 per job. But Krug says the monthly fees were eliminated after three months and refunds were provided since the site really wants to build its volume. Looking forward, the site will expand to other media specialities, such as Lasik, Podiatrists, Chiropractors and Plastic Surgeons.

Other verticals are also being eyed by the site. Since they each have different pricing characteristics, AppointmentCity is likely to vary its fee structure for different verticals. Podiatrists, for instance, assign high lifetime values to each account, but individual job fees should be smaller since jobs tend to be lower value.

Lots of news coming from mobile local app provider WHERE today. Just a week after it opened up its WHERE Ads local ad network, it has launched a new Web site and officially changed its name from uLocate to WHERE.

The company not only provides the WHERE local app but is also an app production house, which my contacts in the publishing world tell me has solid technical chops. It will continue to build this side of its business but the name change reflects a friendlier consumer brand, in line with the familiarity of its flagship local app.

As for the Web site launch, this is similarly meant to solidify the brand and create a more integrated local experience between PC and mobile device. True to the cloud computing trends driving a great deal of online and mobile media, the site lets you log on (or register) to view and manage your local activity, such as the places you’ve checked in from mobile.

Other features, from the press release, include:

• Keep track of all the places they’ve been to in the past, those they want to go to in the future, and their reviews with Placebook
• Record their current location with Check-in
• Share their WHERE activity with their social network via Facebook and Twitter
• Search, discover and review local restaurants, businesses and services
• View nearby concerts, sports games and other events

In terms of creating continuity between the online and mobile experiences, Foursquare has a similar site but it’s not as functional (though we hear Web site updates are coming).

Lastly, some news from our Marketplaces 2010 conference next week. WHERE VP of Product David Chang is joining us onstage to discuss mobile monetization in a segment that caps off our mobile forum. He’ll join MoVoxx, LocalAdExchange and CallSpark in a discussion about the growing area of mobile local ad networks and monetization. We’re expecting a great session.

Groupon has a roaring head start in the deals of the day category for groups, with more than a million users. We’ll hear all about Groupon from CEO Andrew Mason at next week’s Marketplaces conference in San Diego, where he is keynoting. But there are now countless imitators adding their own deals.

New York-based 8Coupons.com, which aggregates coupons from content partners such as Valpak, Money Mailer and RedPlum’s SuperCoups, has now put them all together in one spot (great idea). 8Coupons launched the top 10 U.S. cities last month, and now has 55 different Group Buying “Deals of the Day” Web sites in 100 cities. Based on what we are hearing around the industry, many more sites are likely to enter the space soon.

Six months after launching its iPhone app, Coupon giant Valpak has announced an app for the Android platform. Reaching the enterprise BlackBerry set is next on its list. The company currently delivers about 17,000 offers via mobile which is equal to its online volume.

Features of its mobile couponing include (verbatim from release):

• Search savings by categories of dining, auto, beauty, health, shops, leisure, home, professional and general
• Use the phone’s GPS to locate savings around you
• Automatically sort results by distance from your current location
• Click on an offer and use the phone’s mapping function to get directions
• View multiple discounts at any given time
• Tap business phone numbers, making it easy to call for more information

Meanwhile mobile couponing continues to heat up, as it follows the overall growth in mobile data consumption. Fifty-eight percent of respondents to our recently released User View study reported using online coupons when shopping for local products. Mobility makes the coupon search and redemption process more integrated, and we’ll see a greater pace of growth in mobile. New Compete data out this week supports this.

Valpak’s move to Android will be important as the platform’s market share gains pace. Gartner believes Android will be the second-largest mobile platform globally by 2012, behind only Symbian. This will happen as its open nature attracts developers, its price tag (free) attracts device manufacturers, and the combination attracts users in search of iPhone alternatives.

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Related: Flurry released data today showing Motorola’s Droid has outpaced iPhone sales for the first 74 days after launch.

CBS Local has launched an auto shopping guide on the Web site of WCCO-TV Minneapolis, using vertical content and services from High Gear Media, a Palo Alto, California-based auto specialist publisher launched two years ago by Daily Shopper founder Hesky Kutscher.

The CBS Local deal marks the first local effort for High Gear, which has 90 vertical auto-related car sites of its own. It also has distribution on site such as NASCAR.com, Yahoo Autos and Huffington Post. Its own vertical sites include TheCarConnection.com, MotorAuthority.com, GreenCarReports.com, AllCarsElectric.com and FamilyCarGuide.com.

VP of Product Management Jeff Birkeland tells us the CBS Local site will launch with 1.2 million pages of “very curated” content including content from a six-person full-time staff and freelance auto writers, as well as 200 community sources. He believes the level of specific, high-level auto writing is much higher from general content creators such as Associated Content and Demand Media.

We recently completed the latest BIA/Kelsey User View survey, Wave VII, our online consumer survey done in the first quarter each year. User View asks 1,000 online consumers that detailed questions about their use of various media for local shopping.

Continuing a trend toward media fragmentation, consumers reported using on average 7.9 different media sources for local shopping, up from 5.6 in 2007. This significant increase is fully representative of the fragmentation in media usage by consumers, and underscores the need for SMBs to think aggressively and creatively about their use of media for their local advertising.

Among media used when shopping for local products and services, the Internet manifested a central position. For example:

• 97 percent of survey respondents report using the Internet (in some manner)
• 48 percent report using an Internet Yellow Pages site
• 42 percent report using an online shopping comparison site
• 58 percent report using online coupons

Overall, the User View findings show just how broadly and deeply the Internet is now embedded in local shopping activities.

More detail on the results from the User View survey will be presented at the upcoming Marketplaces conference, next week March 22-24 in San Diego.

Events are a vertical that cuts across many segments: travel, retail, sports, entertainment, education, dining, culture and others. Major players include specialists such as Zvents, Eventful, Americantowns.com and Center’d. City sites such as Citysearch and Yelp are active in the space as well.

A new one for us is Goby.com, a venture-backed firm that comes out of Mike Stonebraker’s relational database studies at MIT. The site, which launched in September 2009, has already had 250,000 visitors. It reviews 300 categories of things to do, from camping to opera. It can be embedded into other sites via Facebook Connect. An iPhone app is coming out “soon.”

The site breaks things up three ways: What would you like to do? Where? and When? It makes a special effort to go beyond “cities with airports next to them.” For instance, the most thorough listing of events in Carlsbad, CA 92009 that I’ve seen.

CEO Mark Watkins, a veteran of vertical search at Endeca, says the site is task- centric and created to be a “search engine for things to do in your free time. It does equally well for people planning a trip or sitting around the dinner table on Friday, wondering what they are going to do this weekend.”

It also approaches events in a way that Google may not. “Google gives answers for general purposes. But it understands keywords, not structured data. Plane tickets and other semantic information are not on Google,” he says. “We’re getting very focused results. We can sort Web data by price,” among other things.

The general model for search engines is to have a keyword and give back a URL, says Watkins. But Goby seeks to convert those Web pages to real world entities people can make decisions about. “We’ve cross-referenced photography from across the Web, and integrated more video types, and MP3 from concerts,” he says.

Another focus is to figure out how people decide to go to events. “We want to know: How did you decide to be at that restaurant?” says Watkins. It is the interaction of the search and gaming worlds, building off location-based sites like Foursquare and Gowalla.

Indeed, Watkins emphasizes that Goby.com is not just about events. “Events are really important. But they are one dimension of how we spend free time.” Travel is another aspect. “We’re coming at it like a search engine, as opposed to TripAdvisor,” he says. Travel is surprisingly local oriented and is more complementary to local than is generally realized, notes Watkins. More than half of queries — 55 percent — are typically near users.

As for revenues, the site expects to initially receive the lion’s share from affiliate and lead generation fees. It anticipates revenues from sites such as Priceline, and tour providers if it can recommend an Alcatraz tour in San Francisco, for instance. Or its personalization and recommendation engines can promote an Opera performance. When the site gets bigger, it will be more interesting to advertisers, says Watkins.

The site will also have a white label “pro” model for sites that might be licensed by media publishers, or travel suppliers.