Interesting – just read about this in the Wall Street Journal – IAC (owners of Citysearch are looking to split the company into 5 separate parts. For those that don’t have a subscription, the five parts will be: IAC – Ask.com, Citysearch, IAC Advertising Solutions, Evite, iWon, My Way, Match.com; CollegeHumor, GarageGames, Gifts.com HSN – [...]
We’ve been slaving over this for months – but we finally finished the category work on iBegin Source. I’ll admit (for current and future clients) – we screwed up a bit. While the ‘business listing’ ‘category’ relationship was accurate, the actual category names were slightly off. A common issue was sometimes we had a category [...]
I’ve talked about how awesome local blogs are, but Gothamist continues to impress me. Check out their Quantcast numbers. 80,000 unique visitors a day. 7,000,000 US pageviews a month (yes I went from day to month). Over $3 million in revenue a year. 30% of their traffic are regulars. With highly educated and rich visitors. [...]
I had an interesting call earlier this week. When we originally launched iBegin Source, we almost blew the floor off the competition. Our entire approach was efficiency and efficacy – do it right (the first time), do it fast, and do it simple – remove barriers to save costs (especially in terms of man-power). Imagine [...]
Everyone talks about business listings, news, weather, movies, events, etc etc when it comes to local. But it turns out that people care about the obituaries too. This one took me by surprise. While the responses focused on gags, I did look for some more concrete numbers on how popular obituaries are – with no [...]
I’m confused – what is so special about Agendize? They enable sharing. Something like Quick RSS links or AddThis. In the context of blogs it makes sense – it is a mass consumer activity. People use Blogger and WordPress.com because they don’t have the technical know-how. But YP companies like Yellowpages.ca are a different breed. [...]
I was looking over Restaurantica’s About page when I noticed that it was owned by ‘eMedia’. I had previously met the owner of Restaurantica, and (at the time) was an employee of GeoSign. I heard a few months later it was sold to GeoSign itself. The about page also says that eMedia owns TrueLocal, GolfCourses.com, [...]
Thought this was sort of odd … I saw Sebastien’s post on 118.com launching in the US. I was doing some random searches, and I noticed that their ‘default’ website image seems to be from Judy’s Book. Eg: food (both #1 and #10 have that as their icon). Odd.
So I was perusing over some stats for iBegin Source, and saw that the last person who had downloaded our data had come via ‘local business data‘ Looking in the results, I noticed a post on Webmaster World titled “Good Source For Local Business Data? Lo and behold, it redirected to this page, which had [...]
I read an excellent post on structured vs unstructured data in the local space. The problem about local data is an impossible human problem. People think differently. What is beautiful to me could be ugly to you. What could be a kebab to me could be a skewer to you. A car could be a [...]