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, etc

Color me confused – what is going on here? eMedia.com has nothing on it, and the GeoSign page shows business as usual.

Update 1:

From http://www.linkedin.com/in/vfilby:

eMedia is a publishing company that took over many of the marquee domains held by Geosign. Our goal was to make TrueLocal more competitive with other local search players by improving performance and moving towards a social Web 2.0 ideal.

I’m not sure how taking over marquee domains (eg GolfCourses.com and Hockey.com) has to do with local search?

Update 2:
Sort of an on-going discovery of mine, it seems like TrueLocal also uses lucene. Same thing that Yelp uses.

Update 3:
An interesting oddity – Google blogsearch. You can see the second result is dated from Oct 3 from rmay.ca. The link itself is dead (http://www.rmay.ca/16/) but Google cache has it:

Now that the news of our rebranding is public, I now work for Moxy Media as Manager, Special Projects. It’s a little sad to see the Geosign name go away after six years of hard work helping build it, but similarly nice to have a fresh moniker to stand behind as we move forward in a series of new directions. If you have me in your address book please update my e-mail address as it is now rmay [at] moxymedia.com.

And lo and behold: Moxy Media – a red-version of the GeoSign homepage.

So I can only conclude that GeoSign has split into two – Moxy Media (‘content’ sites) and eMedia (100k or so domains + TrueLocal).

Update 4:
At the same time, this job posting says:

Emedia (a Geosign company) is an internet media company, poised to launch sites such as Hockey.com and Golfcourses.com

So – if eMedia (a subsidiary of GeoSign) is doing content publishing (ala Hockey.com) – what exactly does Moxy Media do then?