A few weeks ago Steven Aldrich, a VP of strategy for small business software (and now marketing) company Intuit, delivered a speech in which he presented an amazing statistic. According to Aldrich, roughly 6 million businesses are started annually in the U.S. but another approximately 5.6 million go under. Think about it. From the point […]
Google has just launched “My Maps,” an impressively simple tool within Google Maps that allows users to create personal “mashups” and save or share those with friends or the world at large. A range of formatting options enables the maps to be highly customized and include images or video. Maps can be created “manually” by […]
Search has changed. Online consumer information retrieval has reached another inflexion point – a shift from pure algorithmic search to social search. Searchers have become increasingly sophisticated, and basic algorithmic web results are getting diluted out of most mainstream search experiences such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and Ask. Search is not solved. At their […]
Recently, we’ve seen a deluge of forecasts about massive financial opportunities associated with the growth of local search and local advertising. Whether you’re a company in the Internet search space, a yellow-pages directory, or a niche player, it is indeed tempting to get overly focused on how to earn your piece of the local search […]
This evening Topix is doing something entirely logical and taking a big risk at the same time. The site, which has been a “top 25” news destination, is now effectively flipping its model and going from being a news aggregator with comments and community at the margins to a community generated local news site with […]
Maybe you’ve heard of “hyper-local?” Now let’s invent a new term, “micro-local.” That’s what StreetAdvisor (spotted via Mashable) seems to be going for. A nice looking site in the now familiar “Web 2.0” style, StreetAdvisor seeks to make information even more local, down to the street level — literally. It’s a user-generated content site targeting […]
TechCrunch has a provocative post about a “stealth startup” called Vutool. According to the post, the company was/is seeking to create a 3-D street-level view of the entire country by having people take multiple images from cars. The post suggests that the company failed to get series A funding and was acquired by Google.
Yesterday, news came out about Viacom suing Google for $1 billion over alleged video copyright infringement on YouTube. With some dust settling, I thought it would be helpful to recap some of the analysis out there. I’m pulling this roundup mostly from coverage you’ll find on Techmeme. Come along, and we’ll go through the official […]
VentureBeat is reporting that Citysearch/IAC is the mystery buyer of InsiderPages. A purchase price was not disclosed. The formal announcement will apparently come later today or early tomorrow [now confirmed, see below]. I would guess the purchase price wasn’t more than 2x what the investors put in (TechCrunch guesses $13 million), given that the company […]
The awkward phrase “hyper-local” is now embedded in the discussion about local search. It’s a phrase, for example, that online newspapers are using to describe their community strategies, and it’s a phrase that I may unwittingly have coined in 2005 (if I did, I apologize) to describe a category of sites that were seeking to […]
There are tons of tricks that people use to get stories on the homepage of Digg. Unfortunately, in their eagerness to get the visibility offered by Digg, most people are ignoring basic submission guidelines. Rather than concentrating on gaming Digg, if you submit stories using some common sense, your chances of hitting the homepage drastically […]
Yesterday Yahoo announced the launch of their new “suggestion boards.” Yahoo says that these new boards enable “you can browse suggestions from other site visitors or post your own. Digg-style voting means we can quickly discover what’s most important to users.” In fact, these have been live for a while, I specifically noticed the SiteExplorer […]
The Yahoo Search Blog announced that they have added a box to the home page in order to promote user generated search sites. Yahoo will feature selected sites that use the Yahoo Search Builder tool. If you want to ask Yahoo to feature your site, you can use this form to submit your site. In […]
Over the weekend, search marketing blog SEOmoz launched a new design and section of of the site named YOUmoz. YOUmoz is a place you can go and post your own content or rate the posts that others submit. You can listen to an MP3 file of all the new features over here. SEOmoz also made […]
I wrote yesterday about Boorah, which is aggregating user reviews in the restaurant vertical to provide more coverage to consumers. Today, Marchex is formally launching its similar “Open View” technology on its Open List local/travel search site and its network of URL-based destinations, which have been substantially enhanced with Open List search and editorial content. […]
Yahoo Planning to Add 100 Web Sites for Entertainment at the New York Times reports that Yahoo is undertaking a new microsite effort named “Brand Universe.” Brand Universe will create about 100 web sites built around entertainment brands and pull together content from various Yahoo properties. One such site for the Nintendo Wii can be […]
ResourceShelf and O’Reilly Radar discuss a new offering from Yahoo Research Berkeley, in California: TagMaps. TagMaps are something like the word “tag clouds” meeting maps and Flickr. There are currently three offered, as described from the TagMaps site: World Explorer: “Explorer is based on photos users upload to the Flickr website. The World Explorer engine […]
I love that people can comment at Search Engine Land directly within stories. I not only want comments — I want people to contribute links as well. I thought it would be useful to talk more about this, plus get feedback from readers on how we can improve the commenting system going forward.
Yahoo is now allowing users to vote for their favorite questions at Yahoo Answers by adding a star next to interesting or high-quality questions. Similar to Flickr’s “Interestingness
Yesterday’s SearchDay article referenced a Yahoo-Harris Poll conducted in October about user-generated content and its importance to local buying decisions. The poll involved roughly 2,700 U.S. adults. Here were the verbatim questions and the top-level findings:
Today, Kevin Rose announced the release of new Digg features. What most people covered in the release were all the cool additions, but no one really talked about the small changes that have drastically affected submitters. Before I dig into these small changes that affected submitters, here is a quick recap of the new features […]
Time Magazine has declared You — that’s you, me, everyone — to be this year’s Person Of The Year. And You in a big way means YouTube, the video sharing site getting a long profile about how it has grown, with some interesting bits on how it now seeks to maintain its “underground image” as […]