More specifically: the non-commercial license

I know there are quite a few of you in the local scene that read this blog - I expect your comments there

Finally - we’ve expanded iBegin Source into Canada.

The iBegin Blog covers the details of the update.

We are likely going to settle on US & Canada for now, though we are definitely still gathering information on other English-speaking countries (UK, Australia, NZ). While I wouldn’t expect anything for a while - don’t think we’re happy to rest on our laurels with just US and Canada.

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 - HSN TV, hsn.com, Cornerstone Brands
• Ticketmaster
• Interval International
• LendingTree

“We’ve been a complex enterprise almost from the very beginning 12 years ago, with hundreds of transactions over those years. And while we’ve created a lot of value, I’ve always believed our complexity and many mouthfuls of sentences to explain who we are and what our strategy is have hampered clarity and understanding with all our constituencies, particularly investors,” Mr. Diller said in a statement.

The spin off would happen in Q3 3008.

This is an interesting move to me - by a lot of accounts, Ask.com, even with its $100 million campaign, wasn’t making much of a difference in the only category that matters - generating money. I wonder how this will affect Citysearch.

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 end with ‘(Manufacturers)’ and other times ‘ - Manufacturers’ and other times ‘ - Manufacturing’. All three were the same, but the lack of normalization was an issue we made a mistake on.

It has taken a while, but it is finally ready for consumption. I’ll be sending out a mass-email tomorrow, but for current (and future) clients, the important links:

Category updates: Old » New
Raw list of category updates
New master list of categories

We started off with 11,094 categories, and ended up with 10,432. 662 categories merged into existing categories - a 6% reduction. A total of 5177 categories were affected (though this does include minor tweaks like the above mentioned ‘(Manufacturers)’ vs ‘ - Manufacturers’.

This is of course the start. While the databases are primed to support both the old and new category format simultaneously, we will have to modify the system to properly accomodate and generate files for each. And then we have to start selling the Canadian data. And work on super-categories. And sell super-categories. And re-design iBegin Source homepage. And move the listings to www.ibegin.com [so that source.ibegin.com = info on business data, and www.ibegin.com = actual listings]. All while continually improving our data (normalizations, franchise-lists, franchise info, listings from professional organizations and associations, etc).

Fun

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.

Even more stunning - 60% of their traffic is just two areas - New York and Los Angeles. Imagine if they could fully replicate their success in other major metros (I’m looking at you Chicago and Toronto).

All from the ground up. All with nothing but a focus on blogging about their locale.

Why do all the local analysts ignore this fantastic homegrown success?

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 my surprise - one of the ‘Big Three’ was willing to offer Full US for 36 months at $2000 a month.

For another post, but the noise volume over at iBegin is definitely on the up-and-up. By making sure we are around, keeping in contact, our “presence” is starting to get felt, and it seems like the competition is responding. We have quite a few customers now who were going to go with the Big Three - but ended up with us. Price? Support? Our vision? This blog (I myself am flattered by how many compliments I’ve gotten here).

Even better is that our presence is now strong enough that we are cash-flow positive. Isn’t that a peachy thought. Which at the same time isn’t to scare our current customers - the rest of Enthropia Inc does well enough to cover any issues (plus savings). But iBegin is almost ready to stand on its own two feet.

I’m terribly excited for 2008. Not that we are interested in selling (consider me as someone who builds lifestyle companies), but we had a buyout offer in the low seven digits. By end of 2008 we should be at least in the eight digits. We have a lot of stuff to do and implement - so much in the pipeline - our small team means fast results with low overhead. First on the agenda is taking direct control over is My Home and giving it a shake (the current manager for that is … leaving … more on that very soon).

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 luck.

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. How is figuring out the HTML to add to delicious difficult? Stuff like converting to PDF or IM, which may seem complicated, are all open-sourced for you to find online.

Instead of paying Agendize for this little feature, why not just have an engineer build it in-house and be done with it?

Can anyone elaborate the advantages of using Agendize for me?

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?

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.