Since my last post on our all out assault on local, it seems like I’ve gone AWOL.

Alas, between a quick trip to Houston and focusing on such said assault, it is hard to get a break. Stuck staring at a computer screen for upto 16 hours a day, spending even more time makes me dizzy.

I had missed over something when I had talked about local - weather. Our most requested feature on weather. So after my latest blog post, we got another two requests in one day for weather.

It was time to do something about it.

So (while running everything else), we heavily pressed on weather. Turns out the US Government provides weather information, as does the Canadian Government (but not nearly as openly). Problem is that relying on the government for an XML service is dangerous - their servers are notorious for flaking out at any given time. So we pressed for enterprise solutions to weather delivery.

In under 10 days, we have a fully functioning weather site: iBegin Weather. It is 99% done - the caching element is still a work in progress (right now we fetch data ‘live’ - the updated version will automatically do that every 20 minutes). The site design is ripped straight from iBegin Source - keeping with our simple/clean/quick loading motif. We even have a nice widget for spreading weather. Example: Share San Francisco, CA Weather.

Again - underlines the versatility a larger company can have. Our illustrator did the icons and other misc graphics (roughly 100). Our JS/PHP guy did the widget. Another programmer focused on the primary engine. Data-provider gave us easy to use CSV files that make data manipulation easy. Our geocoding abilities let us figure out spatial distances that would have cost a pretty penny. And previous experience with sites like iBegin let us churn out an intelligent structure, XML feeds, and even try to guess where the user is from.

We should have the site 100% by Tuesday morning (and thus our ‘launch’). We should be in the rest of the world (~15,000 locations outside of the US) in 4-6 weeks.

Whew.

We recently sent out a massmail to both Blog Top Sites - we are looking for bloggers interested in blogging about their local city (major US cities only for now). If you are interested, do email local@bloggynetwork.com.

Already 163 responses, and getting one per ~5 minutes. I think we will end up with roughly 200-250 emails.

I believe, in terms of approaching local, we now have the most massive breadth:

• iBegin - city search
• iBegin Source - business data provider
• iBegin Geocoder - geocoding abilities for US/Canada (not launched yet)
• iBegin Source Hosted - hosted platform for local search. Eg Minnesota.com or Lauderdale.com
• Blog Flux Local - aggregated local news powered by blogs (not launched yet)
• is My Home - city blogs [eg newyork.ismyhome.com] (not launched yet)

We have other stuff coming too (community-related), but those are 6+ weeks off. Everything else mentioned above should be live within four weeks.

This massive breadth will allow us to do some … interesting things. We get roughly 20,000 unique visitors a day now, but by end of year we are targeting at least 50,000 a day. Should be a fun ride.

Slight Update: 24 hours after posting this, we’ve now received 261 emails from people interested in being a part of our local blog network. I think we will end up around 275.

I have a lot of experience with widgets/gaining links on other sites. From back in 2000 when I first started to hammer away at top sites, to Blog Flux, widgets are something that I am intimately acquainted with.

Nevertheless, I still follow widgets like a hawk. If there is anything that Digg did well, it was creating an easy ‘Digg This’ javascript system. Basically a widget, it got Digg’s brand everywhere.

In local, widgets are especially fantastic. Yelp has one, but I’m not impressed - the map system means heavy load, which … well - sucks. I find it surprising that neither Judy’s Book nor IP ever released such a widget - or if they did, their promotion efforts for it were horrible.

So I was actually glad Judy’s Book this time actually had a widget for their Coupon Looker, but also confused. It was brand heavy (link on top, and more on the bottom). It didn’t pay anything. The actual results were a bit retarded - instead of sending them to the actual coupon, it just sent them to the search results on Coupon Looker (which you were getting already through the widget).

So I did what anybody curious would do - I emailed everyone on their ‘Who’s using the couponlooker widget?’ list. Or at least, I emailed everyone that didn’t work for JB.

Key observations:

• A few of them had used JB previously. They had stopped using it for this or that reason.
• Quite a few of them have their readers ask about coupons. This was a good solution for them to offer to their readers.
• Most haven’t looked at it in depth, but will review it in time (did JB say it was in progress?)
• None of them were paid. BUT - quite a few said that if there was a commission (perfectly acceptable imo) they would much prefer that.
• Most of them found it ‘acceptable’. Most had a shortlist of features that could improve it. Most of these features involved flexibility (design, categories). The most interesting one was recommending contextually. I can see a contextual + affiliate system could be a sustainable ad system.
• Link back. For most, who were teetering on the cliff, the link back pushed them over.

Almost all promised to monitor how the system works over the coming week before coming to a decision to ’stick’ with it or not. And while the link back closed the deal, all the bloggers did do it for their readers (a few mentioned that the traffic they did receive from that link has been minimal). Not a single person mentioned SEO.

UPDATE: It also seems like that CL is a team play.

Judy’s Book recently launched Coupon Looker, which … umm … helps you find coupons.

Pretty obvious.

What is odd is how there is a non-obvious connection to Judy’s Book itself. On the about page, it is (dismissively I think) stated as follows:

couponlooker was started by a few of the folks at Judy’s Book who recognized a need for a fast and efficient coupon search engine.

Huge difference between ’started by a few of the folks’ and ‘owned and operated by’. The terms page also mentions it once:

The couponlooker site is controlled, operated and administered by couponlooker, a subsidiary of Judy’s Book from its offices within the United States.

Much more obvious - so the question remains, why is Judy’s Book hiding the relationship? Do they believe the Coupon Looker dilutes the brand? Or that Judy’s Book has a negative image in coupons?

One other thing - widgets. I have a lot of experience in building widgets/tools to gather links and branding awareness - but who would put a coupon looker widget on their site? Seems a bit odd. I know they have links listed on the right, but those could easily be seeder ones. Speaking of which - I am going to research this and get back on this.

It has spread to every nook on the internet - Google picked up Doubleclick for a sweet $3.1 billion

With it, Google gains access to some big-name clients of DC - brand managers for major companies that have a lot of money. PPC is just a facet of internet advertising - there is also banner advertising (which Google has a small share of, and DC a large share of), CPA (which Google is expanding into, and DC has the highest quality network for), and email (which I don’t think Google is going into any time soon).

Anyway, the story goes that Google beat out Microsoft (again). And by beating out Microsoft, they also beat out Yahoo (after all, all three are going after the same - internet advertising).

Yahoo is looking especially vulnerable. Since picking up Flickr (which I still argue was mostly for guaranteed ad-inventory), and Delicious/MyBlogLog (both for user behaviour/tracking), they’ve been relatively silent. There was suppoused to be a deal for Facebook, but that has not produced anything.

If there is one product that I think Yahoo is pushing ahead of Google is local. Local is more than just local search though - it is about a presence in the local area. And while I argue Yahoo! Local is superior to Google Maps, Yahoo has really pushed ahead of Google with key partnerships with newspapers, the latest being with McClatchy.

So while Yahoo continues to sustain PR black-eyes, what can it do?

Buy up companies in the emerging local market.

With that in mind, and a way to get a leg-up on Google (for once), Yahoo could go and buy out (for relatively cheap) both Local.com and Yelp.

Local.com keeps making noises about how much traffic it pushes (roughly 11 million unique visitors a month). They claim $35 RPM (revenue per 1000 pageviews), and ~$90 per 1000 daily visitors. While their CPM doesn’t compare to Google’s, it has gone up significantly, and by utilizing Panama, it should be able to make even more. As Google and Yahoo jostle for the local market, Local.com and its 11 million unique visitors a month make perfect sense. There are some other things to consider (eg Local.com heavily invests in PPC), but a great domain with steady traffic could be a good call. And local.com needs money - it just received $8 million in funding.

The other site would be Yelp, which simply fits into Yahoo’s strategy of user-generated content: Jumpcut, Flickr, Upcoming.org, and Del.icio.us. User generated, active participation, without too much butting in by Yahoo (though I am sure quite a few Flickr fans would disagree). They would get their hands on some of the most loyal visitors in the local area (you don’t drop 400 reviews on a site and then just get up and leave). Yelp struggles with their ad-sales, but few sites get as much attention as they do (especially considering how much real traffic they do get). But that attention has helped them skyrocket, with Hitwise reporting that Yelp’s traffic has increased 91% in just six months.

Get the top independent local search site, and the top local review site - I do wonder what the valuation would come out to, but I am sure Yahoo has enough cash to scoop them both up.

Just saw that another local search engine has been released: YellowBot.

And so another chapter in my ‘reviewing and criticizing local search sites’.

I will first send our attention to this: Yellowbot.com - Social Networking and Local Search. Why don’t we go over their feature-list:

Local Search - An obvious one. Dozens of sites for that
Advanced Search Filters - I see no ‘advanced search’ option. I’m going to chalk this up as buzzword sensation
Tagging - Been there, done that with iBegin
Ratings and Reviews - The staple of all local sites
Recommendations - The only thing I saw was ‘recommended - yes or no’. Seems like simplified version of a review. Similar to our own ‘Favorites’
Business Details - Unless details are the basic name + address + category, I missed something.
Uploaded Pictures - Another staple
MyAccount Page - Again, another staple
Blog - I don’t see a way for users to blog, so I imagine this is the company blog. Old hat
Forum - Another staple (be it in the form of ‘Talk’ or ‘Community’ or even ‘Q&A’ - same thing)

Other things to nitpick:

• When adding a review, a nice inline popup appears, and then a nasty redirect to the login page. Why even bother with that guys?
• http://www.yellowbot.com/tags/food/El%20Paso%2C%20TX%2079922/page1.html is not a proper URL. You need to add url encoding
• On the map page of this listing, what’s with the ‘Good to Know’? (plus you wrote it as ‘el Paso’ heh)
• Your MapView is busted - no icons for above ‘100′ it seems. It would be prudent to use the ‘bounding’ function in GoogleMaps so it auto-zooms in as close as it can

In your WebProNews interview, you said people do not get the connection between offline and online. In what ways are you guys making that connection better?

Aaron from Find Buffalo has a dual-interview up, where he asks Paul Jahn and Matt McGee about local search et all.

Do notice how Paul mentions iBegin Source - rawr!

I was reading the latest Business 2.0, and in it was an interesting article on Various, the company that owns AdultFriendFinder (amongst many other *FriendFinder.com sites). It also had an article on LibraryThing, where people can pay to list books they own (the first 200 are for free).

An interesting point by the owner of Various, Andrew Conru, was about how people wanted to pay - in the case of their BigChurch.com site (religious dating), their registration jumped immediately after adding a subscription fee. To quote verbatim:

“On the Web there are not enough filters to sincerity”

I couldn’t agree with this quote anymore. As is evident on social-networks like Digg, the ‘mass’ effect is not necessarily a good thing - mob mentality caters to the lowest denominator, with fantastic news stories such as ‘AWESOME PIC’ the current du jour.

Money has always been a filter. Be it a private school that asks for a ‘donation’, be it a conference you have to pay $5000 to get into, or be it a forum that charges you access to its member areas.

The evolution of most medias has evolved from free -> advertising-supported -> subscription based.

It has happened to newspapers
It has happened to radio
It has happened with television
It has happened on the web (ie online newspapers or forums)

We already have a Digg-like site with a paid barrier of entry with Metafilter.

There are two fields that require a subscription/upfront-fee for admittance (and its coming):

1. Blogs
Yep, I said it. I remember when Greg Sterling mentioned the idea (sorry can’t find the link), I was ready (quite a few people were not). And why not? What is so different about blogs that a subscription model is so horrible? Heck you can argue Search Engine Watch already does it.

2. Local Reviews
I’m not advocating something closed off like Angie’s List. No - the entire point is to leave everything open, but - to contribute you must become a subscriber. It’s an odd situation isn’t it? Everyone can see everything for free, but if you want to write a review (which takes up your time), you gotta pay for it.

Lets step back for a second and think of the situation (where the initial catch-22 problem has been solved). You have a local review website that has 10,000 reviews in your area. Every single reviewer has been ‘qualified’ by having to pay an upfront free (lets say $15). In such a situation, people want to contribute. And knowing they will be contributing alongside serious people (qualified by the buy-in), the ensuring contributions should also be high quality.

There will always be shills. But a combination of upfront free + ‘invites’ could be a great way to go at it (if done properly).

Synergy was an awesome buzzword. Not only does it mean something, it just sounds awesome. If you had synergy, you couldn’t go wrong.

People have often asked me - is there something wrong with me? Do I have ADD? (not to imply ADD is wrong, but you get the idea). Why can’t I just *focus* on one thing and go with it?

The answer is simple: having resources in various areas makes it much easier to ‘push’ a product.

Case in point: Blog Flux Local

While not launched, the entire project is a very daunting task - we essentially want to catalog local content, and geocode it to where it belongs. Similar to outside.in, but really - more simplistic.

So one of our initial problems was - how do we figure out where a post is about? We can attempt to parse out street intersections etc, but that is haphazard. We can ask people for GPS coordinates (FeedBurner supports this) - but who the hell is gonna figure that out?

The simple truth is that we associate places with names (or even street intersections). I would say “McDonald’s near Elm and Queen Street”. I wouldn’t say ‘131 Elm Street’ or ‘23.2352, -115,234234′ Now to be able to do something like that, we need both the business data and the geocoder.

And so now in comes iBegin Source and iBegin Geocoder (launching soon). We already have support for linkage on iBegin Source - basically you link to that specific page, and we link back (right now you have to manually add the link, but we are working on a trackback system for that). Example: Best Vet Inc in Boynton Beach, FL.

We know the post is about XXX, we know that XXX is located in YYY - so now we know where all of this is.

The next challenge then is to introduce bloggers into this system. And that is where Blog Flux’s fantastic reach comes into play. Almost 31,000 blogs approved, and over 72,000 registered users. Throw in Blog Top Sites with another 30,000 members (50% overlap with Blog Flux), and you now have the potential to reach 87,000 users about this service (by the time we launch it should be 90,000). Blog Flux is going from strength to strength (just peaked at 45,000 pageviews a few days ago) - this will just push it further along

I’m not going into more details about how we are presenting the data and so forth (aha!), but this should give an idea on how having multiple established brands can be a good thing. Do remember that both iBegin and Blog Flux have their own staff, so it’s not like you can just setup two brands and enjoy. It takes time to do that too.

The newest local search site has arrived, and this time its Canadian: ZipLocal

My standard practice of welcoming a new site is to usually point out about a dozen mistakes they have commited (usually over at Greg Sterling’s blog). But things change, and this time I have my own blog - huzzah!

Furthermore, in terms of disclosure, the investing company behind ZipLocal was interested in our iBegin product. I met them. But I’m reviewing these guys because - well, I review all local sites.

So, things that ZipLocal needs to fix up:

• The frontpage takes eons to load. The frontpage took 10.875 seconds to load. I can only assume its the gobs of JS they are loading, but simply unacceptable.
• Beta 1.0. Slight one, but seeing that just angers me beyond belief. These guys have existed as RedToronto for years. They have been working on this for a while. Sure there will be bugs. But what the hell do you need a beta 1.0 line for?
• I’m a big stickler for un-needed linkies. Why have something that turns off Display Tips? The actual display tips are actually very cool, and kudos to them. But when I look in the top right, I expect a login (or *hint* language selection). Having it there seems like a waste
• ‘Send Feedback’ vs ‘Contact us’ - what exactly is the difference? Why not just have the ‘Send Feedback’ form on the Contact us page?
• Need to clean up their categorization - Q - “Quilts Whol & Mfrs” doesn’t cut it. I have an entire list of popular abbreviations for categories if you want it [from ‘acces’ to ‘whol’]
• I hate the fact that on certain inner pages I have to go back to the frontpage to do a search. What the hell people - if I visited the Help page you can be damn sure I am interested in searching.
• We own two stat-tracking programs. Combined, they track 500,000 uniques per day. And guess what - 4-6% have Javascript off. So when I click on your feedback link and end up here, you can be sure I am unimpressed.
• The CSS has to be tweaked on the frontpage. When you actually fill out what and where, the text is aligned way to the top of the search box, with maybe 2 pixel padding on top, and 10 on the bottom
• Search results: that radius circle is quite cool. And having the TTC (Toronto) on the map also - very cool. Nice one on that.
• I think the choice of Google Adsense colors made me cry. Holy painful on the eyes batman
• The map hated me when I was using it. I pressed zoom in twice, the map image disappeared, it hung for roughly 10 seconds, and then WHOOSH came back. The map is *VERY* sluggish - it just chugs on my machine (and this puppy has 2 gigs of ram and enough horsepower)
• I hate it when I click on a listing I get this massive box that takes up the entire space above the map, when all it needs is a few hundred pixels. Talk about jarring experience. And what is with that + in the topright of that popup - how am I suppoused to magically fathom that it takes me to a page.
• I would like a list view. Mostly because the map is amazingly slow.
• It has built in directions. Pretty damn cool
• The site passed the apostrophe test - huzzah guys. Almost everyone out there chokes on the fearsome ‘
• The names are normalized - again, good job on that.
• Clicking on ‘Your Search History’ throws out the smallest scrollbar imaginable. I did notice that it did not overlap over the map. Come on - that sucks. And dont use a stop sign for the image - use an X image.
• If they don’t find any results, they spit that out without the option of extending the search radius. Why?
• The search couldn’t find Wal-Mart (even though it would suggest that name). This is with a 75 km radius from downtown Toronto - the right most part was Oshawa, and it even covered Hamilton and Niagara Falls. And no Wal-mart?

Just because of the Wal-mart debacle, I give it a D-

Whew - that turned out to be a long one. They should be paying me for this