Seeing Forests

The Kelsey Group in the post Will Consumers Ever Rule Yellow Pages?  leads out on a discussion concerning the impact of Web 2.0 on the YP industry.  There’s a “Web 2.0 Checklist” of “transparency, customization, social networks, and user generated content” and a challenge for the YP industry to “embrace such change and turn it into their [...]

As Dan Frommer reports Google’s Newspaper Ads: Big Hopes For Small Barcodes, Google is trying to merge print and online with 2 dimensional barcodes or Semacodes.  The idea is that people can use a cell phone to take a picture of the bar code in print, go to a web page, and take advantage of some special [...]

TechCrunch posts ‘Find Something That Is “X” And Has “Y” With Circos‘ to talk about the Hotel and Restaurant search engine Circos - Search in Color.  At first blush it’s got a lot of promise - finally I can find funky hotels with Internet access in New York.  Filtering using words people actually use as opposed to [...]

I understand why companies provide their own mapping solutions but I just don’t see how they’re going to compete with Google Maps in the long run.  Those of us living “la vida Apple” enjoy location-finding services, satellite imagery and local search all delivered on the surest sign we live in the 21st century - the [...]

Well, that didn’t take long.  In Neighborhoods II I essentially  said that Urban Mapping’s Neighborhood API will become moot because neighborhood data will become a commodity as others release their data.  So, as Greg Sterling says, There Goes the Neighborhood, Free, Zillow has released Neighborhood Boundaries under the Creative Commons license. Although people can argue about which neighborhood is which, I [...]

A recent report from Forrester Research, entitled “Retail Channel Surfers Prefer To Buy Online“ by Carrie Johnson has some intriguing little bon-mots.  66% of Online Shopper prefer Brick-and-Mortar Stores as their Retail Channel. Apparently men buy about 50% more than women and all expect to pay less on-line.  Younger males in particular are less focused on [...]

Gregg Stewart over at Search Engine Watch says that Local Search Lives or Dies by User Reviews.  I would have thought actually having decent search results would somehow be central to the long-term viability of “Local Search”.  But, sure, User Reviews, got to have them.  Just slap up a little box, add a few stars, and bang, Ratings [...]

Read/Write Web notes that folks from LinkedIn, SixApart and Flickr have joined DataPortability.org to go along with Google and Facebook joining.  Couple this with the TechCrunch rumors of Google, IBM, and Verisign getting on the OpenID bandwagon, and you’re seeing a real push towards user-centered control of user content.  Is there no White Pages company out there that’s going to capitalize on this trend?  I [...]

Read/Write Web has a post Semantic Web: What is the Killer App? that tries to identify a number of application categories from which the Killer Semantic Web application can emerge.  As a pet peeve, including “Natural Language Understanding” as a potential killer semantic web application weakens the post.  If we could have computers understand natural language that [...]

As Greg noted at Screenwerk and Brady at O’Reilly Radar, Urban Mapping is opening up an API to its Neighborhood database.  It is a smart thing to do as while this data is not widely available it will become more of a commodity as others with source neighborhood data start to distribute access to that data.  I’m expecting that others will [...]