Seeing Forests

I’ve been in Europe off and on the last 6 months working on Local strategy in several countries.  The impact of culture and language in the use of the Internet on a local basis has been quite a good experience.   One thing I noticed is that the complexity of the North American market, for [...]

I was following up on Zillow’s release of its neighborhood data and noticed in their sample neighborhood implementations, Zilpy, a housing rental site.  It looks they’ve mashed up Zillow’s neighborhood data with their rental data.  I can see, for example, rental heatmaps in my Denver area.  Very nice.   I just want more - more than just the facts [...]

Greg Sterling in YellowBook Redesigns Amid Traffic Surge talks about the new look for YellowBook and how they have experienced a tremendous growth in traffic.  Apparently the traffi might have something to do with the Grasshopper David Carradine of Kung Fu fame shilling for them in TV ads of late more than anything.   My point is come on, you spent all this time [...]

ReadWriteWeb asks: Web 3.0: Is it About Personalization? in reaction to an article in the Guardian: Web 3.0 is all about rank and recommendation.  There are a lot of pithy phrases being thrown about such as that from Robert O’Brien saying:  ”Web 1.0: Centralized Them. Web 2.0: Distributed Us. Web 3.0: Decentralized Me” or my personal favorite: Web 3.0 = (4C [...]

On the heels of this post: Could Instant Messaging (XMPP) Power the Future of Online Communication? the announcement thatMeebo Launches Rooms API - Chat Gets Everywhere reminds me of the potential of IM on Local 2.0 sites.  It looks like you can pretty easily embed a chat room in a web site with Meebo (I’ll have to try [...]