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 about the rentals and the populations. Want a sense of the “coolness” of these areas as well. Still, very useful stuff.
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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 streamlining the interface but can’t streamline the search. Once again, engineering overrules the consumer experience. I envision this kind of dialogue:”But, ma, they’re two separate database, I can’t search both at once.”"Now, dear, if Google can do it, so can you.”"I HATE GOOGLE. I HATE GOOGLE. You’ve always liked Google better than me. Google’s UGLY. Stupid Google.” ”Oh, OK, Honey. We’ll keep the two separate search boxes for now. Now, let’s get some ice cream.”Sound like anybody you know? 
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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 + P +VS) from Srmana Mitra (although, as a mathematician, I don’t understand the need for the parenthesis). I think all of this is just trying to make the case that Web 3.0 = Semantic Web. First, this whole versioning of the Web is getting ridiculous (although I will claim copyright of version 3.002a). I do think we are evolving towards far more of a “me-centric” information universe that is imbued within the Data Portability movement. I feel like something new this way comes. Something where people will start to take much more control of their information and to use that control to their greater benefit. It’s going to be more social than technical but I do think some new paradigm is going to emerge to support this. I think that paradigm is going to be about people learning how to use technology more and more rather than the technology learning more and more about people.
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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 this) and I understand that XMPP (the protocol behind Jabber) is used as the foundation for the mobile platform of Android from Google. More and more plug-and-play and standardization in IM means more consumer adoption and probable interest in its use for interacting with businesses. Of course, I’m not so sure there’d be a lot of activity in your local plumber’s chat room but I imagine tying chat with events, like where you going to watch the Superbowl would find a lot of interest.
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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 advantage”. I’m much more comfortable with the focus later on in the post on relevancy to younger adults and fulfilling their needs for help in facing life’s challenges for “getting married, buying a home, having children.” Like Soylent Green, Web 2.0 is people, plain and simple. I agree with Perry in the yellow ruler question that distribution and aggregation will be key drivers for the transformation of IYP. Not only content but functionality needs to be decoupled from the sites and embedded throughout the network. That’s leveraging the architectural aspects of “Web 2.0″. My concern about trying to leverage Web 2.0 in general is if someone gets the idea all you have to do is slap a social network over top of your syndication strategy and wham, there you go, instant Web 2.0. The problem has been and will continue to be the brands, how they can wean the online from the print sales model, and how they can develop a meaningful long-term relationship with people and not just advertisers. Develop a strategy for embracing that challenge and you’ll be a Web 2.0 company by definition.
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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 offer. Google in turn tracks this and reports back to the advertiser. According to the Print Ads 2D Barcodes page:
To read 2D barcodes, your phone will need several things: a camera (ideally with a close-focus or macro mode) and the proper decoding software installed. Your phone will also need a web browser and data service to visit any encoded URLs.
Pretty straight-forward. Not. Reminds me of the time we were working in the Lab at Local Matters a couple of years ago. Perry Evans came up with the idea of doing just this with 1 dimensional bar codes following the release of some Japanese camera and associated web service. So I said sure and went down to Martin May and talked the project over with him. After a few hours of noodling going back and forth over the user experience of trying to do all this when Martin realized that there’s usually a number below the bar code. Phones are really good at typing in numbers. Of course, Perry and I knew that. We just wanted to make it hard.
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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 the garbage you get in a lot of IYP sites (look for hotels in new york on superpages and narrow to the ones providing hunting trips). Techcrunch goes on about how this is “categorized under the ever expanding umbrella of semantic search engines” which once again shows appalling contempt for the word “semantic”. All this is doing is string match using a select set of phrases that were probably hand entered. Don’t get me wrong, this was still useful. I got some nice hits against “funky” hotels where people had included the word “funky” in their reviews. On closer inspection there’s no semantics here. One of the matches was “No funky smells” which isn’t quite the implied meaning of funky. And doing a search for zen restaurants with bathrooms got me some matches but I’m pretty sure there’s some law that says that restaurants in New York have to have bathrooms. Still, it’s a step in the right ontological direction, semantically speaking.
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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 iPhone. I think that the best strategy is to use Google Maps as your mapping platform and build value on top of it. Google will keep building up value in the visual side of mapping - Street Views and 3D Views will continue to be enhanced. Mapping applications that support decision-making in verticals seem to make the most sense. For example, MySociety provides travel time and house price maps that allow you to dynamically overlay estimated travel times to a location and house prices to get an idea of where you’d like to live based on how long it takes you to get to work and how much you want to spend on a house. I don’t think Google is going to build general-purpose tools to do these kinds of things. Of course, I could be wrong now that I write that down. :)
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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 predict that Zillow’s definitions will become the baseline around which neighborhood data will be developed. They’ve released the boundary data and others are going to start using that data to refine and expand upon. Having the polygons makes all of the other services that Urban Mapping’s API provides merely an exercise for the student. Can’t wait to dive in!
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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 price and will pay a premium for time-saving or image-driven products. Couple that with another report from a comScore/Kelsey Group study that Online Consumer Reviews Have Significant Impact on Offline Purchase Behavior where product reviews with 5 out of 5 star ratings can command higher purchase premiums and you can start to see what kind of market segmentation and product features might mean for more Local 2.0 niche products, perhaps those that actually focus on top-rated convenience products and services.
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