Local Search Continues Expansion with Enhancements to Yahoo Local & Live.com

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As I’ve said earlier, local search is increasingly the optimum marketing medium for local businesses (from auto repair to therapists). Clearly, the big search engines agree as they continue to enhance their localized search services. The latest enhancements come from Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live.com; who are, of course, trying to keep up with Google. A good overview of these latest local search features is here.

LonelyGirl15: Viral Video Victory

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If you search YouTube for “lonelygirl15,” you get all kinds of debunking, profanity and other forms of extremely personal video reactions. Whether hoax or otherwise, the girl’s got buzz. Personally, I’m with the crowd that thinks she’s too polished not to be a professional production (and I am a video production professional). Regardless, she’s the latest generation of viral video star; and, as New York magazine says, she’s the leading edge of a new (albeit commercial) art form.

More on Online Video Search and Contextual Video Advertising

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The online video revolution continues to rev up (with a long way to go.) Andy Plesser, publisher of Beet.TV (also the author of the piece linked below) is covering it as well as anyone I’ve seen. Here’s his latest piece on contextual video advertising which includes, of course, a video interview. (Thank Gawd for someone who walks his talk.) This short piece also has a nice short list of links to video sites he considers online video advertising pioneers.

I also found the link in this piece to Blinkx.TV to be interesting, including the kewl video mosiac on their home page.

Microformats: The Future of Microcasting?

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I’ve been around long enough to come from the cable TV daze when narrowcasting was a revolution. When I was at USA Network, MTV, CNN, ESPN etc were breakthroughs as channels for what we now call vertical audiences. I like to call the web’s quantum leap into far more finely defined audiences “microcasting.”

Technorati‘s Chairman, Peter Hirshberg (shown here) thinks that the organized tag technology called Microformats will provide important accessbility to the millions of video clips on the web… via tagged indexing. As you might expect, there’s a video clip to explain it.

What do you think?

Free Conference Calls with Built-in Recording

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I’ve been using free conference calls from FreeConference.com for some time. It works. No toll free number, but no per minute charges either. Now thanks to a tip from NYTimes’ David Pogue I’ve found LiveOfficeFreeConference where you don’t have to make a reservation, AND you can record up to 60 minutes of the call (just press “5*”). And, they make this recording easy to share because they send you a link to an MP3 file (within 60 minutes). This way someone who couldn’t be on the call can hear it. Now that’s a convenient service! And the price is right. 😉 Enjoy.