The Web was supposed to be the "disintermediator" - the destroyer of unnecessary middlemen....

There are many reasons why price comparisons for services aren’t generally done. (i.e. the difficulty of nailing down providers; price changes, the need for custom quotes in many categories). Generally, people should choose service providers on multiple criteria; not just price. But wouldn’t it ...

I’ve been lately working on trying to generate heatmaps from an assortment of data. To say it has been tough is an understatement - I have tried Python, PHP, and Ruby libs/classes, and all have been too slow, too weak, and/or plain ugly (high peak is red, not blue nor fire-colored). In the cas...

Palore’s Hanan Lifshitz writes an interesting column at SEL in which he says that the best sales prospects for publishers seeking to attract SMB ad dollars are those local businesses that are either already advertising elsewhere or those who’ve claimed online profiles but aren’t ye...

Most web professionals are quite familiar with global search. Search marketing for global search can be boiled down to a two part formula: anchor text + authority. Local search is different. I’ve been dabbling in local search for a few months now, trying to get my feet wet for the supposedly imine...

One of the homespun stories of interactive local media is the rise of HelloMetro, a city guide company that started in 1999 as an entrepreneurial effort in Louisville, KY, and has since grown to include 15 staffers, including five direct salespeople. The company, which has hundreds of Hello(City nam...

Here’s a general article on the local market from Business Week. Many people have seen it and emailed me about it. It bothers me because it’s pretty superficial. And here’s a gem of a paragraph that no doubt captures the author’s personal experience and feelings (complete wit...

Google developed its authorized reseller program in part to reach hard-to-reach SMB advertisers. But now it has awarded that same certification to Where2GetIt. The latter provides a range of services to clients that include franchises, product makers and branded companies with multiple locations. ...

The fact that the average person doesn’t go beyond the first page of search results is well known, and when it comes to Google Maps listings, it’s important for a business’s name to be prominent, too. KeyRelevance’s director of optimization strategies, Chris Silver Smith, gave some tips on t...

Marty Himmelstein’s previous post “Why We Don’t Have Good Local Business Content?” sparked considerable discussion and debate. I’m letting Marty respond to the comments (in two separate posts). The first about the role of SEO in local search is below. The second one, accord...