A recent post by a local portal guru cites an employee memo from Gannett’s CEO Craig Dubow saying that “news and information will be delivered to the right media - be it newspapers, online, mobile, video or ones not yet invented - at the right time. Our customers will decide which they prefer.”
Dubow goes on [...]

Thanks to one of my favorite blog sites the Local Onliner, I was pointed to the co-founder of Judy’s Book blog Andy Sack. If you haven’t seen Judy’s Book, it is a local e-commerce portal appealing to local businesses (sound familiar?). On his post, he talks about the big issues facing local e-commerce portals which [...]

I was reading a blog a few days ago about the growing online classifieds market. The discussion centered around the Yellow Pages online vs. local directories online. As I read the article and started thinking about our local networking groups that we’ve started pulling together each month, I realized a new competitor in the local [...]

The experiment in local business networking this week was a huge success. Our format was a bit different than most business networking groups I’ve been involved in, primarily because I’ve never liked a business network group. I could never put my finger on it, but it dawned on me a year or so ago the [...]

I’ve been thinking for a few years about how to help communities “network” better. Not the cable and fiber networking, but the social networking that communities do.
There are chambers of commerce which provide some level of business networking. Their biggest problem is they are great for businesses to know other businesses, but not so [...]

Our first newsletter for Fishers, Indiana went out yesterday through the post office and they should be hitting streets today and early next week. We managed to sell about 5 pages of ads total into it, making our first issue 12 pages total (which seemed thin by comparison to atGeist’s newsletter).
With our new TownePost platform [...]

Some of you that have been following the atGeist.com project for the last three years will be happy to know that we finally launched our newest project, atFishers.com. This website and print newsletter is in nearby Fishers, Indiana, contiguous to the atGeist newsletter distribution and targeting over 12,500 new residents. In addition to the experiment [...]

Now that I’ve been doing a local portal for over three years, one thing that I realized is that the tone and journalistic style of “local” is not AP Stylebook. When I was taking journalism classes at Ball State, the AP Stylebook was the Bible for journalists. Quote at least three sources for every story. [...]

Sure, every local portal owner knows about Google’s AdSense program, a revenue sharing ad affiliate network that pays you for placing Google AdWords ads on your website or blog. But did you know about a text linking ad campaign manager that takes up less real estate and actually helps your search engine optimization program? Didn’t [...]

Borrell Associates Inc. just published a report looking at the increase in online local advertising over the last two years. In 2005, local paid search amounted to $420 million and 5.6% of all sponsored links on the major search engines. This year, the amount is predicted to be over $1 billion with 33% of sponsored [...]