Finally, a Directory of Local Search Directories

I love good aggregations of content. As mentioned recently, yellow page style directories are becoming increasingly important for businesses that wish to target local searches, in other words, geographically-targeted searches to find a business of a particular type in your area. Now there’s something called the Yellow Pages Association (YPA) and they’ve published an online directory of local search engines. Useful stuff if you need that kind of thing. Here’s the link to the directory of localized directories. Enjoy.

DropLoad: a Free, User-Friendly File Transfer Service

Credit my son, Andrew, for this tip: DropLoad.com let’s you upload up to a 100MB file and then auto-sends download instructions to the person to whom you want to send the file, and then auto-deletes it from the server in seven days. It was immediately useful to me in the delivery of a large file to a client. Saved me the usual hassles. Hopefully, it will help you too. Oh yea, and it’s absolutely FREE. A grand Hazzah (salutation) to the creative folks who provide this free service.

La Madame du Paid Search + Tip

Here’s a great resource for real online advertisers. Catherine Seda not only wrote the book (literally) on pay-per-click advertising, but she has written tons articles.

Her most recent for Entrepreneur magazine is on the merits of local search, which if you haven’t heard, is the ideal way to go for those of us who tend to do business only with locals–even on the web– including all those tire stores and other retailers who must market to customers who can literally show up at their door. Click here to read more about how “geographic-targeting get your online message to customers right around the corner.”

Apple Back in the Spotlight

As a mac man and an Apple stockholder, it should be clear that I’m a fan of one of the most innovative companies in the history of technology. So, of course, I’m pleased to see Apple back in the spotlight as evidenced by the current cover story in Fortune magazine, How Big Can Apple Get?

Wired: The End of Radio… Really!

Right. Podcasting is just a piece of the replacement of radio by “on-demand audio.” Thanks to Tivo, podcasting and a slew of other digital technologies, combined with smaller, cheaper, faster electronics, media is finally coming into a new generation where we can see and hear what we want, when we want it. Thank goodness!

IMHO, Wired magazine is back and getting better and their recent cover story on this trend is more evidence of that editorial success. I don’t mind that every month they publish something from one of the most important intellectuals writing about digital rights et al, Lawrence Lessig. He’s well worth following.Read the coverage from the Wired cover story. It’s already online.

More Kewl Podcast Links

OK. I promise. This is my last podcast post for a while. The “Marketing Diva” has her own take on the podcasting trend and her blog post includes a bunch of decent links to articles, resources, podcasts, Power Point presentations and more. Enuf said. Click here to dish with the Diva, Dahling!

Podcasting for Profits?!?

What is this? 1999? 😉

In the article, For a Start-Up, Visions of Profit in Podcasting NYTimes’ John Markoff stays sober in describing a mini-start up that’s making a move on the emerging market for podcasts. The most quotable quote, IMHO, attempts to provide perspective on how the leading commercial audio download service, Audible.com and podcasting may overlap (in the future, of course) with radio listeners:

“When I started Audible and we started signing up radio partners, people would ask me, ‘where does your technology leave radio?,’ ” said Donald Katz, Audible’s chairman. “Now it’s clear that the creative capacity that is out there greatly outstrips the capacity of the radio pipeline.”

And, here’s the good news, from my perspective, as described by Markoff:

“While still too much in its infancy to be considered an immediate threat to the radio industry, podcasting does present the prospect of a growing army of iPod-toting commuters who take programming decisions out of the hands of broadcasters and customize their own listening.”

America’s Greatest Online Poker Player is 17

If you’re interested in online poker, you will likely enjoy this article from Sync magazine. I did, and I am. Watch for more in Media Mall’s online poker section soon (I hope). Click to read: America’s Greatest Online Poker Player

Easy Jump Start & Podcasting Pitch

Tinu Abayomi-Paul who writes for Search Engine Guide wrote a somewhat optimistic yet useful pitch, Why You’re Missing Out on Hundreds of Visitors If You Aren’t Podcasting which includes a link to her even more useful HowtoPodcast blog which includes a quite groovy little Flash movie, “The Easy Podcast Movie” which shows you how to do it in a few easy steps. $5/month and you can record yours on the phone. Maybe this is the revolutionary medium I hope it is and, of course, even those without iPods or other MP3 players can still listen on the Web.

Podcasting Builds Momentum, Gets Defined

iPod promo OK. I admit it. Maybe podcasting IS the beginning of the personalized webcasting that I wrote about for years in Videography.

I was impressed with the NY Times coverage this weekend… snappy examples… Tired of TiVo? Beyond Blogs? Podcasts Are Here. I take as a sign of emerging yet premature maturity 😉 that there are already sites like Podcastalley.com and Podcastbunker.com, that review and rank podcasts.

I even download the iPodder podcast aggregator software, but I’ve not yet put it fully to use. Although, if you’re interested in learning more, you might check out Dave Winer’s (he’s one of the originators of the RSS, Really Simple Syndication format) well-linked definition of podcasting: What is Podcasting?