Last month I blogged about the death of the Yellow Pages being premature. The next day, R.H. Donnelley continued its aggressive online push by acquiring Business.com for $345 million.

Today, R.H. Donnelley, the No. 3 Yellow Pages publisher in the US, announced it has begun selling ad placements in Yahoo! Local, according to a News Observer report.

According to The Wiz of SearchEnginePeople.com Internet stalwart and SEO guru paid directory of yore, Uncoverthenet.com appears to have been blacklisted and removed by Google.

A simple site search on Google http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=.. shows no reslts. A simple search for uncoverthenet also reveals no results for the site itself. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4GFRC..

Google of course has the right to do as it please with regard it’s own business however, is it possible that the paid links exceptions are going too far?

Only time will tell. After all, paid inclusion extends to every store that extends a portion of its sales to Amazon. Or to Yahoo. Or to Ebay. Or to, well, I’m sure you get the point.

I just received this email from Yahoo!

Dear Yahoo! Photos user,

For some time now, we’ve supported two great photo sharing services: Yahoo! Photos and Flickr. But even good things come to an end, and we’ve decided to close Yahoo! Photos to focus all our efforts on Flickr — the award-winning photo sharing community that TIME Magazine has called “completely addictive.”

We will officially close Yahoo! Photos on Thursday, September 20, 2007, at 9 p.m. PDT. Until then, we are offering you the opportunity to move to another photo sharing service (Flickr, KODAK Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, or Photobucket). We’re making the transfer real simple, and with a couple clicks we’ll automatically move your photos to Flickr or wherever you want them.

Marissa Mayer, Google, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google (my emphasis):

“Google is painted as the algorithmic purist. That’s not our view. The algorithmic approach is important. That said, once you had the basic algorithm, you can layer human elements into it. We have properties like Google Co-op where people can label items and Google Notebook which has human interaction. But you need to layer the two together - algorithms and human elements to achieve relevance.“

The beauty of social networks is that they engage users and facilitate enjoyable forums to discuss a variety of topics.

One of the significant trends of social networks is that they are beginning to develop a distinct local flavour. Facebook
alone has over 1 million members from Toronto.

With this level of engagement it’s tough for traditional local print media to ignore, particularly the Yellow Pages, who have among the most complete local online business listings around. So when will Yellow Pages become social? According to Darby Seiben, Senior Manager - Traffic, Distribution and eProduct Management with YellowPages.ca, they already have.

 Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, on “wisdom of the crowds”:

“In general, I’m pretty skeptical of the idea. And I’m very skeptical of it being applied to Wikipedia in particular.”

The concept of a self-regulating online community where the best bubbles up and the worst gets buried, is a myth.

MySpace bars 29,000 sex offenders
Digg Riot in Full Effect Over Pulled HD-DVD Key Story
Digg Caves in to User Protest: Risks Company
Wikipedia: A Nightmare Of Libel and Slander
Spock Thinks You’re a Pedophile 
Users abuse Facebook
Staff use Facebook to abuse customers

The Carnegie Mellon University has published an interesting study which attempts to show that online shoppers are so concerned with their privacy that they are willing to pay for it.

Sounds catchy and I imagine some e-merchants running to their keyboard to hammer out a premium ”upgrade privacy package” page but alas, it is a little bit different.

See, the 72 subjects were given money to make two online purchases (don’t ask what…) and some were sent to Privacy Finder, a shopping search engine which takes privacy policies into account. This too is a project of the Carnegie Mellon University.

I came across Tyler Reed’s blog who posted this great e-conomy presentation:

It underscores that consumers trust word-of-mouth more than any other form of advertising. In fact, 76 per cent of consumers don’t believe that companies tell the truth in advertising at all.

According to the Word Of Mouth Marketing Association, yes, there really is such an organization, over 90% of purchases made online were a direct result of some kind of word of mouth action and being a known brand website came in 2nd.

I just read that the European Union gave Germany the go ahead to give $165 million for research on Internet search-engine technologies that could someday challenge Google.

Called Theseus, the project is aiming “to develop the world’s most advanced multimedia search engine for the next-generation Internet”. It would translate, identify and index images, audio and text.

European companies in general spend far less on research than US companies do, and so the EU said the project should help change that.

The Theseus project was born out of Quaero, a joint French-German Internet search initiative. Quaero was put to rest in December 2006 when the German and French researchers “took different directions”.

Tony Wright at SearchEngineWatch had an interesting post regarding Google’s Local Search Land Grab.

As anyone who has ever done directory work before (Hey Tom!) knows, the infrastructure costs are prohibitive in as much as the legwork and the adminstrative work involved more often than not prove prohibitive barriers to entry.

Interesting that Google has solved both, turning once again to its infrastructure base at the academic and collegiate level to accomplish both, the required feet on the ground, and the data entry.

Google never fails to recognize the value of every dollar and it perhaps for that reason they see so much of a return on every dollar.