At $40 billion a year for traditional print advertising (10 times the size of the existing search engine advertising market), the online Yellow Pages advertising market is the biggest revenue opportunity for search engines now that the pay-per-performance revenue model is cemented. Since most services transactions happen offline, Google/Overture style PPC (Pay Per Click) is the perfect way to charge advertisers.

Latest figures show that search for local services is twice usual estimates, at 25% of all commercial searches online.

The market for local services has traditionally been owned by the phone companies who used phone numbers as the key for Yellow Pages listings, however, Yellow Pages publishers have been lazy and arrogant and are just realizing that they could be crushed by the likes of Google, since the majority of revenues will soon come from online advertising. Traditional publishers’ online Yellow Pages are usually very poorly executed, for example, Dex only introduced searchable listings (instead of browsing a directory) at the beginning of this year.

The model for online local services is probably Citysearch who offer paid listings alongside the directory and include value added content such as ratings. Craigslist should be in there but the lack of focus means that the biggest services advertised have gravitated to the seedy or low cost end of the market, Craiglist’s biggest services advertisers seem to be prostitutes, whereas Yellow Pages’ are doctors, dentists and lawyers.

Although Yahoo has had a local services tab for a while, it hasn’t linked this to pay-per-performance advertising, however, an Overture service is in the works. In addition, Google will surely ditch their increasingly defunct DMOZ powered ‘directory’ tab for the Yellow Pages service at Google labs. For Google, Yellow pages may have an added bonus - since local services require a search term plus some information about yourself, such as location, storing this information in a profile benefits users and helps build in a ’switching cost’ to lock in users. Perhaps this is the kind of profiling service they should morph Orkut into.

There may be an opportunity for weblog publishing tools to package a product geared to small business websites. In order for PPC local services ads to work, they must click through to a webpage about the service, but most of the 100M local businesses in the US do not yet have a website.

Andrew Grumet has an excellent proposal for using RSS to share and syndicate TV listings that can be used to instruct your PVR to record program information.

Given that traditional academic clothing, mortarboard hat and black robe, has religious origins, does that mean that it is now illegal for French scholars or teachers to dress as scholars?

Also, since it is traditional for American high school students to graduate wearing mortarboard and cape, perhaps the students of the American School of Paris would be expelled were they at a public school.

Perhaps next time professors parade around the Sorbonne in traditional garb for a formal occasion, someone should test France’s proposed law and demand their expulsion.

Satire aside, this excellent New York Times article outlines some of the real complexities of the issue.

1. It is backed by the head of the Paris Mosque who:

“praised today’s vote as “impressive” and a “buffer” against Muslim fundamentalists intruding into French secular institutions”

2. Communism has been historically agressively secular but French Communists are among the few detractors of the secular laws:

“Alain Bocquet, a Communist Party deputy who voted against the law, said that it will ’stigmatize’ citizens of immigrant origin and ’set things on fire rather than calm them down.’”

3. The law is a part of the move to secure teaching of issues which are objected to by some, including Evolution and the history of the Holocaust.

“at the Merkaz Hatorah School for Orthodox Jews in the Paris suburb of Gagny, which receives state funding and was vandalized in an arson attack last November, evolution is taught as a theory, not as fact.”

but more serious is this:

“teachers have complained that some Muslim students have been so disruptive in rejecting the veracity of the Nazi slaughter of the Jews that it is impossible to teach the subject”

4. Non public, religious schools, which do in fact get state funding, will not be held to the law.

“Despite France’s insistence that secularism must govern French schools, there are exceptions. France spends billions of dollars a year to fund private religious schools, mostly to pay teachers’ salaries, for example.”

Jon Udell looks at multiple metadata values within CSS class attributes.

CSS is the logical place to put metadata in that metadata often, but not always, needs to be styled - e.g. a ‘headline’ might be big bold and blue.

But the main problem for me is that by using attributes in HTML tags to define metadata you have to count nested tags in a parser, which is a total pain and can cause problems if fragments of information are syndicated.

Wouldn’t it be much better if HTML were amended to include closing attributes?

i.e. you could say:

<pre class="headline">DOJ sues Microsoft</pre class="headline">

instead of:

<pre class="headline">DOJ sues Microsoft</pre>

That way people wouldn’t have to invent tags, which couldn’t be styled, such as:

<headline>DOJ sues Microsoft</headline>

TiVo and PVR wishlist:

1. All PVR’s are sold as commodity hardware with no signup or subscription fee or tie in to Cable or Satellite.

2. TV listings are provided for free by ad supported online services.

3. Opt-in targeted ads based upon your personal and viewing profile (with ability to remove items from viewing profile) are served alongside listings.

4. You have total control and ownership of your profile to block certain advertisers or limit your profile.

5. Either onscreen or via a webpage you can buy from ads based on what you have watched. For example if you watched a travel show about Hawaii you can choose special vacation deals from your nearest airport (you can store your zipcode in the profile), if you want to buy what they are wearing on Sex in the City (heaven forbid), then you can.

Basically I want to walk into a store buy a PVR with no signup and use a different company for free listings that serve the equivalent of search engine text ads but for TV.

Perhaps Google should think ‘inside the box’.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Jim Crow Stories . Democratic Party | PBS

“The South remained a one-party region until the Civil Rights movement began in the 1960s. Northern Democrats, most of whom had prejudicial attitudes towards blacks, offered no challenge to the discriminatory policies of the Southern Democrats.”

Clearly the Democratic party is now the more tolerant party. When did it change?

I don’t mind the guy, but can’t help thinking of this similarity (they really should give that scream bloke some botox injections):

UPI has compiled a list of the nationalities of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay from analysis of multiple news sources.

The results: almost half the foreigners taken from Afghanistan were from the Arabian peninsula (160 from Saudi Arabia, 253, from the Arabian peninsula as a whole), less than 0.2% were from Iraq and there are more Brits than from any other European country.

Going to war with Iraq, meant that you removed a tyrant and had control over almost exactly the same oil reserves (Iraq plus Kuwait) as Saudi Arabia. This would mean that you could tighten the screws there, or be covered if there were a revolution, without drying up the pipeline of oil. Playing hardball with Saudi directly would not have been possible. Just a thought.

Saudi Arabia 160
Yemen 85
Pakistan 82
Afghanistan 80
Jordan 30
Egypt 30
Algeria 19
Morocco 18
Kuwait 12
China 12
Tajikistan 11
Turkey 11
Britain 9
Tunisa 8
Russia (not including Chechnya) 8
France 7
Bahrain 7
Kazakhstan 5
Australia 2
Canada 2
Chechnya 2
Uzbekistan 2
Syria 2
Georgia 2
Sudan 2
Bangladesh 1
Belgium 1
Denmark 1
Sweden 1
Germany 1
Iraq 1
Kenya 1
Libya 1
Mauritania 1
Qatar 1
Spain 1

iTunes wishlist:

1. Ability to create a list of personal favorite songs as playlists/wishlists and publish on a weblog with links to iTunes (newsblogger for iTunes).

2. Affiliate program for above playlists (an Amazon style affiliate program with no physical product to deliver).

3. Ability to send someone a gift of a song with a picture and message (a value added online greetings card).

4. iTunes Music Store API.

5. Publication of aggregated affiliate playlists from weblogs on the iTunes site (iTunes celebrity playlists, but for everyone).

6. iTunes charts by song instead of by album, with cut and paste adsense like code to publish on affiliate sites.

I guess the problem is that the iTunes model is the reverse of the Gillette Razor model i.e. Apple makes money on the handle (the iPod) rather than the blades (songs). But the fact that the songs are a loss leader is a function of the record companies taking too much money - give people 5c per song bought as an affiliate CPA deal and I’d be happy.

The head of the BBC resigned over exactly the same allegation that the Independent makes today. So either the Independent is guilty of far worse than the charges levelled at the BBC, under which circumstances one would expect a gagging order - or - the BBC had covered the truth but couldn’t prove it.