Ghost of Midnight

An interesting take on Craigslist in Wired is now online.

Online classifieds are a dime a dozen… but many of these services are failing lately.  As reported on Local Onliner…
Jay Schauer, a friend who runs Ad2Ad.com, … complains that “people seem to assume that classified advertising is an easy business to understand and enter. It’s not. It’s a business that demands fierce commitment to localization, [...]

From Greg Sterling today…
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…
Here’s the reality, which BW either doesn’t fully “get” or seem to want to explore in sufficient depth:

Local is about offline — money spent in physical [...]

Front Porch Forum gets lots of predictable postings among neighbors, but I didn’t see this one coming…
“Does anyone know of a place that would have a vintage style Hearse that I could rent like a Limo?  Do I just start cold calling Funeral Parlors?”  -Brennan in Burlington’s Old North End
“Cold calling” indeed.

From the Local Onliner…
Local media is so fragmented that its becoming increasingly important to aggregate classifieds from several sources. GoogleBase and Oodle go a long way in this regard… But other classified aggregators are coming up the horizon, too.
One site that recently launched is iList, a San Francisco-based company that has received $1.5 million from [...]

From Scott Heiferman…
Forbes: “The Watch List: Meetup.com. The bartering economy will expand. Local social networking communities will continue to thrive and help people connect to information, resources, ideas and employees. Meetup.com groups will be at the center of the burgeoning part of the economy. Entrepreneurs will tap these groups for goods and services and to [...]

Here’s Front Porch Forum boiled down to two slides…

Mike Vorhaus blogged today at Advertising Age…
Consumers might “hate ads,” but not enough to pay even as little as a few cents a day to avoid them.
He reported on a survey…
When we asked consumers if they would pay $39.99 a year, which comes out to less than $4 a month, for an ad-free version of [...]

Lots and lots written about online advertising dollars.  Bottom line… it (online ad spend) is big and it’s growing.  Although, it’s not likely to grow as fast as some predictions previously suggested.

Steve Yelvington posted today…

Knowledge@Wharton has an interview with Joe Kraus, director of product management at Google, in which he highlights the importance of social interaction on the Web:
“So, the killer apps that have really worked on the web have always been about connecting people to one another. So, whether it is instant messaging and e-mail [...]