SANTA CLARA, Calif. (at the BIA Kelsey Interactive Local Media conference): Look for expansion into Canada and the U.K. next year by Angie’s List, a subscription-based site that focuses on home improvement providers. Competitor Servicemagic, a free competitor, has moved into France and is targeting Germany as its next international expansion country.

Angie’s List founder Angie Hicks today said that the company will use some of its $18…

SANTA CLARA, Calif. (at the BIA Kelsey Interactive Local Media conference): In a fairly candid but clearly promotional conversation, Mike Silver, the new executive director of the Newspaper Consortium (and its only employee), and Lem Lloyd, VP of Yahoo for the consortium, said the 800 daily and weekly papers participating in the group are making significant sales --- and they’ve just scratched the surface of the opportunity.

(If you read our CIR overview two weeks ago, you’d…

Facebook has quietly launched a new feature that has the potential to significantly increase the page rank data that Google uses to track Web sites, potentially resulting in much higher placement during searches on Google for Facebook members and marketers.

The change was a simple one. Google searches Facebook's “public listings”…

SANTA CLARA, Calif. --- Talk about a “wow.” Attendance at the BIA Kelsey Group “Interactive Local Media” conference in the heart of Silicon Valley this year is about 450 --- or roughly the same as it was two years ago. That’s a remarkable accomplishment in this economy.

The number of attendees is down from last year, when Kelsey had a relationship with a Search Engine Strategies. But there are 26 sponsoring / exhibiting companies, and the general sessions…

SANTA CLARA, Calif. --- At the BIA Kelsey Group “Interactive Local Media” conference, Kelsey’s Matt Booth said “Uncertainty is the fertile ground of the next set of winners.”

In local advertising and small and medium businesses, what are those prospective winners?

Booth’s answers:

- Advertising will have to have immediacy, with no latency and full transparency on return on investment.
- Lead tracking that’s simple and easy…

Purely by coincidence, Statistics Canada -- the government agency -- reported that Canadians ordered C$12.8 billion worth of goods online in 2007, just a few days after the Federal Court of Appeal ordered EBay Canada to hand over all information needed to identify at least 10,000 of the northland's Powersellers, defined as those selling more than $1,000 a month. EBay, which says more than 32,000 Canadians now make at least significant earnings via its site, has for two years fought the original…

It’s so easy to beat up on Yahoo these days, that when a group of leading marketing execs extol the company’s virtues, we can’t help but take notice. In an article in today’s Ad Age, Chrysler CMO Deborah Wahl Meyer, ad agency GroupM CEO Rob Norman, and Scottrade CMO Chris Maloney say Yahoo is a must buy when it comes to online advertising.

An ad on Yahoo’s home page, says…