4 hours ago

Screenwerk Business Insider captures the decline in 2009 (and before), citing statics that approach shocking: 105 newspapers have been shuttered. 10,000 newspaper jobs have been lost. Print ad sales fell 30% in Q1 ‘09. 23 of the top 25 newspapers reported circulation declines between 7% and 20%. . (Read More)

1 day ago

Submitted by Matthew Sboc from Google Reader: Michael Jackson's Life JourneyMibazaar has created a Google Maps mashup that shows Michael Jackson's biography from his birth in Gary in 1958 to his recent death. The map shows important stages in Michael Jackson's life and is accompanied by the occasional video from YouTube.The map automatically animates, in chronological (Read More)

12 hours ago

Small Business Trends BlogRank is a new ranking system for blogs. You really should check it out.BlogRank dynamically ranks blogs in a wide variety of categories.  Here is a small sample of the categories:music blogsAsian food blogsmuseum blogsreal estate blogstechnology blogsThe sheer number of categories and blogs is impressive.  Data is coll (Read More)

1 day ago

Submitted by Matthew Sboc from Google Reader: Jennie O'Keefe's Mr. C. Goose. The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) launched their summer exhibition last Friday with a big party featuring “the smooth summer sounds of Toronto synth-rock-pop combo The D’Urbervilles” as live entertainment. Hopefully ironic press-release writing aside, "Pulp Fiction" brings to (Read More)

2 days ago

Submitted by Matthew Sboc from Google Reader: Google’s recent blog post describes how they use eye-tracking to improve the usability of the Google search results page, and showed that eye-tracking is a valuable technique for website optimization. The post received a lot of media attention, including mentions in leading blogs like TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb, all indica (Read More)

Jun 04, 2009

Submitted by Courane01 from Google Reader: Did you know that about 40-50% of your site’s visitors leave after seeing just a single page?*If half of your traffic disappears, it will take a heavy toll on your site’s conversion rate. Understanding why visitors leave and how they interact with your site is crucial to your business, and bottom line.ClickTale has helped t (Read More)

4 days ago

Submitted by Matthew Sboc from Google Reader: Figuring out who is on top of the heap in the online directory business is a complex task: On one hand, a “directory” category is kind of an oxymoron, given that so much of what is quantified is based on search engine optimization.Only 25 percent of Citysearch’s traffic, for instance, comes from its destination URLs. Some s (Read More)

4 days ago

Search Engine Watch Blog YouTube is now allowing advertisers to incorporate a "Call-to-Action overlay" on their videos. With the overlay, advertisers can drive traffic to their sites where they can make purchases, sign up for email newsletters or whichever action an advertiser wishes.The Call-to-Action overlays are available for Promoted Videos onl (Read More)

4 days ago

geo2web.com PubQuestPubQuest is a Google Maps mashup that will help you find quality craft breweries, brew houses or brew pubs wherever you are in the USA or Canada.It is possible to search the map by state, province or city. Alternatively, it is possible to pan and zoom the map and the markers will automatically be updated.Brew pubs a (Read More)

Jun 20, 2009

Submitted by Matthew Sboc from Google Reader: Twitter is responsible for the most popular blog post we’ve written on any of our four hyperlocal real estate blogs. Here’s how it happened, how we use Twitter as a content source for all of our local blogs, and how you can do the same.Twitter, Kanye West, & Local BloggingIt was just about a month ago when I saw this tweet (Read More)

Apr 06, 2009

Submitted by Matthew Sboc from Google Reader: (This is a guest post by Andrew Moore, a hyperlocal blogger from the Kansas City, Missouri area. In addition to being the editor of TheKCGuy.com for over a year, he has been a software engineer for most of the last decade.)I have made what appears to be a rather foolish decision. People often ask me why I built my blog out (Read More)

Jun 20, 2009

Submitted by Matthew Sboc from Google Reader: (I sometimes fear that the conversation here on Hyperlocal Blogger is focused too much on hyperlocal news and what’s going on around us with so many newspapers struggling. After all, local news blogs are just one of my 5 types of local bloggers. I don’t mean to ignore the other types, but we’re in a cycle now where the news (Read More)

Jun 20, 2009

Submitted by Matthew Sboc from Google Reader: Does local blogging really work?If you’re a small/local business owner, that question may be on your mind. It’s a smart question to ask if you’re thinking about using a local blog as a marketing tool. (Business bloggers are one of the five types of local bloggers.) When it’s done right, local blogging can be a great marketi (Read More)

Jun 20, 2009

Submitted by Matthew Sboc from Google Reader: Can you help with this post? I’ve put together this list of (currently) 33 blog directories where a hyperlocal blogger might want to be listed and linked. Some require payment; some are free. Important: I am certainly not vouching for all of these; some I wouldn’t want our local blogs to come anywhere near! But it’s still a (Read More)

Jan 12, 2009

Submitted by Matthew Sboc from Google Reader: Oh, sweet irony. Seth Godin just wrote this weekend about the hyperlocal movement again, and this time he suggests that “not-so-busy real estate brokers” should start a local newspaper. Only, his definition of a newspaper is actually more like a local mailing list, or maybe a local blog.It will cost you nothing. It will bec (Read More)

Matthew Hunt

I am an internet junkie helping small business owners market online.