Almost everyone is aware that mobile usage has been on the upswing for the past few years, and more and more search activities are being conducted via smartphones. Since consumers are going to handheld devices to find products and services, it behooves companies to target the mobile market and focus on the unique opportunities to be found there.

Enter Pure Oxygen, a real pioneer in the field of mobile ad optimization. The firm provides consumer brands and marketers independent analysis, tools, and strategy to improve results across mobile web, search, social, sms, apps, and more.

They have created a tool for checking out webpages on mobile devices, the Mobile Site Analyzer, currently in beta, which checks content for optimal delivery on multiple platforms including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

Pure Oxygen also provides consultation services for more sophisticated analysis of mobile friendliness, and they help increase conversion rates and ROI derived from mobile channels.

There’s a surprising number of companies which are ignoring mobile optimization and ad targeting — apparently expecting their regular internet marketing via SEO and PPC advertising to automatically distribute their marketing message via mobile as well. This is a very poor assumption, since traditional internet media does not automatically translate onto mobile platforms, and there’s a plethora of mobile-specific channels which would fail to be exploited under this lack of strategy. For instance, mobile apps can be a terrific source of referrals and promotion, but they must be properly engineered and could be offered through iPhone app store, Android/Verizon app store, and Amazon’s appstore.

I recently pointed out how Google is treating mobile-friendly sites differently than sites without mobile optimization, and this has significant implications for websites’ performance as mobile usage continues to grow. For many local companies desiring to appear and rank in local search results, the need for mobile optimization borders upon necessity — it could well be, ahem, “oxygen” to them!

Anyway, congrats to Brian on the launch of Pure Oxygen Mobile! I think this new venture is targeting a great niche, and will provide just what many companies need.

You can use a Firefox or Internet Explorer browser both of which are compatible with the Google toolbar. You also need a Gmail account with which your comments can be associated.

The sidewiki panel that appears on a website will be displayed to users with the toolbar installed. It is a separate window that appears to the left of your browser. All the comments displayed are stored on Google servers.

This annotation of the web through the sidwiki pane on any website is not owned by a site owner. It is activated by a program that users install on their computers of their own volition.

The disconcerting fact is that when visitors arrive at your site by either typing in your website address or clicking a link that points to your site, they can see comments on the side of your site.

There is no separate URL on the sidewiki panel that shows the source of the comments. They look like part of your site. It cannot be taken for granted that all users know the concept behind sidewiki even if they have willingly installed it on their computers. The comments beside your site can lead to users assuming that it is part of your site.

Unlike your blog on your site where you can moderate the comments, in the case of sidewiki, as the site owner, you have no control over the comments that appear beside your site.

The Google moderation team will ensure that damaging comments will be prevented from getting published. But there is no guarantee on this. As Matt Cutts always states, it is the intent which Google has a close look at (behind any strategy or move by webmasters). In this case, it may not be truly relevant as malicious competitors can hold the key to the comments and the site owner cannot do anything about it.

If visitors to your site were to see offensive comments on the sidewiki panel that fly under the moderation team’s radar, it can reflect badly on your site and can stop repeat visits after that experience.

Consider the example where you search on Google for the term “sidewiki controversy” (without the quotes). Have a look at the second result on the Google SERPs in the screenshot below.

The link below the second SERP result clearly shows the Google domain as the URL. On clicking the link, you are taken to a wikipedia page titled Vaccine Controversy. You can see that the comment on the Sidewiki panel has been indexed by Google and displayed on the Google SERPS. The highlighted portion on the screenshot below (click to enlarge the image) matches the second result on the Google SERPs in the screenshot above this.

If sidewiki comments can influence search engine rankings, then that is a matter of worry too as your competitors can leverage it to their advantage by posting comments that are contextual to the content on your site and get your site ranked for search terms with negative intent.

Google might possibly consider the aspect of monetizing the comments made on sidewiki panel through contextual advertisements in future. These can confound the web landscape further as ads placed can be contextual to the comments made that in turn corroborate with the content of the site on which the sidewiki panel is displayed.

With commercial sites selling products or services, an ad with an affiliate link in direct competition to the site on whose left side it is displayed can become a classic case of riding piggyback on some site owner’s hard work.

I am certain Google will take precautions to counter these possible ill effects. Maybe an idea would be to exclude websites with commercial intent from this sidewiki feature to start with. Once the system is ascertained to be foolproof in the non commercial space, then it can be slowly introduced to include commercial sites.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland ppc services provider that offers both seo and ppc services to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

I describe in the article how Verizon spun off Idearc Media (division which publishes print phone books and operates Superpages.com among other online yellow pages), and set that company up to pay back some billions of dollars for its worth. Verizon then turned around and resold those debt instruments to other companies, fully divesting itself of ownership in the new, standalone company.

This sequence in of itself isn’t remarkable – it’s the normal process a company might go through when spinning-off part of itself to form a new company.

But, my contention is that it was done so in a highly irresponsible manner. Verizon had to know beforehand that print directory business was going into shrinkage mode, and that the debt repayment structure would simply be too much for the new company to be reasonably expected to be able to handle. If so, then this could be expected to be a form of fraudulent conveyance, and Verizon could be culpable.

Is my contention outrageous?

Well, even Idearc’s Chief Executive, Scott Klein, has been paraphrased by the Wall Street Journal as saying “Everyone was aware that ‘$9 billion was really more debt than this business could bear’”. So, Idearc was spun off with a majority of this debt from Verizon from the start – clearly set up to fail.

So far, I’ve seen maybe three different law firms filing class-action lawsuits against Idearc and its executives, based on the premise that the stock tanked due to them secretly changing policies, resulting in inflated-looking sales on the books for businesses with higher likelihoods of not paying for contracted advertising. But, I think the real culprit in all this is likely Verizon – they pushed off a part of the company with an untenable debt load, in large part to pay off debts incurred by Verizon FiOS (Verizon’s fiber optic network) expansion.

Decider brings local business listings for bars, restaurants, music venues, events, and reviews. It appears to be targeted to the college-to-early-thirties demographic, and sports advertisements on the pages.

When I heard about Decider, I immediately though, “oh, yet another business directory site among the many others,” — a thought apparently shared to some degree by Andrew Shotland.

Yet, I don’t think local search has hit a point of “critical mass” like the largest point of expansion just before an industry’s bubble is about to burst. While I do believe that there is likely to be some collapsing of the businesses at the top of the local directory food chain like major yellow pages, the cheapness of launching local businesses at the bottom of the equation virtually guarantees that there will continue to be many more contenders continuing to enter with their own takes on the local search experience. The barriers to entry for launching a local directory are quite low, and various related local info APIs cause the barrier to reduce even more.

Greg Sterling points out that The Onion’s intro into local directory space isn’t all that surprising, since they are a type of newspaper — though, newspapers have also been struggling to get up to competitive speed in the internet age.

Oh, and I should also take a moment to point out that Decider has been fairly savvy in trying to construct a site that is very search-engine friendly. Their developers have obviously worked to incorporate SEO elements into the construction. Page titles are pretty well-formed, along with Meta tags and H1s. Page URLs are very spider-friendly and include keywords.

They even get a special place in my heart for incorporating hCard microformatting elements, although I’m not convinced that their microformat code is valid — the hCard stuff isn’t recognized by my Operator toolbar in FireFox, so I think they may’ve set the hCard up in an invalid manner, perhaps.

The article further reports that the www.InfoSpace.com domain homepage began redirecting to www.Superpages.com a few weeks ago.

InfoSpace continues to operate, albeit at a much-reduced size in terms of numbers of employees and assets, focusing on their metasearch services such as Dogpile, MetaCrawler, and WebCrawler.

It may be that the operators of InfoSpace are indeed looking for their next big thing to do as a company, as was hinted at in their press statements last year. It still makes one wonder what that would be, since they had been a general search engine, then local search engine and mobile services company. The metasearch area seems like a very, very small slice of the pie in advertising terms, and one would expect it to shrink as Google appears to be eating up greater amounts of overall marketshare according to some reports. These changes would all appear to be eroding the value of the name brand as well — something not good, even if the plan involves the eventual sale of that intellectual property asset.

If InfoSpace is to rise back up again it will need a visionary to help it find the next big thing. Interestingly, one of the founders, Naveen Jain, went across the street when he left the company back in 2002, and opened up another competing local search oriented company, Intelius (provider of background checks and criminal record searches), which by all outside appearances seems to be operating quite successfully.

While some are critical of various Intelius marketing efforts, I’ve long noted the robust services they provide and have been impressed with their ability to affectively market their products and increase distribution through the internet using noncontroversial promotions. I’ve even purchased their services on occasion. Regardless of business practices involved, Naveen Jain helped create a compelling product while at InfoSpace and he’s repeated some measure of success at Intelius as well. InfoSpace needs a similar sort of visionary for the sake of long-term viability or they’ll ultimately cash out for investors as only a short-term investment.

WhitePages states on their blog that they’ll use Snapvine’s technology to provide their users with free, private voicemail boxes. In addition, WhitePages will roll out other features such as email and SMS services.

I think this signals that WhitePages.com will be pursuing community development as an ongoing strategy to maintain and build their traffic. This could be a really strong strategy — encouranging community engagement could drive up usage and associated ad revenues considerably for the residential listings directory. WhitePages.com also offers yellow pages directory service through a partnership with Idearc’s Superpages.com.

Considering the rise of Twitter and other mobile phone services, VOIP applications like Snapvine could be poised to be the next big thing.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that the deal likely comes in below previous valuations for Snapvine.

Having this covered in a mainstream rag like TIME is probably nearly enough to make the concept jump the shark, and the novelty element and guerrilla marketing value could be virtually annihilated by familiarity.

I’m not really complaining so much as noting the effect — and noting that the promotion value of the medium could become rapidly eroded when it’s too common. The novelty and amusement factor could give way to annoyance if laser displayed images on buildings became frequent. When a methodology hits mainstream, it’s no longer “guerrilla”.

(click to enlarge)

The image is located somewhere in Vancouver, British Columbia, and was created with the specific intention of being findable via Google Earth (warning, I have the location pinpointed in a link and geocoordinates at the end of this post). It will be a while before Waldo can be found in Google Earth (or in Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, or MS Live Search Maps, for that matter), because there is a time lag in between when satellite images and aerial photos get updated in those services — so, it could be six months to a year before the image is really findable and viewable online.

The image was created as a demonstration of a viral game for Coles’ graduation art project at the Emily Carr Institute. Her blog statement on the project says:

“My addition of a Waldo figure to Google Earth, in a way subverts the whole earth into being part of my game; each rooftop or field then becomes a place where Waldo could be hiding.”

Coles further mentions that she intended the project to artistically confront the question, “Is Google God?”

Coles’ Where’s Waldo project appears to me to be a combination of a number of different sub-genres of art and marketing, simultaneously, making it a very effective piece of commercial art. It is incorporating the emerging discipline of locative art, viral marketing, pop art, commercial art, and digital mapping.

The project has gained viral popularity fairly rapidly, generating media buzz throughout Canada, and it’s now breaking out into other worldwide attention like Wired, and various blogs.

Coles’ ability to get distribution and popularity is not just due to luck — she apparently has access to some good savvy in documenting and distributing info about the project. For instance, Carolyn Coles (sister?) has uploaded pix of the Waldo project in Flickr under a Creative Commons license allowing open distribution — something allowing news reporting sites and blogs very easy terms under which they may include illustration of the work with articles.

We can expect to see a lot more of this type of thing in coming years. I’ve written before about how Yum! Corporation targeted viewers in Google Maps with their “space ad” of the KFC logo on a Nevada desert, and I halfway joked before about how people could improve roof ads intended to communicate graphic messages from building tops like this Waldo art piece. This USAToday article I was quoted in also outlines rooftop advertising, and Google’s announcement of a flyover to update map pics for Australia Day last year had all sorts of people crawling out of the woodwork in attempts to get messages into the satellite images.

Bottom line: online and interactive mapping application usage is picking up and the popular culture is rapidly evolving in attempts to be seen through map search systems.

For those looking forward to seeing Waldo when Google Maps images get updated for Vancouver, the picture will be located at: 49°16′ 04.5″ N, 123°8′ 58.7W (click the link to view the Google Map of Waldo). I expect the map satellite images might get updated anywhere from six months to a year from now.

I’m seeing more and more articles on the subject — this article indicates that as consumers perceive that there’s low usage and little need for print yellow pages books, they’re also coming to believe that the books sent to them are an inconvenience and an unacceptable environmental waste. (I’ve also mentioned before how I find the print directories less worthwhile, even though I used to work for a major yellow pages company.)

Apparently the Cambridge city council and other cities are actually considering going so far as to enact laws requiring that residents must opt-in for receiving the books, or they might ban mass distribution entirely…

The Boston article does reiterate some fallacies, though, when they state:

“In the age of the Internet, it simply makes no sense for residents to get fresh stacks of phone books when they use paperless web browsing to find local businesses anyway. The shift does not cost phone book companies in the long run because they offer the same advertisements on their websites without spending extra on costly printing. Yet the companies still deliver millions of new books each year without asking residents.”

No, this is not so, and it indicates that the reporter didn’t attempt to objectivity by getting commentary from major phone book companies. First of all, not all yellow pages companies give parallel advertising to their print advertisers — often, internet ads and print ads are sold as two separate products. So, they don’t “offer the same advertisements on their websites.”

Second, it may cost the companies more, because print directories have long been one of the most profitable areas of advertising, and these companies’ internet directories do not always equal the profits they’ve been getting in print — after all, there appears to be considerably more competition in the online space where there is a much lower barrier to entry than in the legacy print directories.

The article further misses that it would increase the administrative costs for yellow pages companies if they have to maintain some sort of opt-in records for book distribution. Currently, many YP publishers contract out book distribution to low-cost contractors who are directed to deliver books to businesses, hospitals, hotels, homes and apartment buildings. The low-skilled labor only has to drop books off — no time-consuming record keeping involved.

It is an editorial piece, but I think it would be stronger if they’d at least acknowledged some of the points from the side of the YP industry while giving the opinion that print book distribution should be sharply reduced.

This article, and the phenomenon it’s demonstrating, are intellectually fascinating, though! Print yellow pages companies have a vested interest in continuing distribution of the books as long as possible since it helps to rationalize the continued advertising costs they charge from businesses. But, if there’s any truth to the assertion found in this article — that a substantial number of residents never use the books — then continued distribution of them is a bit like the Emperor’s New Clothes — it’s just giving advertisers the illusion that there’s greater usage of the books and associated worth of the ads in them.

It’s sort of generally expected that as advertisers perceive that the value of the print ads is decreasing, they’ll slowly pare back their print ad budgets, and yellow pages books may die off by a sort of attrition over the coming years. However, this article and other similar ones I’ve seen would indicate that there could be a really ironic alternate fate for print — that consumers themselves in cities and states might force them to halt their traditional mass distribution rather than mere advertiser attrition. If this happens, it could radically speed up the death of print.

I’ve mentioned before along with other analysts about how there are indications that usage of traditional yellow pages is dropping off, though there’s a lot of disagreement as to how much longer the print products can survive. The decrease of the print YP book industry alongside simultaneous evolution of internet business directories is going to continue to define the characteristics of accelerated business evolution in the modern age.

(See also Greg Sterling’s post about print potentially becoming opt-in.)

Newspapers have been very fearful of the internet and have lost revenue from their print side to free internet alternatives. But, it’s clear that embracing greater integration with interactive technologies is one viable way to remain competitive.