Is your Yellow Pages phone book thinner than it used to be? You might not have noticed, but apparently it’s on a diet. The Yellow Page publisher AT&T blames the shrinkage on several factors including (un-surprisingly) online advertising.

According to an article by WWAY, “The 2009-2010 version of the Yellow Pages has 140 pages less than last year’s version, which had 60 pages less than 2007-2008″. That might not sound like a lot of lost ads but when you consider that most of the pages had at least several, if not several dozen, advertisers on them it starts to add up.

It’s no great surprise that instead of paying for an ad in a printed Yellow Pages phone book that will enjoy few, if any, peeks (mine are stacked precariously in the corner awaiting the recycling run) business owners are turning instead to free online advertising. Why pay for what you can get for free?

If you haven’t already gotten your free Bizwiki listing, sign up and add your business now! You can add opening hours, payment types accepted, products, services, specialties, awards won, a special Message from the Company, and of course your contact details and website address. Click here to get started. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or suggestions.

Since we launched the Beta version of Bizwiki.com last week we have been very pleased with the sheer volume of user registrations and company submissions.

We would like to especially thank Choice Window Tinting Orlando for being the first submission we received, just minutes after the US Beta was launched. We wish you all the best in your business and hope your free listing on Bizwiki.com brings you many new customers.

Most companies submitting their details are taking advantage of the Message from the Company field which is great. That’s your space, go ahead and tell us all about what a fantastic company you have and why we should do business with you. Bizwiki editors do not amend what you place in the Message from the Company field (unless it has obviously not been written on behalf of the company) so feel free to advertise yourself as much as you want.

And don’t forget that your initial submission doesn’t have to be the end. If you would like to add more details to your record you can at any time. Both additions and updates are free so if you forgot to add your toll free number or your website address why not do it now? Please note that our editors review all submissions and updates to ensure accuracy.

It’s early days and we have a lot of new features planned for Bizwiki.com so please feel free to contact us with any suggestions or comments you might have. We’d love to hear from you.

We’re happy to announce that the fully-functional Beta version of Bizwiki.com has launched today, enabling our users to build up the most detailed and up-to-date index of businesses in the United States.

Bizwiki invites everyone from business owners and representatives to customers and consumers to get involved in adding and improving company records of businesses anywhere in the US, with everything from contact details to prices and opening hours, completely free of charge.

Regular readers of our blog will remember that we put up the Alpha-version of Bizwiki.com in December 2008 to test it on the web. Even though it was just a work-in-progress version of the site with limited functionality, traffic levels have already grown to several hundred thousand users per month.

There is definitely a strong demand for the sort of information a community-based Web 2.0 business site can deliver, and the increasing number of users on the site provides a compelling motivation for businesses to get involved in adding and editing their listings.

Today’s launch is officially a fully-functional beta, but we already have several hundred thousand pages on the site, with more being added each day. We’ve tried to take ideas and concepts from some of the most successful user-created websites in the world, such as Wikipedia and the Open Directory Project, and improve them to where the ‘anyone can edit’ principles of a wiki can be used in a business-environment.

More features and functionality are on their way, along with a host of changes and tweaks to improve the service further.

In the meantime, to try the new US Bizwiki site or even add and edit a business record, visit www.bizwiki.com.

The Bizwiki difference:

• It’s free – Unlike many established publishers that charge for inclusion, Bizwiki is free to search, free to edit, and free for companies to list on.
• It’s editable – The ‘anyone-can-edit’ approach is a challenge to the frequently out-of-date records of traditional printed Business Directories.
• It’s a wiki – The wiki approach allows far more depth of information about each business to be compiled than anything conventionally available.
• It’s structured – Bizwiki is built using structured data, allowing reusability of information, bulk updates from chambers of commerce or webspiders, and an easy search experience for users.

The Independent newspaper published an article on Tuesday, 3 February 2009, titled ‘So is Wikipedia cracking up?’ in which Stephen Foley explores the problem of vandalism plaguing certain areas of the online encyclopaedia site, and Wikipedia’s reaction to it.

The article states, ‘Barack Obama’s inauguration day was the final straw for Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder and visionary-in-chief, who declared that it was time to break with the tradition of “anything goes”.

From now on, he proposes, editing the biography of a living person will be a two-stage process; anyone can still make a revision, but it will have to be flagged as “approved” by someone higher up the Wikipedian food-chain before it goes live on the site. “This sort of nonsense would have been 100 per cent prevented by flagged revisions,” Wales stated.

Of course, apart from the headline itself there is no indication of Wikipedia ‘cracking up’ – it remains a source of information that millions of people around the world are coming to rely on more and more. What we are really seeing here is Wikipedia moving to a more ‘managed’ approach to editing,  but even this limited move towards moderation will be a big change to Wikipedia’s former somewhat laissez faire approach in allowing changes to instantly go live.

We have implemented a similar approach in having editors involved in the moderation of new company data and business information here on Bizwiki because as a business site, it’s vitally important that users can trust and rely on information. This does slow the process of adding new records down somewhat, but we believe we’ve still kept the best part of the wiki-model, which is a site made by its users for its users.

In Wikipedia’s case, Reid Priedhorsky, who studies Wikipedia and similar social projects at the University of Minnesota, estimated in a recent paper that the chances of any one visitor seeing a damaged Wikipedia page are about one in 140, as the average time it takes to repair damage is less than three minutes, and even less for heavily tracked pages.
However, the most startling fact about Wikipedia remains how accurate it is, not how inaccurate.

“As a researcher, I’m baffled that it works, but Wikipedia is one of the wonderful things that has happened in the 21st century. Many hands make light work. There are millions of people who edit Wikipedia, and many of them track changes to the pages they are interested in. I have 43 pages on my watchlist, for example, covering subjects I know things about. Any controversial edit is likely to be quickly seen by many people.”

So while we can expect their approach to continue to gradually change and evolve, long live Wikipedia and their brave goal of enabling users to create the largest encyclopaedia of knowledge the world has ever known.

We are pleased to announce that the US Bizwiki site is now live as an Alpha version.

What this means is that this is an early version of the site that doesn’t contain all the features that are planned for the final version, and some of the features are not fully functional (that’s the way our technical team describes anything that’s not really working properly that they don’t want to be asked to fix yet).

A huge amount of work is going on behind the scenes, but in the meantime having the site up on a publicly accessible website gives us a chance to stress-test the servers and have a few live users try it out from varying locations.

We will invite more users when the site hits the Beta stage, but in the meantime please feel free to browse around the site and hopefully get an idea of the scope of our ambition in launching the US version of the Business Wiki site that anyone can edit – there will be over ten million companies and organisations listed here when we’re finished!

Here’s to an exciting 2009 from everyone at Bizwiki!

In a recent the Wall Street Journal blog post, Kelly Spors wrote an article titled ‘Yellow Pages Face Extinction’, which says ‘Publishers of the local directories often dropped on doorsteps are bleeding money, my colleague Emily Steel writes today. These directories rely on small businesses in particular for advertising, but many businesses are reining in their marketing budgets in the bad economy and buying fewer yellow pages ads – not to mention just the steady migration over time to online advertising.’

The article continues, ‘Some businesses also feel their money is better spent online by focusing on search-engine optimization or getting a local search ad listing through a company like Google rather than sticking with online ads offered by the traditional print directory publishers. If yellow pages directories were indeed to go extinct it would be a big jolt for the many small businesses that use them as the primary way to generate leads to their business.’

This may be an unexpected point of view for someone writing for Bizwiki, a site totally committed to moving local business information online and away from the paper books, but I’d have to say traditional Yellow Page books are not going to be extinct any time soon.

It is certainly true that many companies are finding advertising online is a lot cheaper and easier to target than adverts in the phone books, and that it provides quantifiable trackable results. However, much though I may hate to admit it, there are sections of the public that still rely on the print editions and remain more comfortable looking things up in a printed book, particularly when it comes to older demographic groups, and the local books are likely to retain these as an audience.

It’s not that long since internet pundits were predicting the end of the newspaper, yet despite similar pressure from online news sites (including their own online editions) printed newspapers look like they are here to stay.

Simply put, Yellow Pages, Thomson Directories and similar print publications are facing a lot of erosion of market share they could previously have taken for granted, and no doubt this translates into pressure on their bottom lines and a thinning of their margins and profitability. However, as Mark Twain might have said, reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated.

Decline is not demise.

Full Article:
http://blogs.wsj.com/independentstreet/2008/11/17/yellow-pages-face-extinction/

Bizwiki.co.uk has once again been mentioned in the Telegraph as a great way for small firms to advertise online.

Being asked for advice on how small businesses can promote themselves on the web, Will Critchlow of online marketing firm Distilled, said that listing in free business directories like Bizwiki.co.uk made sense but questioned the return on traditional paid-for directories. Read the full story here.

The story primarily focuses on promoting your website online. Remember that if you have a website you can add it to your Bizwiki listing at no charge. We’ll even show a snippet of your website’s text in the “From the Website” section on your Bizwiki record.

If you don’t have a website yet you can use your Bizwiki listing to advertise your business online. A Bizwiki listing puts your details in front of potential customers by being distributed to some of the UK’s top local search sites. And it’s all FREE.

So sign up now and add as much factual information as you can. See this post for ideas of what type of information to add to your Bizwiki record and this one for tips on getting it approved quickly.

A new study of 3000 US consumers puts local search at the top of the charts for ways people use to find local business information.

TMP Direction Marketing’s Local Search Usage Study confirms that in 2008 the web comes out ahead of print for local business information searches. Last year’s study showed printed phone directories as having a slightly larger following with 33% of respondents citing print as their first point of call for local information and the web following closely behind at 30%.

This year the tables have turned and search engines top the list at 31% with printed directories falling to 30%. It’s a close race, but as Screenwerk’s Greg Stirling puts it, we have now passed the tipping point. I wholeheartedly agree with Greg’s comment that there will be differences in the web/print usage depending on the category and market but the trend is definitely moving towards the richer data consumers can find online. Printed directories simply can’t provide reviews, opening hours, product and service details in the same way that online local directories can.

What this means to local businesses is that it’s now essential to have a good local search presence. A listing on Google Local, Bizwiki (and the sites Bizwiki powers) and other free online business directories and local search sites help to put your details in front of your potential customers. The good news is that, unlike some of the print directories, Bizwiki is free and you’re not limited to just a phone number and address. And Bizwiki also saves you time by placing your listing on not just the one (albeit fantastic!) site, Bizwiki also powers other major local search sites such as Accessplace.com, TownPages.com and British Services as well as industry specific verticals such as BuilderNet.

Have you signed up for your free listing?

This will be old news to some of our most frequent users, but with the final elements integrated we are very happy to announce that Bizwiki is now the power behind the extremely popular Accessplace Business Directory.

Anyone following the Bizwiki Blog will have read our announcement on July 25th that we now power the TownPages.com local information website.

‘One more reason to add your business to Bizwiki – TownPages’

This has now been heavily underlined by the powering of Accessplace, which Hitwise list alongside such respected sites as Google Maps, Yell.com, BT and Local.co.uk in the top 10 of the UK’s Local Search sites.

See the top 10 table here:

What this means to our users is that by adding your business or increasing the amount of information available about it on Bizwiki, you will get exposure not only to our users but to the very many people who use Townpages for local search and the vast audience of Accessplace Business Directory.

Additional information including photographs is provided to all three sites by Local Data Company, but the only way to get a new company listed is to add it right here.

The good news is its completely free to do so. That’s the wiki difference.

An article for the British newspaper the Telegraph highlights the importance of Internet Directory sites like Bizwiki for businesses forced to save marketing budgets in adverse economic conditions.

‘Blog on and use web pages to drive up sales opportunities

By Richard Tyler, Enterprise Editor

Given the current economic slowdown and that marketing is often the first expense to be cut when firms face a financial pinch, here is a snapshot of some free services being used by firms on the internet.

Internet directories

Traditional directories have moved online, like Yell.com. New free sites feature highly on natural searches: www.Brownbook.net and www.Bizwiki.co.uk are fast-growing business directories with self-edited listings and customer reviews.’

At Bizwiki, we whole-heartedly agree with his assessment. More and more commerce is moving online, and with all the talk of possible recession and belt-tightening in the wider economy, it makes more sense than ever to take full advantage of resources that are available online for businesses -particularly sites like Bizwiki that list companies for no charge at all.

The first step is to make sure your company is listed -simply use the search form at the top of the page. If it isn’t, you can add it for free in a few simple steps. If it is listed, now would be a good time to add more information and details.

Bizwiki gets a wide variety of users from other businesses owners and managers to researchers to competitors to local councils to suppliers – and perhaps even your next customer.

Full article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/08/12/ybmedia112.xml