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.

Yesterday we put a few tweaks and bug fixes live including:

• Near-instant map co-ordinates update for businesses that have edited their address.
• A minor design change to the Bizwiki homepage.
• A more robust profanity filter.
• Easier to understand instructions for the email that is sent when a user has forgotten their password.

We’ll be rolling out more changes and updates in the coming weeks.

So keep sending in your comments and 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.

Now there is a new way to search Bizwiki UK — check out the new Bizwiki iGoogle gadget. You can add the Bizwiki UK gadget to your iGoogle homepage, stick it on your Google toolbar and even embed it into your own website.

The Bizwiki UK gadget was developed by our own Casey Lee and we love it.

Give it a go and tell us what you think. We’ll be developing one for Bizwiki US as well so stay tuned!

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/

One of the sessions at this year’s Search Marketing Expo (SMX) was called ‘Search 3.0: Local Search & Blended Results’ and focused on how local listings are being blended into the regular results of major search engines.

Susan Hallam of Hallam Communications referred to a review carried out by Hitwise, saying that there are several new entrants in the local search industry that should not be overlooked when marketing your business, including Accessplace.com Business Directory (one of the business sites that are powered by Bizwiki).

Businesses are also advised to encourage their clients, partners and customers to submit their feedback and reviews to third party sites, since search engines are pulling in business contact details/ review information and blending them all together.

According to Heini van Bergen of Tribal Internet Marketing, nearly 30%-40% of searches have local intent, and for a local business like a dog grooming business in Leeds it is vital to show-up well in search results when someone searches using a keyword combined with either a location name (Leeds) or a postcode (LS7 or LS22).

Among many useful search marketing tips, several stood out. If you do have a business, ensure that:

- its website is linked to from other local business sites (i.e. Leeds pet owners clubs, Leeds pet stores etc.);
- it is added to local business directories (especially if you don’t have a company website yet or do not intend to have one);
- it is added to nationwide online business directories;
- it gets genuine reviews on independent 3rd party sites.

“Personal reviews are the most trusted form of advertising, and they have to be on third party sites, not your own website. But please, do not be tempted to write fake reviews”, – concluded Susan Hallam. Sound advice for anyone who is looking to promote their business online.

Ready to get started? Add your company to Bizwiki, or start contributing additional information and details if your business is already listed.

Jurga Galvan, Bizwiki’s Social Marketer, will be attending the Search Marketing Expo on November 4 & 5. If you’re going to be at SMX London drop Jurga a note to let her know – comments (at) bizwiki.co.uk.