Some Headlines on Local and Beyond

I’m having trouble blogging because of my schedule here but there’s lots to discuss — eventually. For now, however:

Yahoo! and Viacom yesterday announced (or formalized) a paid/contextual search relationship. Here’s BusinessWeek’s piece on it.

The Yellow Pages Association announced sponsors (SuperPages/eStara) for its Local Search Guide, which I contribute to. Previously Idearc (SuperPages’ parent) announced the rebranding of SEM agency Inceptor (which it previously acquired) and new paid search distribution for its advertisers via abcsearch.

AOL (supported by Google) on Monday launched its own sponsored search marketplace, to complement display ad buying on the AOL network. This deal had been set from the time of the resigning of the relationship in 2005. I got some more color and insight on all this having run into the former head of search for AOL, Gerry Campbell (now head of search for Reuters) in the airport in Washington DC.

PiperJaffray surveys teens on MP3 players and their willingness to pay $500 for the iPhone (Answer: yes). Among teens the iPod (according to the data) has an astounding 82% market share.

Google may do its next TV deal with DirectTV — that’s the rumor. And Goog411 continues to get coverage and intrigue people, which indicates to some degree they were unaware of existing services that offer the same capabilities. And on the heels of Google’s Friday voice search announcement speech technology provider Nuance made its own announcement. Nuance powers Jingle on the front end (CallGenie is behind Jingle’s new category search — as it is “Hello Yellow” in Canada).

I ran into the Kelsey Group’s Mike Boland at an interesting mobile panel (featuring Medio, JumpTap, Nokia and Yahoo!). He’s faithfully blogging away (with more bandwidth than I have at this point).