Web 2.0 Local Session: Where’s the Video?

This morning I moderated “Why Local Is the New Global” at Web 2.0 with Ethan Stock of Zvents, Joel Toledano of Krillion, Siva Kumar of TheFind and Scott Dunlap of NearbyNow.

One of the interesting things about this panel is that it was a discussion of local in mostly the product, retail and brand context. There was also discussion of mobile. Ethan talked about events and merchant promotions but everyone else was talking about product search and offline product purchasing.

If this session were your only exposure to the “local space,” you wouldn’t have understood that most of the local discussion heretofore has been dominated by talk of small business and yellow pages advertisers. Overall, I thought it was a very strong discussion.

Here’s some data that Scott Dunlap presented in connection with the performance of his mobile Lucky magazine iPhone app:

But the real purpose of this blog post is to ask the guy who had the flip video camera and was capturing the session to come forward so that some of the panelists can get a copy of the video for themselves.

Google and the Local Burger

Andrew Shotland joins in the discussion of Google’s move to show local results for general or ambiguous queries. He points out that one can now get a local result for the query “burger.” 

It was pointed out to me in a comment to the previous post that Google has actually been testing this since late last year and has now decided to roll it out more extensively. Assuming this is correct Google must have seen users positively respond to the presence of the map and the 10 pack in these situations. 

There’s all kinds of discussion about how this will affect SEO going on at SEL and elsewhere. Matt McGee points out that the ISP location matters even more now because IP targeting is the way that Google will identify what local results to show. Inevitably the examples of horribly wrong results start to appear. Today at the Web 2.0 event in San Francisco, somebody told me that he was getting results for Arizona when he tried it out. 

Eventually this will all be moot because IP targeting will be largely superseded by other methods of location identification (triangulation/GPS) baked into the device and/or the browser. 

Google is also getting data from NearbyNow (maybe Krillion) on the product side and we should start to see more local product data start to appear in Shopping if not in search results too.