Wiki Directory BizWiki Launches in US

BizWiki formally launched on last week. It’s an international wiki-based directory site, like Brownbook. According to the release:

Bizwiki was built by industry-veterans with years of business directory and meta-search experience behind them, including Keith Hinde, Matt Aird, Craig Sefton and Arthur Jenkins, who between them have helped develop directory and search products for Infospace, local directory publisher Thomson Directories, TradePage and Webcrawler.

The fact that it involves people experienced in local and the directories business is the only thing that suggests there’s any chance to gain visibility and usage. Regardless success with a directory wiki (unless acquired) is a relatively long-term play.

Yellowikis was the original effort to use a wiki to develop a directory site in 2004. Since that time the major search engines have allowed users to add or edit listings on their local sites.

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Google Announces 2009 Mtkg Challenge Winners

Google has announced the winners of its 2009 Marketing Challenge. The overall winning campaign was from a team in Austrialia on behalf of Little TiGrrs Indoor Play Centre & Cafe.

This competition is all about business students helping small business (SMBs) use Google/AdWords as a marketing tool. It’s party intended to raise the profile of Google AdWords among SMBs and party about exposing the students to Google as a marketing platform. What’s missing is the big PR push that comes at the end — at least I haven’t seen it. And we can’t see the ads/campaigns, which would also be helpful and interesting.

Here are the semi-finalists were from around the world:

Four out of the 11 semi-finalists are from the US and three of those from the same team and Penn State:

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Related: Google now allows busineses to add addresses (dynamically) to AdWords copy. In other words, instead of just the city at the bottom of AdWords copy you can now have a specific address. Here’s an example from Barry Schwartz at SEL:

True Local (News Corp.) Touting OZ YP Decline

News Corp-owned True Local in Australia (not to be confused with Canada’s True Local*) has set up a site that features data showing declining YP print usage (Sensis) in Australia:

The site is called “yellow turning blue.” Others in the US have considered doing this but not set up this kind of a site (that I’m aware of).

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*I have no idea who’s running Truelocal.com now