The Praized Blog

At the EADP conference last week, I had the chance to listen to a great presentation by my friend Christer Pettersson from Eniro, the Nordic Countries directory publisher. Their online strategy has always been very progressive but this presentation has convinced me that they are amongst the most innovative directory publishers worldwide.

Here are the highlights:

• They’ve introduced moderated reviews and ratings within their directory site a year ago with great success. They want this database to become a new competitive advantage that cannot be easily replicated by competition. They offer an opt out for merchants who don’t want it but very few have done it. Some advertisers even include their review scores within their print ad! Users love it.
• They now offer free user-generated classifieds
• Eniro acquired 50% of Bubblare.se, the Swedish YouTube. They’re placing a bet on the explosion of online video advertising and want users and advertisers to upload videos.
• They want to encourage tagging
• They want people to upload pictures and are introducing picture navigation
• They want users to update/improve their residential listings
• They’ve launched a corporate blog

Update: just before publishing this post, I received news that Eniro had acquired Krak.dk for 400M DKK ($72M). According to what I’m reading (my Danish is quite poor…), Krak.dk is one of the leading local search and mapping site in Denmark.

What it means: Eniro has clearly decided they would experiment with all sorts of Web 2.0 applications and features within their network of sites. Kudos!

Lots of things I want to blog about today (the Facebook f8 Platform announcement, Christer Pettersson’s presentation at the EADP conference) but, as I’m just coming back from Barcelona, I have a lot of catching up to do and am still jet-lagged. So, here’s a grab bag of noteworthy news that happened while I was away:

• Local Matters launched a beta version of LocalGuides.com, their Local-Social play (what I call Local 2.0). Perry Evans had shown me an alpha release a few weeks ago and I was very impressed with the concept and the site. They describe it as “a new approach to creating a “social-local” experience in the Local Search domain”. Perry adds: “The site empowers consumers with the tools to create, annotate, expand and share lists of local businesses
  and places – publishing their own personal local guides.” You can read more on Perry’s blog. I’ll get back to it in a few days once I’ve had the chance to play with it.

• Publicar announced the re-launch of their local search engine for Latin America at www.PaginasAmarillas.com. The new site powered by i411 provides business and residential information for 14 countries in Latin America.

• Directories.ch offers 3D views from selected Swiss localities (via EADP.org)

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to co-host the interactive session here at the EADP conference in Barcelona. Participants (about 90 people grouped in 16 teams) were asked to do a blind wine tasting exercise and submit comments & ratings about eight Spanish wines. The comments were appearing in real-time on a giant screen in the room. At the end, the various teams had to vote for their top 3 wines and try to guess their price. At the same time, we had a wine expert from our industry, Trevor Fenwick, who was tasting the wines and coming up with his own comments and ratings. At the end, we compared the expert’s view vs. the opinion of the group to prove the concept of the wisdom of crowds.

It was a great session, combining Web 2.0 and wine tasting! I called it Crowdtasting… We had a whole range of wine tasting comments going from very serious and relevant comments, to single words (still relevant) to silly messages and even spam(!?!). This clearly showed that moderation might be needed in user reviews. And did the concept of wisdom of crowds pass the test? Yes, the group and the expert agreed on 2 out of top 3 wines. I had a great time and a glass of the best-rated wine at the end. If you’re curious, that wine was Scala Dei Cartoixa reserva tinto - Priorat - 2003.