WebProNews

Gmail Messages Get Richer

It appears that they never sleep at Gmail. After the most recent improvement in conversation-saving with the service, they have now added the ability to preview YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, and Yelp content with a new Gmail Labs experiment.

Yelp Controversy Highlights Trouble With Consumer Reviews

This consumer review thing may need to be rethought. Like just about everything else that came out of the Web 2.0 movement, customer reviews of businesses are huge targets for abuse.

Yelp Branches Out With UK Site

People who are careful with their time and money and either live in or have a fondness for the UK should be pleased.  Yelp, the site famous for offering tons of user-generated reviews, has launched a version catering to this region.

Yelp Review Leads to Defamation Suit

A California man named Christopher Norberg is in the middle of a legal dispute with a chiropractor for posting a negative review of his services on the site Yelp.com. The dispute stems from a billing experience, which Norberg referred to in his review, and the chiropractor filed a defamation suit. It is now a classic example of where the line between free speech and defamation should be drawn.

Local Search Sites Past Peak

Whether it's because of consolidation and pressure from above (Google, Yahoo, etc.), or too much competition from one another, including newer upstarts, traffic to key local search sites appears to have peaked about two years ago.(Disclaimer: I know Alexa isn't 100% accurate, but above the 5,000 rank it's probably roughly accurate.)

How Stumbleupon's Beating Google, Yahoo & MSN

Stumbleupon is one of may favorite social media sites, Not only can it drive traffic that matches or often exceeds that of Digg, stumbleupon users are much less critical/confrontation/judgmental than the typical Digg user.

Plaxo Launches Social Network Pulse

Plaxo launched today its social network, Pulse. Pulse pulls in what they call "people feed" or RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to allow for conversation about the content with your family, friends or co-workers.

Food Fans Have Taste For Online Reviews

Going out to eat should be a pleasant experience. But what do you do when want to find out more about a local restaurant? More than a third of adults have researched online about a restaurant they had not visited before, according to the National Restaurant Association's 2006 research.

Web 2.0 Expo: Venture Capital 2.0

A popular and very funny session today was the session entitled “Venture Capital 2.0: Bright Future or Broken Forever?”. This session was moderated by Mike Arrington of Techcrunch who is a former VC himself and current angel investor. It appeared like it could be boring listen to a bunch of venture capitalists talk, but Arrington did a very nice job spicing it up with well-timed insults and jokes.

Building Blocks Of The Social Web

In a brilliant post on nform.ca, information architect Gene Smith of the Atomiq.org blog outlined the 7 building blocks of social software. This pulls together the work of various people including Matt Webb and Stewart Butterfield and provides a framework that I think is valuable in thinking about social software.