Lawlor Featured in LocalOnliner Blog

I was recently interviewed by Peter Krasilovsky at Kelsey regarding my thoughts on vertical development within newspapers, yellow pages and pure plays. He was kind enough to contact me to get my thoughts on this trend since I've worked with several companies now who have tried to kick off vertical implementations. And when I refer to "verticals" I mean categories like fitness, parenting, gardening, etc. With all the information that the Web offers, I believe more than ever that consumers are having to do more self-selection by interest rather than just surfing the Web. Verticals are a great way to encourage users to participate in an online community and for advertisers to gain that first bit of consumer data to direct content and advertising that is to their audiences' liking. Once you have several verticals built then you consolidate them through a "portal umbrella" and drive interest through integrated site search functionality. You can read my comments at Peter's blog.