If you have not seen the press release come over the newswire then allow me to be the one to break the news and shed some light on the details. Recently I have formally accepted an executive position with Best of the Web.

Just over a year ago I began having confidential discussions with Greg Hartnett, President and Brian Prince, CEO of BOTW regarding a new web offering that was in the very-very early phase of development.

Over the course of a couple weeks we had multiple lengthy conversations regarding the general aspects about the new product. After some “big brain” strategizing I was offered the opportunity to take the reins & tasked with “make it happen”.

These past fourteen months I’ve been working directly with some extremely smart and highly spirited entrepreneurs on the build-out of what we now publicly call “Local”. We have recently completed major development work and are progressively rolling out nationwide within the United States.

With Local now a notch on my BOTW belt, Brian and Greg approached me a few weeks ago about coming on permanently. Once again we jumped back into having “big brain” strategy conversations and a formal agreement has been made.

As the press release mentioned, I will be responsible for interacting with agencies, identifying distribution opportunities, and project managing new offerings. Since we have already been working with each other for over a year these new responsibilities although challenging are a natural fit.

On a more personal note, I am thrilled to be joining such a great company. Those who regularly attend search conferences are very familiar with the genuine vibe and kinship BOTW exudes. Being able to share in this energy on a daily basis has made this past year highly enjoyable and productive.

I invite my readers to jump on Local and help spread the word of our latest web offering.

This is certainly an interesting development!

Yahoo! Announces Agreement to Acquire IndexTools’ Analytics Business

The acquired technology is expected to extend Yahoo!’s current analytics offerings by adding capabilities to deliver relevant insights and metrics for online campaigns that run across the entire Yahoo! network. Following the acquisition, the first group of customers to benefit from these enhanced tools will be more than 150,000 small-to-medium businesses marketing on the Web with Yahoo!. Additional capabilities enabling third-party developers to monitor and optimize the traffic performance of their applications are expected to follow throughout the year following the acquisition.

How Yahoo! buying IndexTools changes Web Analytics

Yahoo! will almost certainly be able to take advantage of the good work that Google has done establishing their Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC) network, giving Yahoo! an immediate deployment network (oh man do I hope they call it the “YAAC” Network!) Having run IndexTools on my own site for some time I very much expect that many GAAC partners will actually prefer IndexTools for most of their deployments given the dramatically improved capabilities of the application.