Arizona is trying to stop Zillow from providing “zestimates” — their algorithm-based home valuation estimates — on the grounds that Zillow isn’t a licensed appraiser in the state.

That’s just plain silly. Zillow is, so far at least, a benevolent information provider, not a company people need to be protected from. And its estimates are just that: estimates. They should be taken with a grain of salt, just like all other analysis that tries to predict market behavior.

Lots happening in search recently, especially in the local search segment.

• On Friday Google announced it acquired DoubleClick for $3.1B, beating out Yahoo!, Time Warner (AOL’s owner), and Microsoft in the bidding. This gives Google ability to place display ads (graphical ads) on sites, in addition to their existing text ads. In an ironic twist, both Microsoft Corp. and AT&T Inc. called for antitrust regulators to investigate the deal.
• Two days ago Google struck a deal with Clear Channel Communications to sell airtime on their 675 radio stations to Google’s advertisers. Clear Channel is America’s largest radio broadcaster.
• Also this week, Yahoo! expanded its agreement with a consortium of newspaper publishers to run their content on Yahoo!’s websites, and to place advertisements on the sites of the newspapers.
• In late March the News Corporation and NBC Universal struck a video content distribution deal with AOL, Yaho, MSN and MySpace. Some are casting this as an ill-fated effort to compete with YouTube (I agree), while the dealmakers claim it is more about creating a shared network of content and ads.

It’s neat seeing all the old media companies come around, albeit belatedly, to doing deals with the new media companies. It’s nice for the old media companies; they get a handy cash infusion, some positive PR, and new ad inventory to sell. But this is just a short-term fix. The new media companies get the better part of this deal, because:

1. They get to tap into the local sales force of the old media companies. This reduces a huge barrier to success in local search: the cost of creating and running a local advertising sales force, a.k.a. “feet on the street”.
2. They get to demonstrate their reach, innovation, and cost efficiencies to a new advertising base. (Google and Yahoo! are surely saying nice things about not trying to steal away advertisers from their new radio, television and newspaper publishing partners, but you’ve got to be skeptical about that in the medium to long term. Ad dollars are shifting online, fast. These deals only grease the skids.)

For an overview of US local search market trends, see LennAnn Prescott’s Hitwise blog post.

BusinessWeek also has more commentary on Google’s recent moves in the ad business.

Unless you’re massively bored, and truly have nothing better to do, you should ignore this post.

Really, I strongly recommend you skip this one. It’s horribly dull. And you already know it, because you read the title.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I’ve spent several hours tracking down a bug in Adobe Create Suite 2 Illustrator. After following many false leads I found a valid fix. In the interest of saving other people time, here it is:

Problem: When trying to save a file in Illustrator, you get an error dialog that says, “an unknown error has occurred”. The file will not save properly. Illustrator will then continue working, but in a strange way, and will pop up more error dialogs. Illustrator will also refuse to close properly when you try to exit.

Temporary Workaround: In the “Illustrator Options” dialog that pops up during file save, turn OFF the checkbox labelled “Create PDF compatible file”. With this done, you should be able to save properly, but you won’t be able to save PDF-compatible files.

Solution:
1.) Make sure you have Adobe Acrobat installed. I tested this with Acrobat 8.0, and apparently it works with 7.0 as well.

2.) Open up a new Explorer window and browse to: “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 8.0\Resource\CMap\”. (If you have Acrobat 7.0, try the folder “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Resource\CMap” instead.)

3.) Browse to this folder: “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Font\Reqrd\CMaps\”. If there isn’t already a folder at this location, create a new empty folder with this name.

4.) Copy the two files “Identity-H” and “Identity-V” from the folder in step 2 into the folder in step 3.

That’s it. Illustrator should behave normally now.

Thank you “CWM”, who posted this fix here in the Adobe Forums on 4:16pm Feb 20, 07 PST.

Questions, follow-ups, etc. –> please post on the Adobe Forum.

Good luck.