If you’re looking for a nice and simple New Year’s resolution that might be able to help make a lasting impact, consider opting out of the delivery of physical phone books and yellow page directories.

More and more people are finding the vast majority of their information about local businesses online, so if you aren’t finding yourself actually making use of the yellow page book you might be happy to hear it’s now easier to opt out of receiving it on your doorstep.

It’s wishful thinking to ever expect the directory publishers to ever make it opt-in, but thanks to a few websites you can now at least ask for the huge books not to be sent to you.  If you don’t use them and find they tend to make a short trip from delivery to the recycling bin, there’s no better time than New Years to decide to do something about it.

According to YellowPagesOptOut, “Why do we want to help you manage your directories?

Because we understand that delivering unwanted directories doesn’t benefit anyone. All participating companies must follow the guidelines in our Commitment to Consumer Choice. And in 2007, we adopted Industry Environmental Guidelines, which calls on all members to be more environmentally responsible in their business practices. “

Opting out:

And have a very Happy New Year!

We are happy to be able to announce that the Bizwiki project passed another milestone at the end of last week, when our 150,000th Editor registered on Bizwiki.co.uk.

This means that there are now over 150,000 people who have signed up to Bizwiki to help edit, add, correct and improve business information on the site.

Millions of people access and use the information on Bizwiki and the other sites it powers every month, so this is a great time to say thanks to the many users who are helping make this site the useful resource that it is. In a testament to the power of collaboration, we are seeing more improvements every day to the width of coverage of the business community but also to the depth of information about the individual companies that compose it.

The Bizwiki site is built around a self-organised and collaborative community that any of our users are invited to join. Rather than the usual experience of just reading what a website has to say, everyone is invited to actively participate. Users can help produce for themselves the best and most comprehensive index of businesses on the web, or the most detailed index of companies in their town or even street.

If you’d like to join in, add a company or update any of the information on the site, just click the Create Account link to become a Bizwiki Editor.

The latest version of Bizwiki has just gone live –and it’s a record breaker!

This new update to the site was a colossal undertaking, combining updates submitted by many of the site’s users and manual changes made by the editorial team over the last few months with a huge update across all categories of business using the Bizwikibot spider. The result is not just more up-to-date company records, but a greater depth and breadth of business information is now available to our site’s users than ever.

A grand total of 4,936,758 existing businesses on Bizwiki have had their information edited and updated. This includes manually added content, address changes, telephone and contact detail updates and map location changes.

A remarkable 5,068,071 new businesses have been added to Bizwiki, in many cases completely with in-depth information. This means that the site is now larger and covers the country more comprehensively than ever.

1,367,582 of the old businesses on the site have been marked as obsolete and deleted. This includes businesses that have closed down over during the last couple of tumultuous years, but also companies that have transformed, been renamed or relaunched in new business categories.

There have been a number of dedicated people involved in these updates, changes and the reorganisation over the last six months, but the lion’s share of the credit has to go to our Chief Technical Architect Keith Hinde, who has really pulled out all the stops to make this happen.

And of course, we’d like to say a special thank you to all the many visitors who have helped by adding, editing and increasing the amount of useful information on the site. That especially applies to business owners and representatives who have pitched in to help improve the online profile of their own companies – nobody knows your business better than you, and on the behalf of the Bizwiki team I’d like to thank you for sharing your knowledge with all our site’s users.

Thanks!

Work is underway on a huge update of business records across the site.

This is a giant project involving changes and additions across hundreds of categories of business and hundreds of thousands of companies, and involves manually submitted entries added by our users and editors, updates from databases and detailed information gathered by our BizwikiBot spider.

We expect to have the new version rolled out across the site soon, and hope that it will help Bizwiki be an ever more useful resource for our many visitors and users.

Watch this space for more information!

We are pleased to announce a huge update of Bizwiki UK’s index of companies and information has been completed. Consisting of tens of thousands of user-edited records and new additions that have been hand-processed by our editorial team and more than quarter of a million records being updated or having additional information added to them by our BizwikBot spider, this is a major update and should result in even better depth of information across the site.

There is now the grand total of 1,412,330 businesses in the Bizwiki UK database, and thanks to the submissions our registered users and visitors are making this is a number that continues to grow.

A large part of the credit for the quality and depth of information in this update goes to Bizwiki’s Chief Technical Architect, Keith Hinde, who has been slaving away on this piece of work for more than half a year. On behalf of the site’s editors and users, thanks for your tireless efforts!

Thanks also to the  many users and editors who have continued to add high-quality and detailed information about the companies they know, helping make Bizwiki a useful and popular business resource for all our visitors.

We wish all our users a happy and prosperous year in 2012.

It seems that 2011 was a tough year for many businesses due to the state of the economy and turmoil in the markets, but we’re now entering a new one and hope that it will be brighter.

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all the writers and editors who contributed their diligence, knowledge, time and information to the Bizwiki project during the last year. It has been appreciated, and all our users have benefited from your efforts.

Here’s to the New Year!