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It’s Getting Deeper
By Cameron Ferroni | October 8, 2007
One of the things I love about the local space is just how deep you can get with information. As a locally focused Internet company we are constantly faced with this challenge: How much should we focus on breadth of information, vs depth? As we grapple with this ourselves, it’s fun to look out across the landscape and see how others have tackled this challenge. What’s been on my mind lately are all of the places that take a truly local tack and that are doing it in a really deep, rich way. Examples range from: the well known - e.g. www.zillow.com, which focuses on everything you could possibly want to know about real estate in your neighborhood; the up and coming - e.g. www.urbanspoon.com which takes the basic restaurant concept and blows it out, with not just their own reviews, but aggregated reviews, menu information, friends lists, wishlists, and a facebook integration to boot; the unique - e.g. www.walkscore.com which tells you how walkable a neighborhood is; and the oddly compelling - e.g. http://web1.seattle.gov/seastats/doImpacts.aspx - which shows me all of the police/fire activity in my current area.
At the end of the day these are all compelling and useful in their own way. And it’s precisely because of this that building an overall local information service is both challenging and exciting. There is so much data out there that some set of consumers will love, and others will think is irrelevant. Deciding how to bring it all together and get consumers excited - now that is the challenge.
In any case, what I really want to know is - “What are your favorite local information sites?” - they can be broad, deep, interesting, useful, or just great technical implementations. Go ahead and leave them in the comments - it would be great to exchange ideas on this and see what everyone thinks!
Topics: Local Search |
October 8th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
My first favorite local site will always be a good local newspaper. They have the budget and the depth to cover what’s going on in a town in a way that no individual or collective aggregation site will ever do. Good local newspapers are very rare.
I am a fan of local wikis, in part because they give a handy place to point people to that can be improved, and in part because the production of shared knowledge about a place helps build a real community.
Local libraries can be an excellent place to focus local search efforts, not the least of which because you have a collection of professionals who know their stuff and how to find things.