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Local: Hyper, Meta, and Loco

August 21, 2009

For years, local information meant one of three things:

  1. The Yellow Pages for the city in which one found oneself in the US (an endangered species)
  2. Suburban papers such as the Gaithersburg Gazette (dog paddling in red ink)
  3. Asking a female who was hooked into a fancy women’s club like Rockville’s Club 100 (you have to know one to ask one).

Asking a taxi driver, reading the Washington Post or Newsday, or pulling into a gas station would produce mixed up directions and garbled information. Listening to a local radio station like WGN in Chicago provided zero info about DeKalb. The DeKalb radio station was a mess with reverb and dial in shows. Now big companies like NBC want to crack the code. What is interesting is that there are quite a few local Web sites. I live in rural Kentucky and the highly motivated can locate Louisville Mojo (a unit of Tasty Mojo) and check out the local action. if you can remember to put the hyphen in the url, you can read the Courier-Journal online. You can check out the local blogs, local free newspapers, and read the public grade school bulletin board in the Kroger’s or Giant Eagle near you. Local information is a mess. The Business Dateline database, a product with which I was involved from inception to its sale to the dinosaur University Microfilms / Bell+Howell aggregated business information from regional business publications. That experience taught me that local Chambers of Commerce, state and Federal agencies providing business information, and the local colleges and universities were clueless when it came to local information. Even today, with a wealth of electronic tools at my fingertips, I don’t know where and when the collector car meet up will be in New Albany, Indiana. I have to make phone calls to find out about these venues. Navigate to “MSNBC Buys “Hyper-local” EveryBlock.com” and read the announcement. Quite a bit of cheerleading leaks between the punctuation marks. What is missing from the write up are answers to these questions:

  1. Assume that MSNBC is really successful. How will MSNBC handle the scaling for increased traffic?
  2. Assume that MSNBC recruits bloggers to provide local information. How will MSNBC prevent another, larger aggregator from sucking up the best and brightest? Pay contributors? How will those costs match up with the costs for item one above?
  3. Assume that MSNBC pulls a Hulu for local information? How will that consortium scale, monetize, and innovate? Committees are the groups producing camels when the objective is a camel.

Have You Checked Out Google Local Lately?

My suggestion is that you navigate to Google Local at http://local.google.com. Now select a city with a modest population of nerds and run a query for “Web developer”. Here are the results of my query for Des Moines, Iowa and Web developer.

The screenshot below shows the “more info” for Cargocultdesign.com, a Web development company. Notice that there are four tabs: Overview, which is a description of the company, including a snippet of text from the firm’s Web site, a details tab which provides a mailing address for snail mail and an email address for the non-Facebook set, a Reviews tab (Cargo Cult may want to get a “friend” to write a review, and links to two Cargo Cult Web pages.

cargp ci;t listing

The review function is particularly interesting. Google uses the review content to generate a star rating. With some poking around, a company in Google Local can generate a free coupon.

In short, I find this mash up of information suggestive, but it is clearly not the end of a subway line. The present Google Local have been constructed to make it relatively easy for Googlers to snap in other content. Examples which come to mind include:

  • Links to books or scholarly articles written by the principal of the firm
  • Snippets from the company’s Web log
  • One click connection to chat if the company listed in Local has a Gmail account

You can think of other information that can be automatically extracted and inserted in the Google Local listing for Cargo Cult. One example is hot links to videos on YouTube.com which feature the company.

I think the stampede to local information is overdue. My notion is that hyper, meta, and loco local plays may have to deal with Googzilla. The dust up will be coming sooner, not later. Outfits like MSNBC will have to put their thinking caps on in order to generate enough hard cash to scale, innovate, and grow—rapidly. I haven’t place my bet yet, but I think the Google looks like a contender. The traditional Yellow Pages are ready for the glue factory. The two year olds may have heart but their bones may be frail and the wind too short.

Stephen Arnold, August 21, 2009

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, Database, Feature, Google, Text processing, Vertical search 

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