I’m involved with a great project dealing with local search and local blogs. We’re building a world-wide network of local search and blog sites. You might have heard about the expansion of local search sites and the interest in “hyper local” search.
It’s fine to have a massive portal site like YellowPages.com, but when you are a local, you want local information. Real local information. And not just directory listings of the local hair dressers. You want event news, happenings, and local business news along with the ability to get your closest coffee shop address delivered to your phone.
Another problem is that big sites are trying to scrape their way to looking like they are on the ground when they aren’t. The only solution to this problem is people. You simply must have locals involved in generating content that locals want to consume. Local blogs and local search will not succeed without the real local flavor and information that locals actually seek.
Having people on the ground generating ad sales and blog content that truly “hits home” with local audiences and consumers is the only way local search will take a step forward into the billions of local advertising dollars waiting for a reason to be spent online.
That’s what I think is going to make the hyper local thing really work. And blogs are the heart that drives the interest and traffic to such sites. The problem is, there just aren’t many around which aren’t fabricated with scraped content to appear local when they really aren’t.
So here’s a look at the future of hyper local search and blogging with some live blogs in our network.
More links on the hyper local movement:
- Hyper Local News Coming to Twitter? -Bnet.com
- NYT – Google Exec Go Hyper Local -Mathew Ingram
- Death of local newspapers doesn’t mean death of local news – MathewGain.com
- NBC launching hyper local news channel -Observer.com
Local Search Latest News:
- Local Search Means Business -SearchEngineLand.com
- US Local Ad Market Shrinking (Online advertising going up!) -eMarketer.com
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I am a huge believer of the Hyperlocal blog movement. Thanks for putting this post together. I see some great local blogs popping up but also many that only scrape the rss feeds of news sites.
Mayor of Concords last blog post..Concord Police Volunteers
I’m supporting this project and I hope that this will become the next big thing.
I once thought about the idea when I was working for yellowpages.com as you mention!
I used to sell ads for them. A lot of businesses were looking locally.
Taks last blog post..Socially Brandable
It is surprising to me that Google has maintained its status a dominant player in “local search”? Might Microsoft recently filing a trademark for Bing.com and Bing.net be their attempt to steal Google’s thunder? http://tinyurl.com/coy8pb
The hyper local ‘market’ on the net still has an awful lot of growing room – but I can’t wait for when it does explode with the right service, because finding local services can sometimes be a nightmare, because small business is vastly underepresented on the internet.
I am the owner of http://www.directoryofminneapolis.com/blog. Thank you Jack for Including our blog In your story. We appreciate It. Working together with you on this project has helped Immensely. Whenever I see something that Jack has endorsed I have to read it because he Is “the expert” when it has to do with blogging or getting website traffic. At Directory of Minneapolis,our traffic continues to grow daily and we continue to grow our blog and “Keep It Local”. Living In Minneapolis has helped provide us with the easiest access to Hyper Local content as well. Looking forward to continued success.