The U.K.-based online directory Brownbook, which recent announced international expansion, sees itself as something of an anti-Yellow Pages. The company operates on a shoestring, with fewer than a dozen employees, while taking a decidedly user-generated approach to building an online local business directory. The company isn’t following a shoestring approach out of necessity as much as out of a philosophical view that remaining lean and mean is critical to its success.

Brownbook runs against the grain of conventional wisdom, which sees print publishers’ large sales organizations as a key competitive advantage for traditional players. To Brownbook, the sales force is an albatross that wraps all decision-making around the need to support an expensive sales channel. It sees itself more like Craigslist, which operates entirely on a self-service platform, and Wikipedia, which relies on the wisdom of the crowd to enhance basic listings with rich content.

Brownbook launched in the U.K. back in February, and earlier this month it announced it had expanded its base set of listings content into the United States, Canada and Australia.

Here is how we described Brownbook when it launched:

Operating as an open-source site, Brownbook takes advantage of community editors who can add or update listings and post comments/reviews about any business in the U.K. Businesses can claim their profile for GBP5 per year as well as add additional features such as bold or highlighted listings, expanded profile pages, photos and videos. Taking advantage of community editors and businesses that choose to participate and manage their content eliminates much of the costly database management expenses typically incurred by publishers. By leveraging a prepopulated database of 2.2 million business listings, a basic foundation has been put into place to encourage additional database growth. This is a fundamental Web 2.0 strategy that allows for the creation and extension of an up-to-date, content-rich database that is uniquely owned by the site.

Brownbook is a test case for the notion that an online business directory can be entirely “peer produced” — no teams of content scrubbers and editors, no call centers or premise reps, very little management. In a recent discussion with The Kelsey Group, Brownbook’s Dave Ingram and Marc Lyne, both veterans of the U.K. directory industry, talked about how their business “heroes” influenced the kind of property they hope to build.

In addition to Wikipedia and Craigslist, Ingram and Lyne mentioned Hotmail, Facebook and Zillow as sites that have influenced the creation of Brownbook. From Wikipedia comes the idea of consumers editing content and from Zillow, the notion of “claiming” a listing. And like Craigslist, Brownbook operates on minimal overhead and expects to build content by making the site almost completely free.

In addition to building a robust consumer site, Brownbook also hopes to generate revenue by white labeling its platform to companies with large customer bases that need to create large business directories.