Real estate and rental agents get into big trouble if they mouth off about a neighborhood’s quality-of-life issues. The most they can do is point to Web sites that provide some general stats (i.e., school info, crime stats and market trends).
Now Trulia is getting deeper, a la user-generated content. Three weeks ago, it launched ratings …

News aggregation is being approached in every which way, driven by the long-tail possibilities of search optimization, and less and less local output from newspapers, TV and radio. The content creator sites, hyperlocal sites, blog aggregators and portals have also been aggressively pursuing aggregation of local content (including Fwix, which we profiled last week).
But where …

The local and community news “aggregator” space is poised to become increasingly important. Local news staffs, obviously, are being whittled away with the declining economics of local news. But there is more local content than ever, via blogs, pro/amateur content, reviews and other sources.
Already, the aggregator space is well populated by sites such as Topix.net, …

Outside.in, a major aggregator of local blogs, has begun the integration with CNN that was announced last December at our Interactive Local Media conference in L.A. First up is integration with CNN’s home page, weather page and profile page. On the home page, users can click on Local Weather & News in the right sidebar, …

Redbeacon, one of the new breed of social/local leads providers for SMBs, said it is now available throughout the entire Bay Area and teaming up with BigTent, a mega-moms network in the Bay Area with more than 100 local cells. BigTent will receive a revenue share carved from Redbeacon’s 10 percent commission.
The deal between BigTent …

AT&T Interactive has put up a beta version of its new Buzz.com site dedicated to eliciting positive social recommendations and answers to questions from friends, friends of friends and throughout the Buzz site (which, unfortunately, may get confused with Google Buzz, which was developed after AT&T had announced plans for Buzz.com.)
The site’s main purpose is …

Merchant data sent in by fans of merchants and from merchants themselves is becoming increasingly important. Can it be relied on as a main source, or should it only complement listing data from the big three providers — InfoGroup, Acxiom and Localeze?
We talked to Pankaj Mathur, InfoGroup vice president of business development, about it. Not …

Self-serve ads will bring the SMB masses to the Web. But they haven’t made much of a dent in SMB advertising at this point. That hasn’t stopped a rush of new self-serve products coming out, several married to social media features. The latest is “minute ads” from AlikeList, one of the new crop of social/directory …

Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau defended the role of the site in journalism and said it is helping to herald in “a golden age of journalism” that has more content and audience participation than ever before.
Speaking at IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Carlsbad, California, Hippeau noted that HuffPo is publishing 500 pieces of content a …

Yodle, the third-party SMB reseller, has now divided its business into “Yodle Sponsored” and “Yodle Organic.” The formation of the latter division, which has been live for a month with 150 clients, is a recognition that SMBs are increasingly relying on organic search as much as paid search — and they need help driving exposure …

Yelp has been on a roll, and is now reporting that it gets 29 million unique visitors a month. Given that, the company’s immediate challenge is to move beyond its core base of restaurant and shopping reviews and dive deep for Yellow Pages-arena services reviews, as well as reviews for classified categories, such as autos …

Gannett has always seemed to be a likely directory player. In fact, the world’s largest newspaper publisher owns a small group of print directories. It also provides a white-labeled online directory product to its media properties.
But as directories, search and user-generated content have become more commingled, Gannett has gone a step further with the launch …

Citysearch officially rolled out its CityGrid publisher network this week. The network moves Citysearch away from an exclusive focus on its individual sites (“Citysearch.com,” “Insiderpages.com,” “Urbanspoon”). Instead, it works on a distributed basis with partners (i.e., “SuperPages”) to marry local content and advertising.
In the short term, CityGrid represents the new face of Citysearch and the …

Center’d started its mission in June 2008 like most city guides, albeit one largely aimed at women and planning. But over time, the local space has changed. And the site itself has refocused to meet “the missing pieces” in local.
CEO Jennifer Dulski and CTO Chandu Thota, in a conversation with us, say they’d encountered  a …

Examiner.com, the Philip Anschutz-backed site that calls itself “the insider source for everything local,” says it is likely to pass 30,000 active contributors, or “Examiners,”  within days, and 85,000 by 2011. The current tally includes 1,234 active contributors in L.A., 1,189 active contributors in New York, 921 in Chicago, 901 in San Francisco, 900 …

MerchantCircle has registered its millionth SMB, Nassau Avenue Nails of Islip, NY. Owner Danielle Biegler found out about MerchantCircle after searching for other local businesses nearby, and will receive a lifetime MerchantCircle tools, cool MerchantCircle gear and a new sign.
The million number represents roughly 6.7 percent of U.S. SMBs. It may not mean much in …

Neil Budde of DailyMe and Mike Orren of Pegasus News helped the ILM:09 audience understand what it takes to offer a truly customized news offering that is engaging and relevant.
One of the key takeaways both Orren and Budde discussed was the idea that not everything can or should be customized on the news site. …

Yelp has had lots of success with its iPhone app, which currently accounts for 5 percent of its overall traffic. This is partly because its base of urban “foodies” maps well to iPhone user bases.
This was a smart platform choice — a key issue for small companies given device and OS fragmentation, combined with finite …

Oodle CEO Craig Donato led off day three of Marketplaces 2009 describing how classified advertising has gone through an evolution over the past five years, progressing from simply importing them online, to making them searchable and finally today integrating classifieds with social media/user-generated content (UGC). Donato pointed out that while newspapers led the way in …

Oodle has been describing itself as a “social classifieds” platform for some time, extending its reach via deals with local powerhouses such as AOL, Comcast, Cox, Media General, Freedom and Wal-Mart. Now, it is set to make the hype more of a reality with dramatic enhancements that will power Facebook Marketplaces.
The launch strives to leverage …