Few years’ back various search engines were rolling out their local services. Searching for a product or service in a specific geographical area, and you will see local listings appear in result pages, which might include addresses, phone numbers, maps, and so forth. Craigslist is a huge success. This Classifieds-cum-community service has single-handedly become the major threat to newspapers in the United States.



Local blogs are fast spewing up. More and more citizen journalism sites are focusing a particular city, town or county. Borrell Associates did an annual benchmarking report examines revenue, expense and other financial data for 2,466 local media Web sites in the U.S. and Canada. Internet companies have invested around $4.8 billion on local advertising.



Two major constituents if the ever expanding are splogs and blogs set up by non-professionals (no particular ambition to be a big publisher) who just want to keep in touch with friends, colleagues or relatives. These people do not get much of the traffic obviously. However, if you could gather them around a locality, say, a local group blog of a college, school or a town. The combine traffic will start rising and so will the advertisers’ interest. We have already seen the growth of topical blogs. Metroblogging has successfully launched local metros blogs. However, there are more cities out there than metroblogging can handle anyday. Jason Calcanis also tries his planned domination of local market by launching an Ohio State blog and booking related domains of 50 states. IMHO, not smart moves from either Jason, since I doubt it will be able to create a local community feeling or a topical blog feel.



Building local communities not only gives a richer sense of community feeling to the participants but also opens the doors for the large local advertising market. I will not be surprised if I see more local news aggregators. Newsvine has done a good job so far. However, some more innovative means have to be discovered or invented to catalyze the growth of this medium.



I would like to see initiative taken by young people. I would like to see them graduate from ‘teeny‘ Myspace. I would like to see them use camera-equipped cameras and become versatile ‘instant reporters’ reporting the latest from their locality - their neighborhood, office, stadiums, roads, and everything else. I would like them to graduate to Experience Reporting.