Robert_Charlton - 8:40 am on Aug 17, 2005 (gmt 0)

It's taking the concept of your local independent weekly, and organizing all the local info into an easily scanned dashboard.

I feel it's a very interesting first beta, with more potential than realization at this point. It's definitely not up to the local independent weeklies, of which there are several in the SF Bay Area, almost any one of which has orders of magnitude more useful information. You can see where it might go, but at the same time I wonder whether Yahoo by itself is going to be able to provide anything like the critical mass of information necessary to make this a useful destination. Data input is going to be critical.

What's Happening Locally

The events calendar is a local data sort that could prove to be very useful, and might pull in a fair amount of advertising as well. I can imagine that if users drill down to a movie theater, for example, they might find listings (or ads) for nearby restaurants helpful.

But I think a lot of work needs to be put into the events calendar display format, and also into figuring out what users really want to see. I've only played with it a little bit, but when I looked at Movies and Film, I got reviews of the theaters, not film listings and showtimes as I wanted. Compare Yahoo's listing with Google's [movie: movies:cityname] serps.

Users' Favorite Restaurants

One thing that jumped out at me is that all of these favorites are review driven, and, as has been previously discussed here, it's currently extremely easy to gain visibility with good user reviews. Gaping holes in the data, though, with occasional surprises that a hot restaurant I'd just noticed was reviewed and showing on the city home page....