Local guides and communities

I’ve written about the geographic domain name local community initiative through AUDA and Sensis, my take on Judy’s Book and also local classifieds enough times now. But it IS such an interesting area.

I really like the local wiki’s. OpenGuides is one group providing wiki templates for communities. It makes such a lot of sense to do this instead of requesting not-for-profits to be formed from local community members. Can the wiki be hijacked? Well, yes and no. Sure someone can come in and force links through for their business on every page. But the community OWNS the page so they can push right back. Same as wikipedia. Oh and it has map mashups. Always a sexeh thing to have!

Check out Boston wiki OpenGuide for an idea of what it is like. Now imagine a Sydney or Melbourne guide that pulls in RSS and APIs from advertising bodies like seek.com.au, realestate.com.au and carsales.com.au opening them up for wiki-goodness. What do you think TrueLocal and MyLocal (info pack) et al would do then? Hmmm? And no, it’s not quite there yet – but you can see the potential on the wiki classifieds category page.

Yep, as far as revenue generation is concerned, gambling is starting to look good…