The Praized Blog

Yesterday afternoon at SXSW08, Steven Johnson, Outside.in’s CEO, was interviewing the brilliant Henry Jenkins, Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. I’ll come back to Jenkins’ insights in a later blog post.

Johnson, while talking about hyperlocal, collective intelligence and communities, unveiled a screenshot of a soon-to-be released feature of Outside.in called “On My Radar”. According to the sneak peek page, “On My Radar lets you zoom down and see all the current buzz on the block you’re standing on, while simultaneously keeping tabs on places around the country that interest you.” It uses Yahoo’s FireEagle location technology.

(see the bigger image here)

What it means: On My Radar is very similar to the Facebook newsfeed, one of most interesting features of the popular social network site. I like the fact that they’ve segmented the geographical elements from the very hyperlocal (within 500 feet of you) to the city-level (Brooklyn). I see two challenges to this idea: depth of content and activity. Without these two, a local newsfeed is less relevant. But if they can mine enough information (and frequent updates) from local bloggers and Outside.in users, this might be a very interesting way to discover hyperlocal news.

VentureBeat has the news:

Citysearch, the division of IAC focuses on local reviews of restaurants and other services, has acquired the struggling local review start-up, Insider Pages.

The purchase (amount undisclosed) comes at a time of increasing competition in the race to deliver a compelling local search services. Citysearch’s parent, IAC, has already bolstered its local search offerings, namely with Ask City, a property that packages everything from local search to local maps, reviews, and ticket services.

However, more entrants have arrived to nip traffic away from Citysearch, an early player that has seen its traffic stagnate in recent months. There’s Yelp, Judysbook and Backfence, for starters. Earlier today, we mentioned new competitor Outside.in, another company going after the local community news and events area. (…)

Insider Pages has about 600,000 user reviews, and they’ll be integrated into the Citysearch’s offering, she said. It has 2.5 million monthly unique readers, she said, based on Comscore and internal tracking numbers.

She would not say whether the purchase price was more than $10 million invested in the company by Sequoia Capital, Softbank and Idealab. She said there were multiple bidders, but that Insider Pages preferred Citysearch because it is complementary. Insider Pages is popular among suburban parents and homeowners, she said, giving it strength in the home, garden, health and plumber review areas. Citysearch is stronger in bars, arts and entertainment. Citysearch will absorb Insider Page employees in its San Francisco office.

Rev2 says it was sold for “for an estimated sum of $13 million.”

What it means: I’m surprised it was not acquired by a directory company as it would have been a great jumpstart for any user review strategy (becoming more and more important in any local search site). From the article above, it sounds like the acquisition will be complimentary based on different content & users. I know the Citysearch demographics well (Yellow Pages Group used to be the Citysearch licensee in Canada) but I don’t know enough about InsiderPages’ users to really comment on the complementarity.