February 2, 2007
A New Local Search Product From Yahoo!
Om Malik over at GigaOm has discovered that Yahoo is testing a new local search product in Bangalore and New Delhi. Known as OurCity, it is a city guide-like product that brings together a bunch of Yahoo social media products like Del.icio.us, Upcoming, and Flickr. It is also meant to aggregate geographically relevant news, blogs, and info from Wikipedia.
This could be an intriguing local product given the geographic relevance of a range of content formats. Bringing more information and multimedia to specific geographies is an interesting area of local online media and is being done by PlaceBlogger (blogs), and TurnHere (video).
But for this to work, there will be a lot required of users and the jury is still out on the sustainability and scalability of the "folksonomy" strategy, being pushed strongly by Yahoo throughout its product line.
