Two local social sites that deserve your attention are Judy's Book and Insider Pages.
Judy's Book is clearly the leader here. The site has thousands of local reviews thanks in part to their payment for reviews (in the form of Starbucks coffee cards). If you are looking for a great local chinese restaurant or a trendy local tatoo parlor, chances are Judy's book is your best bet.
A rising newcomer, though, is Insider Pages. The site is set up similarly to Judy's Book, but it features select cities only (much like Craiglist). At this point they are only in Virginia. There are no paid reviews, however, the drive to make your city's page fully functional should not be understated. They're business model is more easily sustainable withouth VC, so they are still one to watch in this arena.
Did I miss your company? If so ping me at robyn *at* socialriots.com.
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Robyn, thanks for your post on local social networking and our company, Insider Pages. It sounds like you were looking at the Virginia section of our site and I hope it was useful. What you may not have been able to see is that Insider Pages has a large national footprint of user reviews. We've focused most of our efforts to date on the west coast where the company was founded, so you'll see a lot of activity in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, but we are also in all 50 states and growing rapidly. As a point of comparison, Insider Pages traffic is about 4x Judysbook traffic according to comScore. Thanks again for checking us out.
Posted by: Stu MacFarlane | September 25, 2006 4:46 PM | Permalink to Comment