Yahoo! Local: Collaborative Local Content
I caught Battelle's excited-about-Yahoo!-local bug. I couldn't help it. Here's what got me excited:

"Levine [head of Yahoo Local Search] called Yahoo Local an emergent 'collective wiki for local.'"

So that's the concept in a nutshell, but it's how he describes his user experience that makes me think Yahoo's moving in an important (with a capital I) direction.

"...as a user I get the sense that the more I put into Yahoo Local (or any number of other well considered sites), the more I get out. I'm motivated to use it not simply because I get some information, find a phone number, get driving directions, but also because I sense I am contributing, through my clickstream, to the creation of a smarter service which will serve be [sic] better in the future."

It's the melding of user generated content into the local/map search that gets me excited. Yahoo's providing the trellis for all this incredible and detail-rich LOCAL user content to grow up around.

Combine local with Yahoo360 and you'll have some seriously rich content for local search (I just think of the mountains of local data in MySpace...).

Yahoo Local could become about 10,000X more useful to me than a phone book. It's not yet, but they just started.

From a marketing perspective Yahoo Local's vital, and points to a future of still smaller audience fragmentation. So get out there and uh, massage your reviews like marketers do in Wikipedia.

More:

Yahoo! Ramps up Local, User Recommendations, More
Next Generation of Yahoo! Local
Yahoo! FUSE-ing Local Content
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |