Yahoo launched yet another local guide to a city. This time 2000 miles away from Yahoo’s California home base. It’s good old New York New York. If they can make it here they can make it anywhere. New York.
The site, although in the same monotone, lame-o style as the rest of Yahoo, covers the general ins and outs of the Big Apple. It’s only the first few days so don’t get your hopes too high, but it is a good enough start to ensure a popular and productive site.
I for one am happy that the local model for web sites is becoming more popular. Of course New York is a huge demographic and you can target them locally, but more importantly is the acknowledgement of an actual living audience by the corporate content creating industry.
The developers and designers today are so caught up in the presentation of the material that we forget the importance of audience interaction. There is hardly ever a relationship built around true interaction, but rather slick graphics and animation have set the standards around the visual presentation.
By developing content around local audiences we at least see the audience as more than just a world wide drooling page view. If we localize the content from being nation or world wide down to city or area wide, then we can go even further. How about area wide and preference oriented? How about content that changes based on the users likes and dislikes? How about the user actually becomes the content in a rich interaction with our site?
The possibilities are there. We can develop content for users to control what they see. When the user becomes the content through creative programming and ingenious ideas then the localized web site will be targeted to an audience no larger than a single person. And then the web will truly meet its high expectations.
Whatya think?