Andy Sack recently wrote a superb blog post (and follow-up) on what Yelp did better than Judy's Book. I not only admire his honesty and openness but also the clarity of his analysis. Yelp's focus on a younger demographic and restaurant reviews proved far more fruitful than the wider net and older target audience of Judy's Book. He also points out that they out-marketed them.
Both Judy's Book and Yelp are competitors of ours in theory as we are all about reviews (I know this is changing in Judy's Book) . Therefore I have studied both sites (and many others obviously) and I find Andy's insights very useful.
As our site is built entirely around the idea of publishing reviews to and aggregating reviews from blogs, we will be a reflection of what our users are focused on already. Of course we have our plans for the direction of the site but rather than force it initially, we are using this pre-launch time to monitor the areas that users are blogging about and see how best to match that to what people are seeking. We've already been surprised by some of the areas of activity and luckily from a business perspective they also make sense for us. The blogging aspect obviously gives us a younger demographic by default.
I should point out that I've never been convinced that hyperlocal "User Generated Content" businesses based on closed data-silos can scale. The amount of investment that Yelp have required to just operate in a small set of US cities says a lot. Looking at the change of direction for Judy's Book and what happened at InsiderPages just confirms that belief.
To me, the ultimate in Local is the individual's blog reflecting the views, opinions and knowledge of that individual in a real community. If individual bloggers cluster together around areas of mutual interest on our site then Local is whatever they define it to be; restaurants in Boise, theatres in Cork, forest walks in Finland.
As with any business, the two challenges for us are marketing ourselves effectively and being able to generate revenue based on user activity and intention. I just don't think we'll be doing down the Yelp party route somehow 
"revenue based on user activity and intention"
'intention'.... as in "the intention economy"? Very interesting....
Whilst there is a lot of bluesky talk in this area, I am convinced that we will have a sea-change in "advertising" over the next two years. At the moment, context sensitive advertising is about "what are you looking at now, lets guess what ads you'd like to see". We are starting to see the emergence of attention-based advertising "what have you been looking at, let's make a better guess" but the ultimate is surely "tell us what you'd like to hear about and we'll go get you information about products and services targetted at you as an individual not as a demographic".
LouderVoice is not going to be leading these developments but we aim to be an enabler of them.
But first we have to launch
"Attention" is a buzzword thats been around awhile and a few startups trying 2 focus on it. Not much "value" seen in that area yet but lots of possibilities.
The Judy's/Yell n others in that LOCAL scene works when u are doing really LOCAL stuff n providing value but once u starting moving outside that area it gets harder 2 stay focused. Also hard 2 scale as u grow from area 2 area.
I can c several areas that might be an issue 4 u if u're going to try and do intelligent (AI style) auto blog aggregation and localise the content/reviews
Lal
I doubt we'll ever try to do that auto-aggregate auto-understand of random blogs and then try to localise the data.
I'm not a fan of anonymised data or sites which claim "we've aggregated from 4 millions sites worldwide and this movie is a 3.024".
I was on a site yesterday which proudly claimed "160 million products and counting". Ye know, I'd prefer it if they said 1000 quality products.