Local.com has been relying on third parties for reviews information. Reviews (or some ratings equivalent) are a must-have for local sites. Now the site has launched its own capability:
Local.com ratings and reviews allows users to create an account and enter ratings and reviews for any business listing that appears on the site. The site gives users the ability to enter comments, rate a business using a five-star rating system and view all of the reviews they have previously submitted. Ratings and reviews entered on the site will appear immediately on business listing profile pages, subject to a user validation process.
I’m prompted to think back to a conference I planned roughly four years ago when the subject of reviews on anything but movies or restaurants was completely dismissed by many. No longer. While it’s true that only the minority create reviews, the majority value and increasingly rely on them. And local sites without ratings/reviews (or some equivalent) will simply be left behind.
Screenwerk 
June 18, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Actually I think I have to disagree here.
I think it is very do-able for a site (like Local.com) to do well without reviews. The differentiator of course would be providing context to users, not just reviews.
June 18, 2008 at 6:27 pm
But context implies deep content. Where does that come from?
June 18, 2008 at 7:26 pm
Never claimed I had the answers 😉
Would I rather know if a business has Product X or provides Service Y instead of what people think of the overall business? Over half the time yes tbh.
June 18, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Agree that deep content works. But getting it is hard and often a self-provisioning or very labor intensive thing.
June 18, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Tell me about it 😉
June 18, 2008 at 9:19 pm
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June 19, 2008 at 2:58 am
[…] read about Local.com adding reviews, and I thought to myself – “is it really that […]
June 19, 2008 at 5:24 am
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June 19, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Increasingly I think part of the answer lies in the realm of the semantic web. It needs to become easy for any local business to publish the details of the products and services they offer, and for those details to follow some kind of standard format. Automated tagging like we’re reading about from TextDigger today seems like a step in the right direction (although getting more local businesses to publish detailed web information in the first place is another challenge).
Of course, I am a proponent of local reviews, too, especially reviews from people you know, via social networking. A complete local solution requires both.
June 19, 2008 at 4:06 pm
TextDigger appears to be positioning itself as an SEO company. Whatever the solution, it probably will not be self-generated/self service.
Reviews will remain important as an extension of WOM. But enhanced data is a next frontier of sorts for the local internet and it’s tied in with product inventory.
June 20, 2008 at 10:45 pm
I don’t know if this will add value. It so hard to know if the reviews are useful and real.