AOL Relaunches, Blogifies Digital City

AOL is relaunching DigitalCity, it’s former city guide that was renamed AOL Cityguide, which spawned another site City’s Best. 

Here’s the new homepage:

Here’s what AOL said in the release: 

[DigitalCity is] a new, magazine-style site that enables readers to stay on top of the latest entertainment trends and stories from around the world.  Digital City takes a new approach to geo-blogging by showcasing original content with a local slant, but global appeal.

In addition to daily posts on topics ranging from the arts to fall festivities, Digital City has weekly features focusing on news and trends in entertainment, concerts, nightlife and dining. The monthly blogazine “Drink World” is devoted to the global culture of drinking.

DigitalCity began at roughly the same time as Microsoft’s SideWalk and Citysearch. It was originally an independent company that was acquired by AOL. Eventually it became more and more obscure within the layers of AOL sites. But it’s now getting blog treatment, like many of AOL’s recent site re-dos. The local element is interesting here: it’s there but not the defining characteristic.

The “magazine” treatment is also interesting. If the economy weren’t in total meltdown, one could see an eventual, offline version of the publication. 

In the upper right “nav” are links to other AOL local properties: City’s Best, Cityguide, YP, MapQuest (there’s also AOL Local Search). MapQuest is being positioned as the high-traffic front door to all this content but each site will all serve to promote the other properties as well.

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