What is local?

“Different things to different people at different times.”

Robert Hardie, Content Strategy Director for  Northcliffe Media, talking about his definition of the variables one has to play with when considering developing local services. I attended Mashup’s local event last night, and broadly speaking founded it entertaining but not hugely useful in terms of real insight.That said, there were a couple of interesting points: 

•  “what the user wants defines what local is” – people are prepared to go further for higher value things, and so local completely depends on context of search
• “in London, local is in straight lines”

One of the main thrusts of the event (and from looking at the sites of some of the participants on the panel discussion) was around how to integrate real local knowledge with search listings. There was a feeling that local knowledge, opinion and other user-generated recommendation doesn’t sit well with a pure local search, in which distance is the primary factor. Most of the sites I looked at seemed to break apart the community from search results, which I don’t think is the most elegant of solutions. In fact, I’m thinking that ‘WeLoveLocal‘ is actually a really nice integration of the two. I’m going to have more of a play with this, it does seem like they have the right mix of good info, local knowledge, and ease of use to be actually useful the next time I need to find out where something is near to me!There were a couple of points made about monetising local search but beyond building scale and advertising on the back of this, I got the feeling people were either being cagy or didn’t have a clue. I did enjoy the feeling of the evening though – there was a lot of energy about this area. Most of the audience seemed to be from one local search startup or another – there were people from TouchLocal, Qype, WeLoveLocal and more…and it’s been a while since I’ve been to something quite as niche!