Spurred on by the likes of BackFence in its suburban territories, WashingtonPost.com has launched its third attempt at a city guide. The new effort, which succeeds previous efforts with CitySearch and Zip2, has a new search engine powered by FAST, search by location and proximity, improved navigation, selected newspaper content, editors picks, ShopLocal sales information, and a calendar that can be browsed by events and categories.
What the site does not include are Yellow Pages, which had been abandoned after Switchboard stopped supporting it. While washingtonpost.com has been an innovator in selling ads on podcasts, video pods and RSS, it has never found “meaningful ways” to sell local service and merchant ads. Indeed, CEO and Publisher Caroline Little, during a keynote at the Kelsey ILM show, said that washingtonpost.com is “4-5 years behind national players” such as Yahoo and AOL who have local templates.
“The previous city guide was off target,” noted Little. “We watched people navigate. Users had no idea” they were in the local part of the site. Little hopes that this effort’s advanced search solution will keep people onsite who might have otherwise strayed to Google, while serving as a home for user’s social life in the DC area.
A major emphasis of the new city guide is on “frictionless consumer generated media,” including user reviews of Washington area services and events. Soon, users will also be invited to comment on news and feature articles. Coming up in three-to-six months will be a photo library where users can send in their favorite photos – among the most popular features, coincidentally, on BackFence. “People love photos,” said Little. “We learned that on 9/11.”
The site also hopes to spur community via blogs and chats. It has launched 25 blogs since January, and also hosts 60 chats a week. Little says they are all “tools for creating demand for news.” With all the government workers, interns and others moving in and out of Washington all the time, she noted that “this is a transient city…and there is limited opportunity to build loyalty.”
What is my view? After the collapse of Sidewalk. Zip2 and others, and the diminishment of CitySearch and Digital City, the conventional wisdom is that city guides are dead. But that’s a little broad. They just aren’t going to be disruptive. For entities such as The Post, a full service city guide fits like a hand in glove. It will be interesting how they fare against more organic, Yellow Pages-oriented fare such as Backfence, Kudzu, Judy’s Book and Insider’s Pages. One cautionary note for The Posties: any effort to generate user reviews will falter unless they are giving a laser like focus (and maybe some Starbucks cards as promotions).