User Reviews: Hot and Getting Hotter

What’s the hottest subset of local search right now? User reviews. Has to be. MojoPages is a new local directory/review site. TellMe offers reviews over the phone. And YellowPages.com recently got that user review religion.

Now, even Skype — the voice-over IP phone provider — is getting into the merchant reviews. They’re building a yellow pages from scratch, which is no easy task, and including user reviews along with a couple nifty social features like asking Skype friends for recommendations.

Sebastian P. has a great recap, complete with screenshots on his Praized blog. And I think he nailed it in his analysis: Rather than trying to build a yellow pages from the ground up, why not just buy a data source first and clean it up?