My thoughts here.

The only way it can be bad is if they restrict the user. There will always be guys like you who want to post on the edge. There will always be a lot more who couldn’t give a shit where they post, simply that their opinion helps others they know and don’t know. Just let the user post wherever is most convenient.

If the core problems are: “even if I did find those reviews, I don’t know who these people are; I don’t know whether to trust their taste.”

Aren’t they better addressed in a centralized manner, where a greater quality of meta-data can be gleaned?

In the end, where the review is posted is a moot point. Solving the trust/credibility issue through technology is where the interesting challenges lie ahead. They have a better chance if they have a partially-centralized data set to do that with.

But that said, I would have to strongly disagree with Chris on the coffee cards. They no doubt have given Judy’s Book a shot in the arm in terms of the volume of reviews, but it has driven the quality level down to somewhat dubious (”This guy is great. That’s all.”) levels in a lot of cases.

For the majority of users, helping out their friends is a much higher motivator. But when you have Insider Pages and Yelp and whomever else chasing the same opportunity, I see why the coffee cards exist, but also why they aren’t that great of a solution.

Wish I could pay folks to write I don’t think that is any kind of negative thing against you whatsoever. I’d pay. I’d gladdly pay.

We strongly agree with your core assertions: that local is hard, and that authors want control over their content and their identities. We also share your concern for the “trustworthiness” of online content and authors. (Take a look at our new TrustScore(TM) feature — a specific effort we’ve undertaken to assign a value to author credibility based on author behavior and community feedback over time).

The one point of criticism that continues to puzzle us is the idea that authors shouldn’t be able to participate in the economic value they create through their efforts. We’ve been suprised at the number of critics who point to our incentives as “proof” that our business won’t work. Our (mostly private) reaction is that any business that hopes to extract value from user-generated content without sharing that value with the authors is headed for a brick wall.

As any participant in the online authorship business can attest, people write for a complex bundle of reasons, but the core impulse behind the behavior is a fundamental human need for validation. This can come in many forms — page views, RSS subscriber counts, reader comments, etc. — but (especially in our consumer society) the most powerful metric for self-validation is economic: i.e., how much is my content worth?

Our recent promotions are admittedly crude proxies for a content-valuation system that assigns rewards based on quality and value creation over time (consider again our TrustScore mechanism). But it doesn’t take much imagination to envision a local word-of-mouth referrals system that marries community policing of content quality and trustworthiness with an advertsiser-funded incentive system that rewards those same virtues.

If we had misgivings about our idea when we started the company, those have been steadily eroded by the feedback we’re getting from our consumer and merchant customers. The fact that every major media company, a growing band of startups, and even left-field entrants like Intuit are now training their guns on the same concept also suggests that we aren’t completely crazy.

As always, ideas are easy, execution is hard, and skepticism — yours and others’ — just adds fuel to the fire. We’re glad to be on your radar, and look forward to your feedback as we iterate over the coming months.

Best regards,
Chris DeVore
Judy’s Book COO & Co-Founder

Agreed. We feature original content on site, posted by anyone with an account, but like Slashdot, an editor volunteer team decides what makes it to the home page - but we also have our aggregator - which you can sample by doing topic seaches:

Eagles
http://www.phillyfuture.org/search/aggregator/eagles

T.O.
http://www.phillyfuture.org/search/aggregator/T.O.

Or Phillies
http://www.phillyfuture.org/search/aggregator/phillies

I’m choosing sports since content is guarenteed to be there

How about cheesesteak (not bad - could be better)
http://www.phillyfuture.org/search/aggregator/cheese+steak

Mayor Street
http://www.phillyfuture.org/search/aggregator/mayor+street

Septa (our public transportation system)
http://www.phillyfuture.org/search/aggregator/septa

Or you can sample by reading the headlines we have from many flowing across our site in various channels and on the home page.

It could be far better if we had resources and time to dedicate to it. Being a grassroots effort - done part time - I hope it shows promise. I wish I had the time to implement tagging and encourage microformats across our aggregated blogs so that we could be even more distributed.

It definately is hard to scale local. Writing about local subject matter is more precarious than about subject matter that is of interest, no matter where. Community helps. I can learn more about Philly visiting Phillyblogs.com (a message board that is misnamed), than almost anyplace else.

I like what I see at Judy’s Book - it shows promise. However it runs headstrong into Yahoo’s local efforts (http://local.yahoo.com/) which grow better all the time. I’m thinking about using their APIs to integrate its content into Philly Future.