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Local Matters announced some exciting news today.  It’s a go-live announcement for a partnership with the largest MLS company in the US market, MRIS.

It’s exciting for several reasons.  It certainly shows off our local search platform to be a flexible and engaging web application platform for vertical local search, which is a trend I strongly believe in.  Check out HomesDatabase.com.  More importantly, it begins to plot a course towards a critical new trend in online real estate – the movement towards richer true local marketplaces for agents and consumers.

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Anecdotally, it’s becoming apparent that restaurants are struggling as consumers pull in their spending reins. It seemed to start with the gas price crisis, and certainly is continuing through the economic downturn.  People are simply not going out as much as a higher share of earnings are applied towards savings, and as job security fears weigh heavily on consumer’s minds.

I discovered a year end research report synopsis on consumer restaurant spending by a small blog post on the finance blog, Infectious Greed, which linked to the NPD Group’s 2008 research results summary.  The details are insightful, and point to the critical importance of incentive offers to entice consumers into restaurants in 2009.

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Over on Greg Sterling’s blog, industry vet Marty Himmelstein provides a nicely articulated perspective on the implications of the lack of effective business content in Local Search.  Even more interesting is the comment conversation that the blog post triggers.  A worthwhile read, all the way through the comments.  The role and merits of SEO are challenged and defended by some of the more astute local SEO practitioners.

An excerpt of my comments are copied below, to hopefully whet your appetite.  Join the conversation on Greg’s site, it’s a quality debate.

…In particular, I think you capture the essence of why web search is struggling with relevance models for local content, and why user-based content forms the most practical proxy for link logic in Local.

I would add that, IMHO, the task of Local Search, particularly for service based businesses, is to winnow down to a short list. I believe it is fundamentally impractical to collect sufficient decision-making content to go from a short-list to a definitive selection. To me, this is where a new generation of conversational and contextual technologies kick in. The consumer wil invariably – as you point out – do their ultimate selection on a range of personal factors. Scheduling convenience and negotiated pricing may be capable of being automated, but not by “the masses” for a very long time. Consumers may also be aided by video tools, in assessing whether they want a specific service person into their house, but again, this is an exception not the rule.

The final mile of Local Search, where a short list converts into a selection/transaction remains one of the most interesting unsolved problems.

Finally, I’d add that one other dimension of local search – wherein consumers purchase patterns are driven by special offers – is another fascinating unsolved piece of the puzzle.  Google’s current lame foray into coupon aggregation and display is not even close to addressing the opportunity….

image credit: motherjones.com

Somehow, the time feels right for some fresh/absurd, Hail Mary thinking when it comes to evolution in the troubled Local Media landscape.

When I look at the problems infecting two major sectors of local media  – newspapers and yellow pages – an idea springs to mind.  Try it on…

Slam them together into one integrated local media business.  Collapse redundant distribution and operations, re-align and trim the sales forces. Infuse the newspaper’s strength with promotion and retail into the scalable SEM/search infrastructure of the YP channel.  Construct a true local consumer portal and promotion channel that has local search and promotion embedded throughout.  Trim out the low-value display ad junk and create real local shopping applications that generate leads and solve consumer problems.

In the off-chance that you’re still reading, perhaps I can explain my thinking a bit more.

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I’ve grown slightly bored and a little frustrated with the “old world” of blogging, and have shifted my attention more towards the more conversational and multimedia worlds of Twitter and Tumblr.  I’m still sorting out how I want to evolve my blog site. For now, I’ve simply cleaned it out to remove a rampant spam problem that I simply don’t have the desire/time to tackle. I’ll reload the archive posts from 2007-8 at some point.

For now, feel free to simply follow me on twitter. This is a more personal commentary and conversation, with less focus on local search/media commentary.

I will find my way back to this blog soon…