Thought I'd toss this one out there and see what people made of it.
I run a Chicago news magazine. When searching around for local stuff I've found many, many awful, adsense-filled, ugly, poorly-written "neighborhood guide" sites targeting people moving or new to an area. It's had me wondering if there's an elegant, scalable, truly useful way to get that sort of info across.
So what about a neighborhood suggestion engine? You build up a "genome" of US neighborhoods in major cities (i.e. included on Craigslist) and push suggestions out to a user based on what they're into. When they pick one, they get a clean layout that pulls from the real-estate sites, yelp, craigslist, flickr, youtube, everyblock, spotcrime and all the other local sites out there. You could scan these apis to serve up a "coolness" rating (social media activity relative to other neighborhoods) etc. On this point I've not yet figured out what you'd offer different from the real-estate search sites other than aggregating them all in one place.
So, Pandora for neighborhoods.
How would you build it? Monetize it? Market it?
Good idea? Lame idea?
Another way to pitch it would be as a hyperlocal media finder. Not sure if the content itself is compelling enough though.
