Yelp, one of the Web 2.0 award winners, is a local community guide. Type in a zip code, I can find suggestions of where to eat and shop, where to find local libraries, or the best route to take to go to work. Recommendations come from members of the site and they are usually rated, this adds credibility to the reviews and it literally puts local businesses on the map.
Yelp is more than a local reviews search engine, it is a social networking site as well. It lets each user blog about almost anything in his daily life. It gives users a platform to discuss what is going on in their own communities. From what I have read on the "Conversations in Columbia" page of this site, topics can be anything from Halloween party to Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize. Yelp also provides users an alternative way of communicating with their friends, it looks more and more like the social networking site, Facebook, to me.
This is what Yelp, or Web 2.0 is about, connecting, communicating, and sharing information, users' involvement is very often as important as the information itself if not more.
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