Andy's Book

Brad Feld just posted on his recent investment in Judy's Book, a social network-based local search service.

Judy's Book is the brain child of Andy Sack and his partner Chris DeVore.  Andy is a guy we backed at Flatiron Partners.  He founded Abuzz which was sold to the NY Times.  As Brad talks about in his post, Andy is a smart and scrappy entrepreneur.  Brad knows because he was an investor in Abuzz as well as another startup Andy did.

Judy's Book is an interesting play. Most everyone who is doing local search is going about it with a yellow pages model.  While Judy's Book intends to replace the Yellow Pages too, they are taking a very social networking/user generated content approach.

I like the service and posted a review this morning.

Many of the comments and criticisms that were leveled at Riffs this weekend apply to Judy's Book as well.  It will be interesting to watch these services develop and see whether user generated content and social networking will be a better solution than search and microformats.

One thing is for sure, reviews, ratings, and tapping the wisdom of the crowds are alive and well on the web this year.

Comments

[P-Air]

Not sure your last assertion s/b an either/or one. Specifically, microformats are not exclusive of services like Judy's Book if Judy's Book chooses to make their content available in that format. Microformats s/b seen here as equivalent to RSS feeds for different types of content outside of blog posts. It makes total sense for them to distribute their content outside the context of their service, and to do so using the reviews microformat.

Watch for some announcements on this front coming fm the Syndicate Conference 12/12 thru 12/14, where some big names will be showing support for microformats & Structured Blogging.