The travel market is full of commercial web sites that collect user reviews, but sacrifice compelling user experiences for attempts to monetize every page view. The local directory space is full of web sites that want you to review your plumber and your drycleaner, and some will even offer you an ipod or a starbucks card to do it. How can a location-based community site stand out in a crowded field of well-funded competitors?

We built 43places to be a storehouse of stories about places people love. We didn't worry about making 43places an exhaustive directory: we only want the places people really care about. In the last 12 months, our 50,000 users have added over 36,000 such places to our database. Along the way, we've evolved our thoughts about how to build a "glocalized" web site that tries to combine the exploratory attitude of travel, with the richness of local knowledge. We've also developed ways to include our members in the day-to-day management of the site, keeping our costs low and bringing in meaningful local knowledge and expertise.

We've been hard at work on a new release of 43places.com that adds features to enable "urban exploration" for locals and visitors alike. When we travel, our senses are wide open to new sights, sounds, and sensations. The question we chose to investigate was, how can we bring this sense of exploration to the places we visit everyday? How can we build a web site that is global in scope but can scale down to feel intimate for locals who want to share insights about neighborhood haunts? We'll share some stories about what we've built and how we did it in this fast-paced 5-minute talk.