Seeing Forests

I couldn’t resist a little turn on Greg’s phrasing for Imagine Every YP Category as a Vertical.  I wholly agree with the basic premise that YP categories are an anachronism and that they merge together into what we may as well call verticals (although on a many-to-one rather than on a one-to-one basis as his title implies).  As Greg points out what makes them work is additional content and functionality relevant to the immediate consumer buying need.  While this is a good thing I don’t think that it’s necessary that this added value has to be delivered in a dedicated “vertical” site.   I think that there’s a lot of value that can be delivered by a site that helps you manage both your auto and home repair needs; That in fact, there’s a lot of scale in that there scope (a repair business is a repair business is a repair business).  The trick would be in developing common functionality across these “horizontals” and then adding the unique content relevant to the “verticals”.  Then, I would get a site that could conceivably help me decide whether I should fix my car or relocate to somewhere near the light rail.  It would be like a Web 3.0 YP site.  Just maybe without the YP part.

Cue record and outro: “Meet the New Boss.  Same as the Old Boss.” - The Who, Baba O’Reilly (no relation to Tim).

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